This just in from Climate Ground Zero:
The State Police have just confirmed that Laura Steepleton descended the tree and has been arrested.
So apparently, both tree sitters have come down out of those tulip poplar trees in Raleigh county, ending a week-long protest they say shut down blasting at a Massey Energy mountaintop removal mine.
More details later … in tomorrow’s Gazette.
The U.S. EPA has released more data that environmental groups say details the threat from the disposal of toxic power plant ash across the nation’s coalfields.
Earthjustice and other groups have posted online this summary of data provided to them by EPA in response to a public records request. The summary includes information on nearly 600 ash dumps across the country, such as location, hazard potential, year commissioned, type of waste disposed, dates of inspections, etc. Interestingly, some companies have claimed some of this information is “Confidential Business Information” that should not be made public.
Word this morning is that one of the two anti-mountaintop removal tree-sitters is coming down from his perch high above a Massey Energy operation in Raleigh County, W.Va.
Climate Ground Zero announced that Nick Stocks (at left in above photo, looking down) planned to voluntarily end his protest and turn himself into the State Police. Fellow tree-sitter Laura Steepleton “remains in a neighboring tree with no immediate plans to come down,” the group said.
The protest at Massey’s Edwight Surface Mine is now a week old, and blasting at the operation appears to still be halted.
The announcement about Stocks did not explain the reasons for his move. I’m told he has a court date in Montana, but do not have any details of that situation. Stocks is expected to discuss his reasons himself once he descends from the tree.
But the move also comes as Massey and State Police are hoping to cut off supply lines to the protesters, as troopers arrest other environmental activists who trespass on company property to supply the tree-sitters. With only one tree-sitter, presumably it would be easier for ground support activists to keep her supplied.
“I will tell you that there’s some pretty country up there that’s been torn up pretty good.”
– President Obama, March 23, 2009
Last week, Bruce Nilles and Mary Anne Hitt of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign wrote a Huffington Post commentary called The Clock Has Started Ticking on Mountaintop Removal Mining permits. The thrust was that a 60-day window for the federal EPA to either block pending mining permits or shut up about it had started ticking.
They got it mostly right, but the post was a little confusing because it added together two different time windows for EPA action under the Obama administration’s plan to take a closer look at valley fill authorizations being considered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The whole process is a little more complicated than they made it out. But indeed, the clocking is ticking.
Before too long, we’ll see if the Obama EPA is serious about trying to limit the environmental damage from mountaintop removal — or if they’re giving in to political pressure from mining’s friends in Congress or from political leaders like Gov. Joe Manchin here in West Virginia.
Here’s how it works:
1. Back in June, the EPA published a list of 108 applications that were pending from mining companies for stream-filling activities under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Remember that under the law, the Corps has primary authority to review and issue these permits. But, EPA is supposed to look over the Corps’ shoulder, and has the ability to overrule the Corps if it chooses. This list of 108 applications was the universe of mining permits for which the Corps had issued public notices or pre-construction notices prior to March 31, 2009.
In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, a man walks past a pipe sending fresh air into a pit of mine operated by the Xingguang Coal Industry Co. in Heshun County, north China’s Shanxi Province, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009. At least 11 people have been killed, three are missing and two survived following a gas blast inside the mine on Monday, Xinhua said. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Yan Yan)
At least 14 people were killed and three others missing following a coal-mine explosion in China earlier this week, according to reports from China Daily, the Voice of America, and The Associated Press. There was also a report this week that seven workers were trapped in a flooded Chinese coal mine.
Here in the U.S., there was news this week out of Utah, where the courts are approving settlements in the wrongful death lawsuits filed over the deaths in Murray Energy’s Crandall Canyon Mine disaster, which occurred two years ago this month.
And in a pretty interesting piece of news from out west, The Dakota Minnesota & Eastern Railroad Corp. appears to have dropped — at least for now — its plans to extend its railway nearly 300 miles to access surface coal mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. The PRB is currently served by BNSF Railway and Union Pacific, as Dustin Bleizeffer reports in the the Casper Star-Tribune.
