In a private gathering adjacent the governor’s mansion in Charleston, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D), Rep. Nick Rahall (D), Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R) and Gov. Joe Manchin (D) met with industry leaders regarding the mixed signals coming from the Environmental Protection Agency on mountaintop removal, a method of mining in which the tops of mountains are blasted away and the debris pushed into nearby streams.

And here’s a hint: the lawmakers are none too happy with the EPA’s actions so far. From the Gazette:

Rockefeller said the White House meeting doesn’t have to involve President Obama, but must be with someone who can provide “good, hard information” about exactly what new environmental constraints EPA wants to place on mountaintop removal.

Rahall said coal executives at Tuesday’s meeting expressed frustration with EPA permit reviews, delays in permit decisions and general confusion about what — if any — new standards EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is imposing on Clean Water Act permits for strip mines.

“We need to know what the rules of the game are,” Rahall said. “We need clarity. We need EPA to get its act together.”

The meeting was originally scheduled to be public, Ward reports, but was moved to a private tent at the last minute. Organizers might have feared the arrival of anti-mountaintop removal activists, though no protesters showed up, Ward notes.

Both sides have reason to feel anxious. Earlier this year, the EPA approved dozens of new mountaintop mining permits, causing some alarm among environmentalists that the Obama administration was poised to follow in the footsteps of the hands-off Bush White House on the issue. More recently, however, the EPA announced that it was withholding 79 pending applications for new mountaintop removal projects in order to assess their impact on local waterways. Then last month the agency took an even bolder step, threatening to revoke the permit for the Spruce No. 1 Mine, the largest mountaintop mine in West Virginia, unless the owner changed the design to protect local streams. It marked the first time since the 1972 passage of the Clean Water Act that the EPA had invoked its CWA authority to halt an existing coal mining permit.

Calls to Capitol Hill today weren’t returned. (Today, after all, is Veterans Day, and many offices are vacant.) But the EPA said last month that other existing mountaintop operations can breathe easy — the agency isn’t likely to target them as it did the Spruce project.

EPA does not expect to review additional mining projects in circumstances where the [Army] Corps has already issued a permit. Spruce is a very large mine, with correspondingly significant environmental and water quality impacts.

That project is slated to bury more than seven miles of mountain streams, leading to a protracted legal battle with environmentalists. But last Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency took a giant stride toward halting the operation, when it sent notice to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers threatening to revoke the mine’s previously granted Clean Water Act permit unless the Corps takes further action to limit the impact on local water quality.

The Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. has the latest details:

The judge said  the stay, until Nov. 3, will give EPA and the Corps time to discuss the permit further and consider the next step. Arch Coal’s Mingo Logan Coal Co. subsidiary had wanted [U.S. District Judge Robert C.] Chambers to deny the government’s request for a stay and throw out a lawsuit filed against the Spruce Mine by environmental groups.

A mountaintop mine in West Virginia (NRDC photo)

In the heart of coal country, a White House stab at environmental protection has struck an angry note with the powerful lawmakers of West Virginia.

The Environmental Protection Agency last week threatened to revoke the permit for the largest mountaintop removal mine in all of Appalachia, citing the harmful effects the project would have on local water quality. It marks the first time since the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 that the EPA has used its CWA authority to examine the environmental impacts of an existing coal-mining permit.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The move is being cheered by environmentalists and human rights groups, who have long-argued that mountaintop removal — the blasting away of mountain peaks to get at the coal inside — comes at the too-high price of decimating local streams and communities. But the reaction from West Virginia Democrats — a powerful bunch — has been something different entirely.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller called the administration’s decision a “wrong and unfair” punishment of mining companies. “When businesses make good faith efforts and fully comply with all applicable laws and regulations,” he said in a statement, “they must have the confidence that the commitments made by the government will be honored.”

Another West Virginia Democrat, Gov. Joe Manchin, also expressed outrage, calling EPA’s decision “a prime example of how the federal government is not working for the people.”

“This federal bureaucracy is misleading, and is adding excessive red tape that is affecting people’s livelihoods,” Manchin said in his own statement. “Government should be a facilitator and partner, not a hindrance to Americans working to obtain the American Dream.”

The comments highlight a dilemma facing President Obama since he took office in February. Mountaintop removal has become popular in Appalachia because the method slashes labor costs and curbs the need to truck mining waste off-site for dumping. But the method has also ravaged adjacent communities by poisoning streams, contaminating air, killing wildlife and flooding homes.

On the one hand, Obama wants to honor campaign vows to rein in mountaintop mining in favor of less intrusive methods. On the other, he doesn’t want the effort to increase energy prices or unemployment in the midst of an economic downturn. The National Mining Association estimates that mountaintop operations directly employ 14,000 people in the Appalachian states. Adding to concerns, coal generates more than half the nation’s electricity, leaving countless businesses and consumers with an interest in keeping it cheap.

