As part of its eleventh-hour push to ram through controversial regulations before it leaves office, the Bush administration has approved a rule that will make it easier for coal companies to dump debris from mountaintop mining into streams and valleys. President-elect Obama should repeal this rule after taking office next month.
Environmentalists have started an online campaign urging Obama to do that, The Associated Press reported Wednesday. Appalachian Voices, an environmental organization in Boone, and other groups are blasting the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to sign off on the rule that they predict will lead to "the death of freshwater streams and the likely start of a new surge in mountaintop removal surface mining across Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky," according to the AP.
The rule, which rewrites a 1983 regulation that provided for a 100-foot buffer zone for streams, is one more hit from an administration with a poor record of protecting the environment. The rule passed despite opposition from top officials in Kentucky and Tennessee, where coal mining is an important industry. And it passed even though "the EPA's own scientists have concluded that dumping mining waste into streams devastates downstream water quality," Ed Hopkins, the director of the Sierra Club's Environmental Quality Program, said in a prepared statement.
Mountaintop mining blasts the tops off mountains. It's an extreme form of strip mining, which the Journal has long fought. In the 1970s, investigative reporting and editorials in the Journal and its now-defunct sister paper, the Sentinel, played a leading role in stopping a company's efforts to introduce strip mining to Northwest North Carolina. Strip mining and mountaintop mining destroy the beauty of mountains and their value to the natural tourism industry and reduce property values. The mining also ravages ecosystems, including watersheds.
The dumping of rock and dirt that the new rule allows will worsen the effects of mountaintop mining. An EPA study this past summer found that waste from coal-mining operations in southern West Virginia was "strongly related to downstream biological impairment," according to The Washington Post. The ill effects included a decrease in the diversity of aquatic life. The dumping can also threaten drinking water.
Even with the 1983 regulation, the dumping continued. The Post reported that "the government estimated that about 1,600 miles of streams in Appalachia have been wiped out since the mid-1980s, and regulators expect that under the new rule roughly 100 miles of streams will be legally filled in each year."
The EPA claims that the new rule will actually help protect streams. But what it really will do is legalize dumping.
Coal is an important energy source as the U.S. tries to reduce its dependence on foreign oil. But this country must continue to search for cleaner ways to mine it. Obama spoke out for that on the campaign trail. Let's hope that he backs his words with action once he takes office by undoing this wrong-headed rule.
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