Hey folks, Coal Tattoo is back up and running after I took a few days off last week and over the weekend … and what do I come back to see? Another editorial in which The New York Times concludes that mountaintop removal must end.
The editorial comes just after the Times account of the battle between coal and wind power on Coal River Mountain here in West Virginia, and the Times observes this on the politics of the issue:
It is now possible to imagine the beginning of the end of a ruinous form of mining called “mountaintop removal.” Local opposition is growing, and the Environmental Protection Agency is tightening rules and threatening to veto one of the largest projects ever proposed.
The editorial praises the Obama administration’s efforts on the issue:
Most important, in June, the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers announced that before granting any new permits they would insist on a robust scientific analysis of a proposed mine’s downstream impact on fish, salamanders and other aquatic life. If the agencies remain true to their word, this new guidance — required under the Clean Water Act, but ignored for years — could make mountaintop mining all but impossible.
But the Times also notes:
The administration’s resolve will soon be tested. As part of its review of existing permits, the E.P.A. has said it is considering vetoing the 2,278-acre Spruce mine in Blair, W.Va. The project was approved in 2007, and limited construction has begun, but the agency said it would irrevocably damage streams and wildlife. It promised a final decision later this year.
In the end, the Times concludes:
Some local residents say a veto would doom West Virginia’s economy; others think it would save the state from environmental ruin. The E.P.A. should veto.
For their part, instead of preaching financial ruin, the coal companies need to develop ways to mine this coal without blasting the tops off mountains and fouling the waters below. If they can’t or won’t, the practice must be shut down.
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The New York Times has a lot about coal.
2404 ARTICLES ABOUT COAL:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/coal/index.html
By the way, blasting (explosives) are commonly used in nearly all surface mining operations so connecting it to only mountaintop removal coal mining is nonsensical.
Also, even if the mountain tops were replaced after mining there still would be concern about the placement of excess spoil (expanded overburden) which also occurs with nearly all mining operations.
The true issue is the degree of adverse impacts to water quality and water flows — the hydrologic balance. Again, this is an issue for nearly all mining operations.
Congress did enact legislation to prohibit or restrict coal mining operations in certain areas, but decided to allow it in mountainous areas with few limitations.
What actually controls where most coal mining occurs are the electric utilities that decide which mining operations to buy their coal.
If the customers and/or the public utilities commissions demand that coal not be purchased from certain mining operations, those operations will cease. (Prior to passage of SMCRA in 1977, the TVA monitored mining operations to assure it was getting “compliance coal.”)
Electric utility deregulation makes it possible for customers to choose what power supply sources to buy.
Bottomline: Consumers and stockholders need to take action.
==
That surprised power experts, who predicted little growth for deregulation in 1999 because states with the most expensive electricity had already adopted the policy before the year started.
In fact, some states with moderately priced electricity, such as Maryland and Texas, hopped on the bandwagon in the 20th century’s final year.
As detailed below, cost wasn’t always the primary consideration as Maryland and Texas joined Arkansas, Delaware, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, and Virginia in committing to deregulation, also known as electric utility restructuring.
The converts joined a club that already included Arizona, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Nevada, New York, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
Will the Times also conclude that construction companies must also develop ways to build highways in Appalachia without blasting the tops off mountains and fouling the waters below, or will the EPA declare highway .
‘fill’ does’nt foul the water. If this agency remains true to it’s word, would’nt this also make highway construction in the area all but impossible?
Watcher when you can provide some data that road construction in these areas routinely has the same environmental impacts as surface mining then you will have a point. You have no scientific evidence to support what you are trying to say. Of course road construction has impacts but they are hydrologically, chemically and biologically distinguishable from surface mining impacts. When you begin your “NO MORE ROADS” crusade perhaps people may take you seriously with this line of reasoning.
Jason,
You are correct that, of course, road construction has impacts. No one will argue that statement. All disturbances to the earth involves some impacts.
But I would like to see the “scientific evidence” to support your statement that materials excavated from the same strata using the same extraction techniques and placed in the same fill areas are somehow “hydrologically, chemically, and biologically distinguishable” as to whether the material came from a road construction site rather than a mine site.
Watcher, Jason Robinson, PEMBA,
This is really a false argument … the difference here is really the size and scope of the impacts, not whether road construction is hydrologically, chemically and biologically distinguishable from surface coal-mining.
We’ve debunked this coal industry argument before … See this previous post:
http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2010/04/02/new-epa-standards-is-this-only-about-coal/
Ken.
rhmooney3 is correct – in the end, market forces are what will kill MTR. We are starting to see one of those already, with the brilliant ploy by the late Sen. Byrd and Sen. Rockefeller to FORCE publically-traded coal companies to report their serious MSHA violations every quarter. Care to guess who was No. 1? Althought I’m sure Massey wasn’t pleased to be leading that parade, being at the top of that list, quarter after quarter, MIGHT finally make them start to clean up their act because that will hit them where it really hurts – the bottom line.