That the coal industry is well-heeled — and West Virginia’s lawmakers well-entrenched — has only complicated the saga.

Cindy Rank, who chairs the mining committee at the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, said the politically charged search for a balance between environmental protection and economic activity is one the state has faced for decades — with sometimes ugly results. “It can get very nasty,” Rank said. “It verges on violence. There’s a lot of intimidation involved.”

The administration has shown some willingness to gamble. Last month, for example, the EPA announced that 79 pending applications for mountaintop operations will be stalled while their effects on water systems are further reviewed. And last week the agency took its boldest step of the year, threatening to revoke an existing CWA permit for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in Southern West Virginia if the operation doesn’t take further strides to blunt its impact on surrounding waterways. That mine, approved in 2007, is slated to encompass nearly 2,300 acres and bury more than seven miles of mountain streams. EPA has “very serious concerns regarding the scale and extent of significant environmental and water quality impacts,” EPA regional administrator William E. Early wrote to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last Friday. “The collective science strongly suggests that projects similar to the Spruce No. 1 are associated with impairment of downstream aquatic life use.”

The Clean Water Act authorizes the Army Corps to issue mining fill permits, but it also empowers the EPA to suspend existing permits if the agency has reason to believe that a project “presents an imminent danger of irreparable harm” to community water supplies or wildlife.

EPA is asking the Corps to submit “any additional information … to demonstrate that no unacceptable adverse effects would occur from this project.” The implication is clear: if no such evidence surfaces, the EPA will revoke the fill permit, effectively shutting down the largest mountaintop removal site in the state’s history.

The EPA was quick to stipulate that the Spruce No. 1 Mine is a isolated case that “represents an unusual set of circumstances we do not expect to be repeated again.”

But that statement has done little to alleviate the concerns of the mining lobby, which wants a clearer sense of how EPA arrived at its decision. “What are those unusual circumstances?” asked Carol Raulston, spokeswoman for the National Mining Association. “We don’t know. We don’t know what the rationale is for that process.”

The owner of the Spruce Mine, St. Louis-based Arch Coal Inc., declined to comment for this story. But in a statement issued Friday, the company called the Spruce project “the most carefully scrutinized and fully considered mine permit in West Virginia’s history.” Arch also decried the absence of “a stable and predictable regulatory climate” — a message often heard from coal industry defenders, including Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee. Last week, Rahall pressed EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on the issue, relaying the industry’s concern that “there are no clear rules of the game by which to seek mining permits.” Rahall’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the Spruce Mine episode.

Environmentalists, though they’re applauding the EPA’s recent actions, are quick to concede that the criticism from powerful Democrats in and out of Congress makes the administration’s job protecting the Appalachians that much more difficult.

“It makes the situation uncomfortable for the administration,” said Ed Hopkins, director of Sierra Club’s environmental quality program. “At some point, pressure from West Virginia politicians may impede the administration’s efforts.”

Vivian Stockman, project coordinator at the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, echoed that message. “It certainly does bring back the idea of politics trying to trump science,” she said, referring to the Bush era when environmentalists felt the EPA often shunned the environment for political gain. “They [EPA officials] are getting a lot of pressure from political big-wigs, which makes it pretty tough for us to be heard down here.”

EPA’s letter today confirms that all 79 permits initially identified on September 11 must undergo additional evaluation by EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers. EPA’s final list was transmitted in a letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works) Jo-Ellen Darcy.  The 79 permits represent all of the backlogged surface coal mining projects under review by the Army Corps of Engineers. After a careful evaluation of these surface coal mining projects, EPA determined that each of them, as currently proposed, is likely to result in significant harm to water quality and the environment and are therefore not consistent with requirements of the [Clean Water Act].

As Ward points out, this doesn’t mean that the 79 projects will be rejected. But they could be altered if the EPA — which has been a more aggressive environmental watchdog under this administration than under the last — determines that they do indeed violate the Clean Water Act.

Environmental groups were quick to applaud the decision. Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, issued a statement saying the further review “will surely prove that this most destructive form of coal mining is incompatible with clean water.”

Congress is best suited to determine how a national greenhouse gas emissions reduction program should work. Therefore, any bill should explicitly preempt the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Translation: They want Congress to empower Congress to do the EPA’s job.

This is an odd argument, considering that the EPA scientists would know vastly more about emissions science than any lawmaker on the Hill. So what does the Roundtable have in mind? Well, for one thing, the group appears to recognize that elected lawmakers are influenced much more easily by public outrage than unelected EPA officials. It also seems to be well aware of lawmakers’ tendency to protect regional industries, even when that protection runs counter to national interests. Having Congress monitor  compliance with new emission guidelines would almost guarantee that the rules wouldn’t be enforced as strictly, to the polluters’ benefit. Indeed, it’s groups like the Roundtable that are spending millions of dollars to ensure that leniency.