Some residents along the route had been fighting the project, and the railway has dropped its lawsuits seeking to condemn their land. Also, the Sierra Club had been fighting the project under the National Environmental Policy Act, arguing that the project would increase coal mining in the PRB, thus worsening global warming.
Earlier in the week, the AP had a somewhat related story about environmental groups targeting the expansion of some Wyoming mines because of coal’s contributions to greenhouse emissions.
Massey Energy President Don Blankenship has broken the company’s silence on the anti-mountaintop removal protesters who are sitting 80 feet up in a couple of trees, blocking blasting activity at one of his company’s Raleigh County, W.Va., mines.
In an e-mail to The Associated Press, Blankenship said:
The coal won’t spoil for a million years. I doubt the tree climbers will be there then.
West Virginia State Police indicated they are taking a similar strategy, according to the AP report, quoting Sgt. M.A. Smith:
We’re going to wait them out as long as we can wait them out, until it gets too dangerous. If I put somebody up in the tree to take them out, it’s going to be a danger. The best thing to do is to keep the others from trespassing and wait them out.
I’m not expert on tree sitting … but if you’re wondering, forced extractions by police are not unheard of … Check out links here, here and here.
Today is the fourth day of the Raleigh County tree sitting protest … you can follow it via the Climate Ground Zero Web site.
There’s been so much said already about the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy that I’m not sure I have much to add.
Personally, I was especially moved by this New York Times story, After Diagnosis, Determined to Make a ‘Good Ending.’ Coal Tattoo readers might want to check out Joseph Romm’s list of Kennedy’s actions regarding protecting the environment and development clean energy.
But buried on page 34 of this official list of his accomplishments is this discussion of Kennedy’s work in 2006 on coal-mine safety:
Senator Kennedy also took a prominent role in improving safety for the nation’s miners.
After the tragedies at the Sago and Alma Mines in 2006, Senator Kennedy successfully championed bipartisan mine safety reform legislation, the MINER Act, which became law later that year. The Act was the most sweeping reform of the nation’s mine safety law in a generation. It guarantees miners updated mine technology, stricter safety standards, and tougher enforcement.
But after that legislative victory, Senator Kennedy continued to lead the fight to protect miners. He pressed for additional mine safety reforms and serious investigations of mine safety disasters. His investigation of the 2007 Crandall Canyon mining disaster was the first to reveal the serious lapses by both the mine operator and the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration that led to the deaths of nine miners and rescue workers.
A few years ago, when I was covering the Sago Mine disaster for the Gazette, and reporting on the erosion of federal mine safety under the Bush administration, some right-wing blogger went after me, claiming that I was a Greenpeace activist disguised as a newspaper reporter and had no business covering the coal industry.
Ok, Ok … you coal industry readers say what you want about that. But I’ve never worked for Greenpeace — not now and not ever.
But, it turns out there is another Ken Ward who did. This blogger, self-proclaimed media watchdog Tom Blumer at Newsbusters had simply looked up my name on Wikipedia and found this bio of the other guy:
Ken Ward is an environmental activist who served as Executive Director of NJPIRGGreenpeace USA, cofounder of a number of organizations, including Green Corps (Senior Trainer), National Environmental Law Center (President), Public Interest GRFX, Environmental Endowment for New Jersey, Fund for Public Interest Research and AmeriCorps Water Watch. His Response to The Death of Environmentalism, published by Grist, March 2005, has evolved into the Bright Lines project. Ward is a graduate of Hampshire College (entered F1975).
Must be the same guy, right? Well, not so much. Blumer ended up retracting his blog post, and the whole incident got written up by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz.
Why do I bring this up?
Well, believe it or not, some folks in the environmental community, especially among the more vigorous opponents of mountaintop removal, don’t think the Gazette covers the issue enough. And I want to head off any left-wing bloggers who decide to seize upon something mentioned this week to allege some coal industry conspiracy.
