ShareThisThe Bush administration seems to be rushing to get in under the wire a rewrite of environmental regulations that would make mountaintop removal coal mining easier for the mining companies but at considerable cost to the landscape and almost assuredly the taxpayers.The regulatory-averse administration has reason to hurry. Democrat Barack Obama has indicated that he opposes mountaintop removal and recently in a surprise development Republican John McCain said he did as well.Mountaintop removal, the ultimate form of strip mining, is an efficient and effective and, compared to underground mining, much safer means of getting at low-sulfur coal in the Appalachians. As airline passengers flying over West Virginia know-- virtually the only way for the average citizen to appreciate the effects of mountaintop removal -- it's also an extraordinary ugly way of getting at the coal. And at the end of the process the ancient mountains are reduced to stumps.In mountaintop removal, explosives and giant draglines rip off the top of the mountain -- hence the name -- to expose the coal underneath. The problem then is what to do with the thousands of tons of rock and dirt that have been removed, and the simplest solution, certainly the one favored by the coal operators, is to dump the spoil over the side of the mountain into the valley below.Since the Reagan administration, coal companies have been prevented from dumping their waste within 100 feet of any stream if that disposal would have an adverse effect, as it almost invariably does.Between 1985 and 2001 about 724 miles of Appalachian streams were buried in by mountaintop debris and between 1992 and 2002 another 1,200 miles were damaged, according to government figures cited by the Charleston Gazette. And new permits issued by the Bush administration will damage another 535 miles, burying 367 of them altogether.The thrust of government mining regulation should not be to make mountaintop more convenient but insofar as possible to make it more compatible with the scenery and the environment. We may be in desperate need of energy but we're not that desperate.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
The Appalachian flatlands
Submitted by SHNS on Wed, 10/22/2008 - 16:36
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