I suppose when you’re a lame duck Administration looking to cash in a few last favors no matter what the public thinks, you pull stuff like this.
The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.
It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion.
The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law.
No doubt the terms, when regulators apply them, will be in the most business-friendly way possible. Or at least that’s the plan.
The Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department drafted the rule, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period and could be revised, although officials indicated that it was not likely to be changed substantially.
Which begs the question of why bother to have a comment period. Oh, I guess they decided that was one law they couldn’t ignore
Government and industry officials say the rules are needed to clarify existing laws, which have been challenged in court and applied unevenly.
So, of course, let’s clarify them in the least troublesome (to industry) fashion, and keep those troublesome courts from causing our good mining friends any grief.
Mountaintop mining is the most common strip mining in central Appalachia, and the most destructive. Ridge tops are flattened with bulldozers and dynamite, clearing all vegetation and, at times, forcing residents to move.
The coal seams are scraped with gigantic machines called draglines. The law requires mining companies to reclaim and replant the land, but the process always produces excess debris.
Roughly half the coal in West Virginia is from mountaintop mining, which is generally cheaper, safer and more efficient than extraction from underground mines like the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, which may have claimed the lives of nine miners and rescuers, and the Sago Mine in West Virginia, where 12 miners were killed last year.
Now, I will confess that I’m in no way out to stop coal mining. As much as I want to see this country independent of carbon fuels, that’s not happening any time soon — and low-sulfur coal in Appalachia is a Good Thing, and mine safety is a Good Thing, too. That said, it’s worth adding a bit to the cost of power to keep from turning streambeds into moonscapes.
From 1985 to 2001, 724 miles of streams were buried under mining waste, according to the environmental impact statement accompanying the new rule. If current practices continue, another 724 river miles will be buried by 2018, the report says.
But what’s a few miles of buried streams between friends? And we are talking about a friendly regulatory effort here, conducted by the usual disinterested moral paragons one’s come to expect from Bush regulatory initiatives.
The Clinton administration began moving in 1998 to tighten enforcement of the stream rule, but the clock ran out before it could enact new regulations. The Bush administration has been much friendlier to mining interests, which have been reliable contributors to the Republican Party, and has worked on the new rule change since 2001.
The early stages of the revision process were supported by J. Stephen Griles, a former industry lobbyist who was the deputy interior secretary from 2001 to 2004. Mr. Griles had been deputy director of the Office of Surface Mining in the Reagan administration and is knowledgeable about the issues and generally supports the industry.
In June, Mr. Griles was sentenced to 10 months in prison and three years’ probation for lying to a Senate committee about his ties to Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist at the heart of a corruption scandal who is now in prison.
Nice. No doubt he’d be hired as EPA director if Bush had a third term coming.
Interior Department officials said they could not comment on the rule because it had not been published. But a senior official of the Office of Surface Mining said the stream buffer rule was never intended to prohibit all mining in and around streams, but rather just to minimize the effects of such work.
Even with the best techniques and most careful reclamation, surface or underground mining will always generate mountains of dirt and rock, he said. “There’s really no place to put the material except in the upper reaches of hollows,” the official said. “If you can’t put anything in a stream, there’s really no way to even underground mine.”
He said the regulation would explicitly state that the buffer zone rule does not apply for hundreds of miles of streams and valleys and that he hoped, but did not expect, that the rule would end the fight over mine waste.
Yeah, that seems unlikely.
I do have to retract my comments at the top of the post, by the way. This has nothing to do with the Bush Administrating a lame duck — they’ve been doing this sort of thing since Day 1. But I expect to see an upsurge between now and January 2009 — especially if the Dems look likely to win the White House.
(via Margie)