Environmental groups announced today that they are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the latest federal court ruling on mountaintop removal coal mining.
Lawyers from Earthjustice and the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment filed this petition. They want the Supreme Court to review a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that overturned a ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert C. Chambers.
Citing the “alarming cumulative stream loss” to valley fills, Judge Chambers had ruled in March 2007 that the federal Army Corps of Engineers failed to conduct proper environmental reviews before issuing Clean Water Act permits for valley fills. In February, the 4th Circuit ruled that Chambers wrongly did not defer to the Corps’ own judgment on those environmental reviews.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection just issued a statement responding a Coal Tattoo post and a Charleston Gazette article last week regarding DEP Secretary Randy Huffman’s testimony on mountaintop removal to the U.S. Senate, and an agency biologist’s memo responding to that testimony. Here’s the entire statement:
In response to an article written by Ken Ward Jr., that appeared in the Aug. 22 Charleston Gazette, Scott Mandirola, the Department of Environmental Protection’s Director of Water and Waste Management, and Pat Campbell, Assistant Director of DWWM, have issued the following statements:
“It is important to state that Cabinet Secretary Randy Huffman’s testimony to the members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works was not misleading as stated in the Gazette article,” Mandirola said. “The sentence in his testimony that is the subject of the issue should not have been construed to mean that the only impact of valley fills was a diminished number of a certain genus of mayflies.
“In fact, when read in its full context, the reference to mayflies was only made to reiterate West Virginia’s use of its multi-metric West Virginia Stream Condition Index for impairment determinations. This index, which has been used since 2002 with EPA’s approval, does not use mayflies as a stand-alone determinant of stream condition. Taken out of context, one could interpret this particular part of the testimony to mean mayflies are the only impacts from valley fills. This was clearly not the intent.”
Campbell said: “It’s easy to take this statement out of context, I’ve worked with this type of information for 10 years and I, too, misinterpreted the statement when speaking with the Gazette.”
Word from the folks at Climate Ground Zero is that the two tree sitters down in Raleigh County are still 80 feet up in a couple of tulip poplar trees, despite urging from the State Police that they come down.
We had a Gazette news story on this protest action this morning, and you can get more updates from Climate Ground Zero here.
Hey folks, I’ve heard from a number of you about problems submitting comments to Coal Tattoo …
I wanted to let everyone know that we’re having some technical problems, perhaps caused by the installation of some new servers here at Charleston Newspapers. Our IT staffers are working on it, but I don’t have an estimated time when it might be fixed.
The problem, though, does seem to be fairly random and intermittent. Please be patient as we try to remedy this.
Thanks for reading and commenting…
A second federal judge has ordered the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to clean up the way it cleans up abandoned coal mine pollution.
U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver Jr. yesterday ruled that WVDEP must obtain permits for the abandoned mine sites it maintains under the agency’s Special Reclamation program.
Essentially — and very importantly — this means that WVDEP is going to have to set pollution limits for these sites, and improve the treatment being used so that discharges from abandoned mine sites meet the state’s water pollution limits.
Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Irene M. Keeley issued a similar ruling in West Virginia’s northern district. Copenhaver’s decision covers the state’s southern coalfields, and specifically addresses three sites at issue in the case brought by the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the West Virginia Rivers Coalition.
This ruling is also the second time in a week that Judge Copenhaver has ruled against WVDEP in a significant Clean Water Act case. Last week — in a matter that WVDEP wasn’t even a party to — the judge concluded that the agency’s secret deals with coal operators do not prohibit citizens from bringing their own pollution enforcement lawsuits.
Jim Hecker, environmental enforcement director at Public Justice and lead counsel for the citizen groups, said this morning:
The State was running these three sites ‘off the books’ to try to escape accountability for necessary water treatment. Two district courts have now ordered the State to obtain the required discharge permits for 21 bond forfeiture sites. Once it does, the State will have to comply with the water quality standards it is now violating.