“This action will give our auto companies some long-overdue clarity, stability and predictability,” Obama said Tuesday in a speech at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

The new rules unify the Environmental Protection Agency’s goals to reduce the emissions from automobiles and the Department of Transportation’s rules on fuel economy. The proposed program will cover model years 2012 through 2016, increasing fleet-wide fuel economy by 5 percent per year. This means by 2016, the fleet-wide average would hit 35.5 miles per gallon, and would need to meet a new limit on emissions per gallon. The new rules will need to go through the traditional approval process before they are finalized, which needs to happen by March 2010. But the administration estimates that they will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 950 million metric tons.

More importantly, it will be the Obama administration’s first action toward meeting its stated goals of reducing emissions and complying with the Supreme Court’s directive to the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The real question is whether the administration will follow through with its threat to move onto setting limits for stationary sources of carbon dioxide emissions, like power plants, refineries, and manufacturers. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson declined to offer much information about their progress on that front at a press conference on Tuesday.

“EPA will continue to do it’s job, which is to respond to the now 2-plus-year old ruling about the Clean Air Act,” said Jackson. “I think it is fair to say that today’ announcement is path-breaking … It is the beginning of regulation. We should expect the EPA to continue to do its job.”

But she also made it clear that the administration would still prefer not to write the regulations. “I hope that doesn’t come to pass,” she said. “I believe that legislation is the preferable route.”

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“The administration pledged earlier this year to improve review of mining projects that risked harming water quality. Release of this preliminary list is the first step in a process to assure that the environmental concerns raised by the 79 permit applications are addressed and that permits issued are protective of water quality and affected ecosystems,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “We look forward to working closely with the Army Corps of Engineers, with the involvement of the mining companies, to achieve a resolution of EPA’s concerns that avoids harmful environmental impacts and meets our energy and economic needs.”

The EPA is also planning to review a longer list of proposed projects over the next 15 days. There will be a 60-day review process for each permit.

Activists organizing against surface mining projects like mountain-top removal, a method that blasts mountains to extract coal reserves, were pleased by the development. “By recommending these permits not be approved, the EPA and the Army Corps has demonstrated their intention to fulfill a promise to provide science-based oversight which will limit the devastating environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining,” said Willa Mays, executive director for Appalachian Voices, in a statement.

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Approved in 2007, the 2,278-acre Spruce Fork mine is designed to fill six Appalachian valleys with mining debris, burying more than 8.3 miles of mountain streams in the process. The EPA, citing “new information and circumstances,” says there’s a “likelihood” that the operation will pollute those streams in violation of state and federal law.

“We are concerned data were available and was not evaluated as part of the review for the 2007 permit which is directly relevant to the Corps determination of whether or not the project would comply with the requirements of the Clean Water Act (CWA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),” the EPA wrote.

Reading a bit between the lines, the letter seems to say that the “new information” is actually old information that both the Army Corps and the EPA chose to ignore during the Bush-era approval process. If that’s the case — that is, if these agencies ignored the law to benefit the coal industry at the expense of public safety — then more should happen than just a suspension of the Spruce Fork mine. Heads should roll, too.

This Administration has shown it is determined to improve mining practices and we will do so within the context of the court’s ruling which we are reviewing.

Not only does this say nothing, but administration officials will have a tough time convincing folks that they’re really serious about improving mining practices in the wake of their recent decision to approve an enormous new West Virginia mountaintop removal mine — an operation designed to fill eight Appalachian valleys. That is, unless they’re going by the Bush administration definition of improvement.

The ruling is a victory for Appalachian mountaintop removal operations, where the peaks of mountains are literally lopped off with dynamite and the rock and soil pushed into adjacent valleys, many of which contain small streams that represent the headwaters of larger bodies of water below.

A 1983 law prevents mining — or disposing of mine debris — within 100 feet of streams if the activity is shown to harm water quality. But in December, the Bush White House finalized an industry-friendly rule that effectively scrapped the so-called “stream buffer zone rule.”

Calling the move “legally defective,” the Obama White House in April asked a federal judge to overturn the Bush rule change. But today, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr., declined to do so, arguing that a change in regulation requires public input.

The Interior Department says it’s working on a statement about its next step.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club has already issued one of its own, calling on the White House to take even bolder steps to curb mountaintop removal.

With the administration currently considering more than 80 permit applications for new mountaintop removal coal mining, it will take policy changes at the Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Interior and Environmental Protection Agency, along with tough enforcement, to end the destruction completely and protect Appalachian communities.

There’s good reason for the environmentalists’ concerns. Despite vows to protect Appalachia’s waterways, the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved yet another mountaintop removal operation in southwest West Virginia — a project that will fill eight valleys with mining waste. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave its final approval for CONSOL Energy Inc.’s Peg Fork Surface Mine on Friday. The move comes just a few months after the EPA approved 42 pending surface-mine permits in the Appalachian states.

Despite promises to install more transparency into its permit approval process, the EPA did not announce its decision to OK the Peg Fork mine.