clears 42 out of 48 mountaintop removal permits

EPA clears waterboarding for Appalachia 7

As American citizens in Mingo County and other areas of the flood-stricken Kentucky and West Virginia coalfields continue to dig themselves out of the muck, indefatigable Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward is reporting on his Coal Tattoo blog that the EPA has “signed off on almost all (87.5 percent, to be exact) of the mountaintop removal permits that has so far been reviewed under the initiative announced in March.”

Ward has just posted a letter dated yesterday from the EPA to US Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), announcing that:

EPA has raised environmental concerns with six pending permit applications in the Corps’ Huntington District out of a total of approximately forty-eight we have reviewed. We have advised the Corps that EPA does not intend to provide additional comments on the remaining forty-two permits. The Corps may proceed with appropriate permit decisions on those remaining projects.

Read that line again: Have 42 out of 48 permits for mountaintop removal—the process of blowing up our nation’s oldest and most diverse mountains, razing historic communities, poisoning watersheds, and causing massive erosion and flooding, which Vice President Al Gore has termed “a crime, and ought to be treated as a crime”—been cleared as “environmentally responsible” by the Obama administration’s EPA?

Since President Barack Obama has taken office, an estimated 300 million pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives have been detonated across our American mountains.

In effect: Residents in the mountaintop removal areas have been subjected to a kind of waterboarding environmental policies. All well-meaning intentions aside, an indubitable fact remains: Mountaintop removal is an immoral crime against nature and our citizenry, a human rights violation, and it must be abolished, not regulated.

The EPA’s letter to Rahall is a curious document.  Acting Assistant Administrator Michael H. Shapiro writes:

I understand the importance of coal mining in Appalachia for jobs, the economy and meeting the nation’s energy needs. I also want to emphasize the need to ensure that coal mining is conducted in a manner that is fully consistent with the requirements of the [Clean Water Act], the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and other applicable federal laws.

If Mr. Shapiro has never been to a mountaintop removal site—among the 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of hardwood forests that have been erased from our American maps—then he needs to visit now and witness first-hand the failure of our mountaintop removal regulations.

“When Congress passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977,” testified Joe Lovett, the Executive Director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, at an Oversight Hearing of the US House Committee on Natural Resource on the 30th anniversary of the SMCRA, “it thought that it was enacting a law to protect the environment and citizens of the region. OSM has used, and has allowed the states to use, the Act as a perverse tool to justify the very harm that Congress sought to prevent. The Members of Congress who voted to pass the Act in 1977 could not have imagined the cumulative destruction that would be visited on our region by the complete failure of the regulators to enforce the Act.”

For more information on today’s breaking news, or flooding, see Ward’s Coal Tattoo blog.

In the meantime, here’s Goldman Prize winner Maria Gunnoe describing how it feels to be flooded out numerous time in the past few years, after mountaintop removal operations altered the natural valleys and terrain:

And here’s a clip from the recent flooding in Mingo County, which residents attribute to strip mining erosion along the nearby ridges and mountains.  Not that we will ever know the true impact of mountaintop removal and strip mining on flooding—as Ward reported in 2001, the WV’s Department of Environmental Protection has actually gone to court to resist “efforts to require coal operators to study stream flows more extensively to help pinpoint each strip mine’s impact on flooding.”

Jeff Biggers is the American Book Award-winning author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (The Nation/Basic Books). His website is: www.jeffbiggers.com

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  1. Bob Perry Posted 6:32 pm
    15 May 2009

    Acting Assistant Administrator Michael H. Shapiro writes: I understand the importance of coal mining in Appalachia for jobs, the economy and meeting the nation’s energy needs.Please Mr. Shapiro, Appalachia has been raped for two centuries and no company that has ever made a profit off of the natural resources of the area has EVER contributed to the economy there or provided any meaningful jobs.  There are very few real JOBS with the coal companies now most people are hired as contractors without any benefits and must maintain their own equipment.  For that reason we see overloaded coal trucks with bad breaks wreaking havoc on the roads in addition to the environmental destruction.Google Wendell Berry's "Speech Against the State Government", he is the most eloquent on this issue.  He quotes Harry Caudill in 1965 who was fighting strip mining even then who spoke of:  "the gleeful yahoos who are destroying the world, and the mindless oafs who abet them".Mr. Shapiro, you are a mindless oaf. 