Opponents of mountaintop removal coal mining today took to the trees near a Massey Energy operation in Raleigh County, W.Va., in their continuing protest campaign to halt the controversial mining practice.
Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice announced the action and distributed photos, including the one above. According to the groups:
Two people are occupying two treetops at the edge of Massey Energy’s Edwight mountaintop removal site above Pettry Bottom and Peachtree in Raleigh County, West Virginia. At 6:30 a.m., concerned citizens unrolled two banners reading “Stop Mountain Top Removal” and “DEP – Don’t Expect Protection” from their treetop platforms. They are perched 80 feet above the ground, within 30 feet of the mine, and within the 300 feet of blasting. Blasting is prohibited when people are within such proximity.
Nick Stocks, 25, and Laura Steepleton, 24, of Rock Creek, West Virginia, are in the trees. Kim Ellis, of New Orleans, Louisiana and Zoe Beavers, of Hurricane, West Virginia are on the ground below. All protesters are associated with Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice.
The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s annual Business Summit at The Greenbrier this year includes a panel called, “Preserving West Virginia’s Coal Industry.” Speakers include economists from WVU and Marshall, a top coal industry engineer and executive, and a vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
But oddly, the lead-in speaker for this “save coal” event is a guy who just last week issued a statement that condemned American Electric Power’s efforts to perfect and deploy “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS — a technology that most experts believe is the coal industry’s only chance to survive international efforts to mitigate global warming.
Here’s the scoop:
The Chamber announced last Wednesday that it was giving a major platform at the Business Summit to Steven J. Milloy, the founder of the Web site JunkScience.com. Milloy is expected to talk about his book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them,” as an introduction to the “save coal” session.
Steve Roberts, the Chamber president, said:
Steve Milloy’s remarks will be timely and interesting, given the current controversies that are being driven by the debate over environmental issues such as global warming, energy use and the economic impacts of all of this. West Virginia is one of the states that could be affected significantly depending on how things go with the scientific and political debate over current environmental issues.
The week is starting off with bad news from the Ukraine, where an explosion Sunday afternoon killed eight miners and injured five, according to press agency reports.
There was lots of other coal-related news and commentary over the weekend.
Closer to home, we published a follow-up story in Saturday’s Gazette-Mail to my Friday afternoon Coal Tattoo piece about a WVDEP biologist alleging agency Secretary Randy Huffman misled Congress about the damage being done by mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia.
Sunday’s Gazette-Mail featured a front-page story by my buddy Bill Lynch about the coal industry’s Labor Day speaker — climate change denier Lord Christopher Walter Monckton. Bill tried to make it clear, I thought, that Monckton’s views are way out of line with the “findings of the majority of the scientific community.” I’ll be blogging more later this week and next about Lord Monckton. For now, let me ask this: Isn’t the coal industry talking out of both sides of its mouth yet again — on the one hand, they lobby Congress to add more “clean coal” money to research ways to capture carbon dioxide emissions, while on the other hand inviting speakers to come in and convince coalfield residents global warming isn’t real. Will the real coal industry please stand up?
Along those same lines, take note that the founder of the Web site JunkScience.com, Steven J. Milloy, will be a headline speaker at the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s annual Business Summit Sept. 2-4 at The Greenbrier.
The print edition of the Sunday Gazette-Mail also included an op-ed in which Boone County, W.Va., economic development authority director Larry Lodato touted the “wage and tax benefits” of the coal industry. The piece doesn’t appear to be available on our Web site (maybe it will be added later today). It was headlined , “Mayflies or jobs?” — a reference to one sentence in the next-to-last paragraph of the piece: “What it all boils down to is mayflies or jobs.” Lodato offered no explanation or back-up data for this argument. And, as readers of Coal Tattoo know, this is just a coal industry effort to cook up a false trade-off that ignores the massive environmental impacts from mountaintop removal.
