Buried in a new Rolling Stone magazine profile of Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is some potentially huge news for coal mining in Appalachia … it seems that EPA has quietly begun re-examining the definition of “fill material” in its Clean Water Act rules and may make some changes.

But if you look closely at what EPA has said, it’s not clear that they’re really going to do what environmentalists would like to … we’re a long way from knowing if this is a big deal.

Here’s the deal: The Rolling Stone story, by Tim Dickinson, reported:

… Jackson tells Rolling Stone, the EPA is reviewing the infamous Bush “fill rule” that allows mining companies to bury streams and lakes with mining rubble in the first place. “Staff is working on it now,” she says. “We haven’t put anything about it out publicly.” Jackson says the primary goal is to reform gold mining in Alaska — where miners have begun dumping toxic waste into a pristine lake near Juneau — but adds that the move may also “curtail” mountaintop-removal mining.

I picked up on this in my friend Elizabeth Bluemink and her Pebble Blog for the  Anchorage Daily News (for more on what Alaska and the fill rule has to do with mountaintop removal, go back and read this Coal Tattoo guest blog by Derek Teaney), and her piece prompted me to check in with EPA officials, who gave me this statement:

EPA is currently considering administrative options for improving the Clean Water Act review of proposed mining related discharges in waters of the U.S., including discharges associated with hard rock (mineral) and coal mining.  Among the options, we are specifically evaluating potential revisions to the definition of “fill material” and clarification of how this regulation is interpreted and implemented.  EPA is coordinating with the Department of the Army and Corps of Engineers in this evaluation of our joint regulations.  The goal is to improve the Clean Water Act review of mining related discharges to reduce environmental, water quality, and human health impacts.  While we are eager to move ahead quickly with improvements in our CWA programs, EPA has not made any final decisions.  We anticipate that the process of revising CWA mining reviews will likely include the opportunity for public notice and comment to provide maximum transparency and public participation in our decision-making.

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I’m sure Coal Tattoo readers are anxious to start weighing in on tonight’s big debate between Massey Energy Chief Executive Don Blankenship and environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So please have at it below in the comments section … just keep it clean and respectful of each other, and both Kennedy and Blankenship.

We’ve got tomorrow morning’s print story online now, and here’s the link to that. Here on the blog, I’m going to try to do a little bit of deconstructing, a little bit of fact-checking and just generally give some more perspective on what we all heard over across the Kanawha River in the University of Charleston’s Geary Auditorium.

UPDATED: If you missed it, the complete audio is available from West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

My guess is most of the commentary is going to say Kennedy won the debate. And let’s face it, Kennedy is a great public speaker and a very charismatic guy.  In a post-debate media briefing, even Blankenship admitted that public speaking isn’t his favorite thing — he says he’s a small-town guy, kind of shy and reserved. I don’t know about that, but Blankenship does sometimes mumble a bit and tonight he failed to really offer much of a detailed response to some of Kennedy’s major points.

Several times, Blankenship expressed frustration as he tried to respond to Kennedy as bombarded him with a litany of problems Kennedy linked to the coal industry:

There is so much rhetoric that it’s tough to deal with in these kinds of discussions.

At the same time, Kennedy certainly was far from perfect and made a few statements that were just way wrong or don’t really hold water. A few examples:

– Kennedy said that wind power provides 85,000 jobs, more than the 81,000 provided by the coal industry nationwide. As I’ve blogged before, that comparison is bogus. The wind industry figure includes construction jobs and manufacturing jobs (folks who make and built the turbines). But the coal industry figure, while accurate as far as it goes, does not include spin-off jobs, vendors, etc.

– Kennedy said that tens of thousands of miners — I think the exact number he used was 90,000 –  had lost their jobs since the 1950s, and none of them were forced out of work by environmental regulations. It’s always dangerous to use always or never … and in this case, anybody who follows the coal industry closely knows Kennedy was wrong. As Gene Trisko of the United Mine Workers testified to the U.S. Senate last year, the acid-rain provisions of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 cost something like 30,000 jobs in the high-sulfur coalfields of places like northern West Virginia and southern Illinois.

University of Charleston officials set up giant video screens for the overflow crowd at Thursday’s debate. Gazette photo by Chip Ellis.

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