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  2. mwildfire Posted 8:42 pm
    15 May 2009

    What a relief it is that we have Obama and not McCain in charge of our government! We really needed all this change. Well, okay, no change on the wars--Congress just voted another $100 billion for the endless Middle Eastern wars we can expect to pass on to our grandchildren. And yeah, no change in economic policy--that's still a matter of handing the treasury over to Wall Street, no strings attached. Well, and I guess the assaults on the Constitution are going to be maintained. And health care, well, it would be asking too much for him to stand up to the insurance lobby--so we'll get a yet more complicated and expensive system with yet another patch to cover another segment of the population (until they get sick). But at least in the realm of the environment, Obama means to stand firm for real change. He GETS climate change! Yeah, he can't be expected to stand up to Big Coal, so the mountains have to come down, damn shame and all. But at least he'll insist on some kind of climate legislation. I mean, it has to pass through a Congress owned lock stock and barrel by corporate interests, so we have to be realistic and not expect a perfect bill. It'll be about cap-and-trade, so that there are profits to be made in it--otherwise Congress wouldn't sign on, don't you see? So the permits will be given away, not auctioned, and the public will get nothing back, and--but maybe it will reduce greenhouse emissions a little bit. Eventually. Or at least slow the rise. Oh, okay, okay--what has changed is that Bush now is taller, more articulate and has better manners.

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  3. Erik Hoffner's avatar

    Erik Hoffner Posted 8:57 am
    16 May 2009

    It's disappointing. It was doubtful that guvvy would halt these permits/companies in the short run - but what it signals is far more important in the middle to long term, that it's no longer business as usual to blow up mountains, and that change is coming. Smart companies will start reviewing their business prospects, elsewhere, hopefully in other industries. Like wind perhaps.Erik, Orion Grassroots Network

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  4. randino Posted 8:50 am
    17 May 2009

    This past week, might end up being a week that will go down as historic.  Not because of Pelosi's problems, or the latest rantings of Cheney, but because this week was when we started disenthralling ourselves from the Obama worshipping mentality of the campaign.  On health care, Guantanemo, Afghanistan and many other things, people started waking up to the fact that in the age of Obama, activism is more needed than ever before.  We must not only support him when he is right, we must not be afraid to kick his ass when he is wrong.  This is what was missing from the scene.  I am glad that people are getting arrested in Congressional hearings about health care.  What is needed now is for some people to get arrested at the Interior Department over these horrendous decisions on mountain top removal coal mining.  Obama is not the Messiah.  He is a politician, and politicians operate best when they are given a good, old fashioned thrashing from time to time. The dream is over. Reality is back and so is the need for old fashioned, take names and kick butt activism and militancy.  Randy Cunningham, Cleveland OH

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  5. Tyler Durden Posted 2:56 pm
    17 May 2009

    As I told people when I was advocating voting for a real progressive instead of the garbage that the Republicans and Democrats always put forward, Obama is in the pocket of the coal industry.  Just look at his voting record and where he comes from fer chrissake.  There's no doubt that he's an improvement over the war and human rights criminals of the past administration, but that's not saying much.  And he's done a few good things, but that's not enough.
    This administration's actions on, for example, wolves, polar bears, wars, and now mountain top removal mining are as horrendous as any of the Bush administration.  If progressives actually want progressive policies, they have to stop supporting jerks like Democrats (with the exception of the progressive caucus of the party, which is 5-10% of it) and start supporting real progressive candidates.  We must at some point either create a truly progressive Democratic Party or win proportional representation so that we have people in government who actually represent us (as much as that's possible).  Withdrawing support from Democrats like Obama would be a good way to put pressure on the system so that a desired result can be achieved.  Lesser of evils does not accomplish anything progressive.

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  6. sanderson508 Posted 10:21 am
    18 May 2009

    Obama really has to clear out the Bush people.   It will be difficult because they are under every rock, b ut it must be done.

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  7. tlucach1972 Posted 2:54 pm
    19 May 2009

    Clear cutting in Oregon never hurt anyone. How is this going to hurt anyone? http://forests.org/archive/america/oremudsl.htm

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