It\’s Getting Hot In Here

Today, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, Council on Environmental Quality, Army Corp. of Engineers and Dept. of Interior announced today “unprecedented steps to reduce environmental impacts of mountaintop coal mining.”

Although mountaintop removal in general seems to still be ok.

Blogger Jeff Biggers has termed this a “Kinder, Gentler Blasting, Leveling of Mountains, Filling of Streams” in his latest blog.  He has great interviews with some of the strong Appalachian women fighting mountaintop removal.

The Obama administration has gone for the compromise on this issue AGAIN.  In March, they reversed themselves overnight after the coal industry brought intense pressure to not hold 200 pending permits for serious review.   Last month they approved 42 of 48 existing permits as “environmentally responsible.”  And today, they announced it will continue and they will only regulate it.  (The Washington Post in a less than perceptive editorial played the role of apologist for the Administration.)

This comes down to a moral issue about the ethics of destroying Appalachian (and American) heritage, streams, rivers, forests, wildlife, communities and mountains.  The people in the coalfields not only live with the inherit danger, but recognize that Appalachia is a national sacrifice zone environmentally and ethically. In order for people to flip on their light switches, power their IPhones and every other modern convenience that comes from coal powered electricity we are sacrificing our own ethics and morals by continuing with mountaintop removal.

Only 7% of the national coal supply comes from mountaintop removal.  Why do our political leaders continue to compromise?  Why not abolish it?

We’re part of a fierce long term campaign to abolish this practice.  It’s being fought in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, the power corridors of New York and Washington D.C. and in the hearts and minds of people across the world.  Now is the time for action, not compromise.  As one a great Kentuckian philosopher once said “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth!”

Rainforest Action Network put a statement out on Obama’s EPA’s disappointing behavior as well:  “The administration is pledging better oversight of mountain top removal mines but providing few specifics about how its oversight will change this destructive practice. This is a step in the right direction at a time when we need leaps. Rigorous enforcement of existing laws is of course needed and would be a welcome change, but does not in itself represent the true change that we need to transition immediately away from the destructive practice of mountaintop removal.
The Administration’s new plan does nothing to address the fact that nearly all mountaintop mining disposes of excess rock and debris in “valley fills” that bury hundreds of miles of streams,  contaminate drinking water and wreck ecosystems.
Why is the Administration allowing massive environmental destruction of historic mountain ranges and essential drinking water for a relatively tiny amount of coal, a fraction of all the coal we use?  This just doesn’t pan out in the cost-benefit analysis.
Mountaintop removal, the world’s worst strip mining,  is unacceptable.  Period. We don’t believe that MTR can be made “kinder and gentler”. Blowing the tops off of mountain ranges to harvest dirty coal harms the people and places of Appalachia,  destroys the economic potential of the Appalachian region for clean energy opportunities and furthers the burning of climate killing coal.
This is not a practice that needs to be reformed.  It is a practice that needs to be abolished.”