Photo by Vivian Stockman
West Virginia Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman’s testimony in June at a congressional hearing on mountaintop removal has drawn a lot of comment, and even helped fuel a protest calling for his resignation.
It turns out that even some folks within Huffman’s own agency were none too happy with his staunch defense of the coal industry before a hearing of a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee.
Behind the scenes, a respected biologist at the WVDEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management responded with a strongly worded memo that challenged Huffman’s statements and urged agency officials to make sure the secretary “will be better informed the next time he represents our agency’s current state of knowledge to federal authorities and elected representatives.”
Doug Wood, a biologist in the water division’s watershed assessment section, wrote his memo on June 30, less than a week after Huffman appeared in Washington at a hearing on a bipartisan bill that would end the coal industry’s practice of burying hundreds of miles of streams with waste rock and dirt (the stuff that used to be mountains).
Wood’s memo showed up in my mail, packaged in an envelope without a return address. I’ve posted a copy of it here. I tried to reach both Huffman and one of Wood’s direct supervisors to ask about it, but haven’t heard back from them this week.
Updated, 4:20 p.m. Friday — Randy Huffman called me back, and said he had not seen this memo … we’ll have more on this development in Saturday’s Gazette-Mail.
The memo’s worth taking a look at, both for the way it directly contradicts specific statements Huffman made in his Senate testimony, and for its broader implications — and especially because Wood makes clear that biologists at WVDEP support the scientific findings of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others that mountaintop removal is having dramatic effects on the state’s water resources.
For example, Wood writes:
With valley fill discharges, especially those from very large valley fills, we can expect the negative impacts to last for centuries, just as deep mine discharges have remained toxic for centuries.
Such long-lasting adverse impacts are indeed significant.
It turns out American politicians aren’t the only ones who feel compelled to tour coal mine. In the AP photo above, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is shown after he inspected a coal mine in Pyongan Namdo, North Korea, and the Pukchang Thermal Power Complex.
And the photo to the right shows German Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor, Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier, when he visited the Prosper Haniel coal mine in western Germany.
Here in the U.S., you can view an extensive photo slide show of U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’ visit to a West Virginia coal mine by clicking here. Read her Gazette commentary on the trip here. I wonder if President Obama will make a trip underground — or maybe even come visit a mountaintop removal mine and talk with folks who live in the coalfields.
This week brought the sad news of the 10th U.S. coal miner to died on the job so far in 2009. Fifty-eight-year-old William W. Parrott was killed by a rib roll early Thursday morning at Big Laurel Mining Corp.’s Mine No. 2 in Wise County, Va., according to this preliminary report from the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.
As my buddy Paul Nyden reports in this morning’s Gazette, criminal charges against West Virginia political legend Ken Hechler — stemming from the big June 23 anti-mountaintop removal protest down at Marsh Fork Elementary School — have been dropped.
Hechler told Paul:
The videotape showed very clearly that I neither impeded traffic nor in any way obstructed justice. The State Police arrested me very politely and motioned for me to get into the front seat of the police cruiser. There was no pressure or contact during my arrest.
The 94-year-old former congressman was prepared to fight the charges, and he wrote a Gazette commentary last month looking back on his transformation into what he called a “hell-raiser” over coal industry abuses.
Here’s some video of Hechler’s involvement in the big protest:
With a carbon capture test at its Mountainer Power Plant in New Haven, W.Va., just weeks away from going operational, American Electric Power announced this afternoon that it plans to seek federal funding to expand the project.
The initiative would increase the carbon capture and storage (CCS) ability of the plant from the current 20-megawatt project to 230 megawatts. That’s still less than 20 percent of the 1,300-megawatt plant — and the effort would not be operational until at least 2015.
AEP hopes to win $334 million from the U.S. Department of Energy‘s latest round of “Clean Coal” money, or enough to fund half of the costs of installing its favored chilled ammonia carbon capture process.
That’s right — $334 million is half the cost of a project to capture less than 20 percent of the plant’s total greenhouse emissions.
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