Interior ’spinning its wheels’ on mountaintop removal
Back in June, officials from various Obama administration agencies said they were going to take “unprecedented steps to reduce environmental impacts” of mountaintop removal coal mining.
They just didn’t say when … and apparently, at least over at the Interior Department, they don’t have plans to act anytime soon. On Friday, lawyers for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and for Glenda Owens, acting director of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement made that pretty clear.
In a four-page legal filing, Interior’s lawyers said they won’t be issuing their proposed changes to the stream “buffer zone rule” until early 2011 … That’s not a typo. They said early 2011.
Remember now, the last we heard from Interior about the buffer zone rule, agency lawyers were trying to withdraw Bush administration changes to the rule without going through the formal rulemaking process — and they were slapped down by a federal judge for doing so.
So now, OSMRE wants to not only start a formal rulemaking, but says it needs more than a year just to gather public comments and come up with a proposal for that rulemaking. In its legal filing, Interior said the Obama administration’s interagency effort on mountaintop removal is:
… Committed to engage in a process for ‘gathering public input, assessing the effectiveness of current policy, and developing regulatory actions.’ The agencies also agreed to ‘ensure robust public involvement in the development of any proposed actions or regulatory reforms.’
So, OSMRE is going to start all over, and is still reviewing a draft of an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” that might be published in the Federal Register later this month. That notice will start a 30-day comment period, and a proposed rule would follow, perhaps by “early 2011.” But the agency’s new legal filing said:
Without knowing the nature and volume of any public comments on the anticipated proposed rule and the effect of any intervening events, it would be premature at this point to speculate on a timetable for completion of any final rule. However, OSM expects to proceed to a final rule as expeditiously as possible.
As I’ve written, figuring out what to do with the buffer zone rule is a long unfinished piece of business, an unresolved issue a decade after U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II’s ruling in the Bragg case. The current rule is the one in which the Bush administration essentially gutted the 100-foot buffer zone protections for streams, but added some requirements for operators to reduce valley fills.
Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said today:
The Department of the Interior is spinning its wheels, leaving this Bush-era rule in place while Appalachia’s mountains, streams and communities continue to be destroyed. We urge the Department of the Interior to stop wasting time and to quickly issue a stronger rule to protect streams.
11 comments
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/cowed-interior-to-conside_b_342508.html
(Excerpts; meaningful statements)
Teri Blanton, of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, asks: “In the meantime, what is the DOI’s interim plan? Without the Clean Water Protection Act, what rule is going to be protecting the streams now? Where is the sound science in two more years of unchecked destruction of the streams.”
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In the meantime, as the DOI flounders, lobby efforts by coalfield residents and national clean water advocates continue to appeal to the EPA, and to members of the US Congress to pass the Clean Water Protection Act and the Appalachian Restoration Act.
http://action.sierraclub.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=141581.0
(Excerpts; meaningful statements)
The statement filed by the Department of the Interior late Friday suggests a slow timetable for the agency to address mountaintop removal coal mining, starting with an “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking”
http://action.sierraclub.org/site/DocServer/NRS-_591516-v1-NPCA_-_Owens_Declaration.pdf?docID=3441
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In 2008 the Bush Administration severely weakened the stream buffer zone rule, a key protection for waterways near mountaintop removal coal mines. The buffer zone rule is promulgated under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA).
“Fixing the stream buffer zone rule remains a key component in the complex effort to end mountaintop removal coal mining,” said Lorelei Scarboro of Coal River Mountain Watch in West Virginia. “The Department of Interior has so far dragged its heels in addressing mountaintop removal coal mining, and the EPA’s recent steps to evaluate this destructive practice are now even more critical to the communities, streams and mountains of Appalachia.”
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“We now have hundreds more buried streams and ten more years of reasons why the buffer zone rule should be enforced as the courts have ordered,” said Cindy Rank with the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy. “Intermittent and perennial streams must be protected from mining activities that obliterate both the quality and quantity of those irreplaceable headwaters that we all depend upon.”
could someone tell me why they are delaying it for so long?
i’d do it right away
-i’m using this 4 a school project (have to find news article in the U.S. and present Nov. 6
anonymous,
You should read the post … the information you want is right there.
Ken.
This is feeling less and less like “unprecedented steps” - good observation. The Administration’s MOU is looking less and less like a “change we can believe in.”
