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Ed note: This editorial refers to
HR2169 which amends the Water Pollution Control Act. John Hall has not
yet signed on. Please let him know that he should. JmG
August 27, 2007
Editorial
Give the Bush administration
credit for persistence. It just won’t let a bad idea die. On Friday,
the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining proposed new
regulations that it hopes will permanently legalize mountaintop mining
— a cheap, ruthlessly efficient, environmentally destructive means of
mining coal from the mountains of Appalachia.
By our count, this is the third attempt in the last six
years to
enshrine the practice by insulating it from legal challenge. But since
the net result is likely to be more confusion and more courtroom
wrestling, the situation cries out for Congressional intervention to
define once and for all what mining companies can and cannot do.
Mountaintop mining is basically high-altitude strip
mining.
Enormous machines scrape away the ridges to get at the coal seams
below. The residual rock and dirt are then dumped or carted down the
mountainside into nearby valleys and streams. By one estimate, this
serial decapitation of Appalachia’s coal-rich hills has already buried
1,200 miles of streams while damaging hundreds of square miles of
forests.
No recent administration, Democratic or Republican, has
made a
serious effort to end the dumping, largely in deference to the
financial influence of the coal industry and the political influence of
Robert Byrd, West Virginia’s senior senator. But the Bush people have
been particularly resourceful in perpetuating the practice.
In 2002, for instance, the Environmental Protection
Agency rewrote
clean water regulations in a way that magically added mine waste to the
list of materials that can be used to fill in streams for development
and other purposes. In 2004, confronted with yet another obstacle — the
so-called stream buffer zone rule prohibiting any mining activity
within 100 feet of a stream — the administration decided that the rule
only required companies to respect the buffer zone “to the extent
practicable,” in effect green-lighting further dumping. The new rule
not only reaffirms the 2004 rule but also seems specifically to
authorize the disposal of “excess spoil fills,” a k a mine waste, in
hollows and streams.
Studies have identified more benign, though admittedly
more costly,
ways to dispose of the waste, while other studies have warned that
unless alternatives are found, an area larger than the state of
Delaware will be laid waste by dynamite and bulldozer by the end of
this decade, poisoning water supplies and leading to continuous
flooding.
With that in mind, two members of Congress — Frank
Pallone Jr. of
New Jersey and Christopher Shays of Connecticut — introduced a bill
last spring that would reaffirm Clean Water Act protections prohibiting
mining companies and other industries from dumping solid industrial
wastes into the nation’s waters. The bill has already picked up 60
sponsors in its brief life, and the administration’s latest sleight of
hand should add more converts to the cause.
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