Big Coal and EPA Part III

Not to be outdone, the Virginia state legislature sought to eliminate citizen participation altogether.

In an unflinchingly quick move, the state legislature in Richmond passed a bill that would eliminate citizens' participation and basic regulatory oversight of clean water laws for strip-mining by shifting control of water quality to a political appointee. In effect, coal lobbyists managed to jam through a bill that placed a stranglehold on state officials by restricting the state's ability to adequately review stream monitoring or toxicity testing in permitting and enforcement actions. "If the coal industry doesn't want state officials testing the water, what are they afraid the tests will reveal?" asked Tom Cormons, Virginia director for Appalachian Voices. "The industry is trying to tie state officials' hands to prevent them from doing their job."

Accusing the EPA of "soft tyranny," a West Virginia state delegate introduced "The Intrastate Coal and Use Act" to strip the EPA of its regulatory overview for Clean Water Act permits in West Virginia. In a stunning move last week, a state committee gutted a long-awaited bill to regulate coal slurry injections despite overwhelming evidence that such operations have resulted in widespread health damages and huge cancer rates.

But West Virginia's state antics over the EPA paled in comparison to the U.S. Congress last week.

In an 11th-hour debate on the floor of Congress, Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-VA, whose Congressional district includes the Abingdon, Virginia-headquarters of Alpha Natural Resources, which recently purchased Massey Energy company to become one of the largest coal companies in the world, chastised the EPA for unfair rules and compared toxic coal waste to Perrier water. In one of the most ludicrous statements in the history of debates on the floor of Congress, Griffith reached deep into the Big Coal depths and responded to one of his colleague's calm review of mountaintop removal mining destruction with his final delusion: "Our data shows there is greater biodiversity after mountaintop mining than before."

Despite the fact that the highly mechanized mountaintop removal mining has led to record losses of underground mining employment -- nearly 65 percent in the last 20 years -- and has left the mining districts at the bottom of virtually all poverty and health care rankings in the nation, Griffith defiantly railed on the House floor over the EPA's war to create poverty.

In the end, Griffith and his House Republican majority won their battle -- though, hardly "the war" in the coalfields. The House passed amendments that would defund the EPA's authority to implement its recent guidance regarding mountaintop removal or invoke its authority under section 404c to veto Clean Water Act permits. Another amendment would defund the Department of Interior's role over the "Stream Protection Rule," which limits the dumping of coal waste near waterways. While the White House has already floated a possible veto balloon, and with the Senate Democrats vowing to scuttle the plethora of House amendments in their budget bill, the future of EPA enforcement of mountaintop removal operations still remains entangled in an endless parade of legal and state legislative challenges.

And mountaintop removal mining blasts on.

Standing at the east entrance of the Kentucky capitol earlier this month, Wendell Berry emerged from his sit-in and reminded me of his four-decades-long struggle to halt reckless strip-mining and mountaintop removal:

You can go to a little stream that's coming down off the mountain, and you know that one day that stream ran clear and you could have knelt down and drunk from it without any hesitation -- it would have been clean. And now it's running orange or black. And what people have to understand is that there's heartbreak in that. Harry Caudill said "tears beyond understanding" have been shed over this by people who love their land and have had to sit there and see it destroyed. I live right on the Kentucky River, and that river's running from those headwater streams. My part of the river is under the influence of this destruction that's going on up above.

Added Truman Hurt, a retired coal miner in Perry County and member of activist group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, in a letter to his Kentucky state legislators:

The people and communities of Eastern Kentucky have suffered unnecessarily for years because the state environmental and mine safety agencies have failed to fully and fairly enforce the law. Now that the EPA is finally stepping up to enforce the law and protect our precious water, you and the governor are making every effort to block that enforcement. You seem willing to sacrifice the health and safety of your own constituents and the future of Eastern Kentucky in order to protect the rights of the coal companies to flatten the mountains and fill the valleys with their mine waste.