People across the country are increasingly outraged by the President’s willingness to keep blowing up mountains under rules rigged by the Bush Administration - we’re hearing it from all corners of the country, and it’s more and more vehement. I just don’t understand how Obama thinks he can rally the country around an energy policy that lays waste to the oldest mountains and most diverse forest and streams in the country. And turning a blind eye to the suffering of hundreds of Appalachian families whose water is poisoned with coal waste hardly seems like the principles he campaigned on.
Nobody wants to see widespread job losses right now, and I don’t mean to underestimate the challenge of diversifying the Central Appalachian economy away from such a heavy reliance on coal. But doing the right thing is going to require genuine leadership. Is that getting kicked down the road to 2011 as well?
[…] Blogs @ The Charleston Gazette - » Interior ’spinning its wheels’ on mountaintop removal blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2009/11/02/interior-spinning-its-wheels-on-mountaintop-removal – view page – cached Back in June, officials from various Obama administration agencies said they were going to take “unprecedented steps to reduce environmental impacts” of mountaintop removal coal mining. — From the page […]
Hi anonymous,
Why? There are probably lots of reasons–a major one being the mid-term elections coming up next year. By postponing action until after 2010, the Obama administration can keep telling environmental supporters that it is working on new, improved regulations, without actually doing anything that might hurt Democrats politically in the coal states or swing districts (districts that can vote Republican or Democrat). They might be thinking that the economy will be better in 2011 and it will be easier (politically) to make changes at that time. In the meantime they are worried about getting re-elected and getting other stuff (like health care) passed. Saving Appalachia is a low priority.
President Bush was very different. He didn’t delay at all. In fact, he changed some of these regulations lickety-split. The federal judge mentioned above, Judge Hayden, said that filling in the valleys and hollows with overburden from the mountain top strip mines was illegal because the Clean Water Act regulations said you couldn’t dump waste into the waters of the United States–and mining spoil is just that, waste.
Judge Hayden’s ruling would have stopped some of the strip mining that is destroying the mountains. It would have made it more expensive to mine coal in other strip mines.
President Bush was more concerned about the coal mining than the mountains. (Some West Virginians say that is why he won the election.) So in a matter of months, President Bush rewrote the Clean Water Act regulation defining fill. Now, anywhere in the US, “fill” is just any solid placed in a waterway that will raise the bottom level of the waterway. In other words, it used to be illegal to “fill” a waterway with waste. Now any solid that “fills” a waterway is legal because it’s “fill”. It’s called a tautological definition. It’s like saying I’m anonymous because I’m anonymous. But it’s now the law of the land.
Good luck on your project. Keep an eye on those postings by Matt Wasson. He knows what he’s talking about.
does that mean that all this drumbeatin and comment takin and hootin and hollerin and youtubin’ and tweetin’ is all for naught? for now, anyhow?
i suppose the cynical optimist would say “that keeps them out of trouble elsewhere”. then again, we shouldn’t even be discussing “Is it wrong”. Enough!
[…] in Iowa becoming less enchanted with this president. Yesterday the enviralists were quoted in the Coal Tattoo complaining about the lack of momentum on dealing with mountaintop removal—ironically, the […]
Oh, we can now start attaching Obama Administration to all comments as freely as use the ‘Bush Administration’ hammer…right? Should there be different riparian zone buffer sizes depending upon the industry or activity: mining, logging, cattle, farming (small farm v. agri)?
Ok, ok, the Obama Administration has a lot of priorities, and it’s probably not fair to be going after “change we can believe in” at this point. My apologies to the many folks in the Administration who are working hard on doing the right thing.
But people without clean drinking water can’t afford to be put on a policy waiting list either - nor can the folks living downstream from the Brushy Fork impoundment on Coal River Mountain. And they have the misfortune of having a US Representative who shows a stunning capacity to turn a blind eye to the suffering of his constituents. In most places of the country, people can turn to their representative in an emergency situation, but… I’m gonna keep saying it and saying it. Rahall’s district ranked 432nd out of 435 Congressional districts in Gallup’s “well-being” index this year. That speaks volumes about his attention to constituent services.
The only thing to be proud of in a record like that is at least Rahall is doing better than Hal Rogers over in eastern Kentucky - Rogers’ district ranked 435th out of 435.
Good thing folks have the coal industry to make their lives better, isn’t it? What would we do without ‘em?
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