(Market forces can be brutal…even when misguided.)
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:MEE
—
NEW YORK (AP) – Shares of Massey Energy Co. fell Tuesday after the company disclosed it received a citation for improperly stored explosives in the mine where 29 men were killed in an April explosion.
The company denied that there was any link between the explosives and the fatal blast.
By midday, Massey shares were down $1.01, or 3.2 percent, to $30.55.
Massey disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday that the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration issued an “imminent danger order” after a box of explosives was found in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia on July 30.
Ken, we were both listening to the EPA-Media conference call when you asked about mayflies vs jobs and I’m quite sure you and I heard the same thing. When asked by a AP reporter what would happen if this same comparison is tested in the supreme court the EPA spokesperson stated , we the EPA would lose.
Ken not sure what you are saying but my point is that the size and scope of surface mining projects is what makes them chemically, biologically and hydrologically distinguishable from road building projects.
for example, PEMBA asks how there could be different effects of using the same materials for fill with the only difference being road building or surface mining. Of course hot rocks are hot rocks. But only in surface mining fills do these activities occupy an entire watershed.
Ken,
I think you may need to do some further evaluation on your assertion.
A mining operation may impact, say 1000 linear feet of stream within one contingous mining site. A highway development may impact 1000 feet of multiple streams, but not in a contigous manner. So, you have to ask yourself, which is worse, to impact one stream in a larger manner, or multiple streams in a lesser manner.
By the way, another way of looking at this is, typically these are very small headwater streams between 1 and a few feet wide. Even if the stream is 5 ft wide, which most are not, that would be 1000 ft x 5 ft = 5000 square feet, or about a tenth of an acre of waterbody. Using EPA estimates of 2000 miles being impacted over the past 30 years, that equates to about 1200 acres of water about an inch deep or 120 acre-feet of water or 12 acres 10 ft deep.
KY,
Perhaps you can point me to some scientific, peer-reviewed literature to back up you argument…Ken.
Watcher,
I assume you are talking about the June 2009 EPA-Corps-CEQ conference call which I referenced and posted audio from here, http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2009/06/11/obamas-plan-for-mountaintop-removal/ … I went back and listened to it. That is indeed where I asked about the coal industry’s “jobs vs. mayflies” mantra.
But I also listened to the Q and A involving Tim Huber of the AP, and I didn’t hear EPA say anything like that at all … Readers can listen for themselves, but there just wasn’t anything like that said.
Ken.
KY a disturbance that impacts 1000 linear feet of stream, while disturbing a large fraction of the watershed, has net impacts on much much more than 1000 linear feet of stream. This is settled science (see Allan 2004, Strombulak and Frissell 2000, work by JV Bonta et al, citations below).
What is also settled science is that dispersing any impacts of surface disturbances across a large area in multiple watersheds is much more desirable than concentrating those impacts into a single watershed. “Desirable” in the sense that it reduces impacts to stream ecosystem processes and patterns that are protected by the CWA and ESA.
The fact that streams “DO” something (transport matter, process nutrients, and most of all flow downstream!) is why simplistic analyses such as the one offered by KY above don’t refer to anything in the real world. “1200 acres of water” ignores everything that is known about stream ecology and reduces the assessment of impact to a metric devoid of any empirical content.
For further reading may I suggest:
Allan, JD. 2004. Landscapes and riverscapes: the influence of land use on stream ecosystems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 35: 257- 284.
Amichev, BY, JA Burger and JA Rodrigue. 2008. Carbon sequestration by forests and soils on mined land in the Midwestern and Appalachian coalfields of the US. Forest Ecology and Management 256: 1949- 1959.
Bonta, JV and WA Dick. 2003. Impact of coal surface mining and reclamation on surface water chemical concentrations and load rates in three Ohio watersheds. Journal of the American Water Resources Association 39(4): 793- 815.
Bonta, JV, CR Amerman, TJ Harlukowicz and WA Dick. 1997. Impact of coal surface mining on three Ohio watersheds- surface-water hydrology. Journal of the American Water Resources Association 33(4): 907- 917.
Bonta, JV. 2000. Impact of coal surface mining and reclamation on suspended sediment in three Ohio watersheds. Journal of the American Water Resources Association 36(4): 869- 887.
Callanan, M, JR Barrs, M Kelly-Quinn. 2008. Critical influence of seasonal sampling on the ecological quality assessment of small headwater streams. Hydrobiologia 610: 245-255.
Caro, T, TA Gardner, C Stoner, E Fitzherbert and TB Davenport. 2009. Assessing the effectiveness of protected areas: paradoxes call for pluralism in evaluating conservation performance. Diversity and Distributions 15: 178- 182.
Conley, JM, DH Funk, DB Buchwalter. 2009. Selenium bioaccumulation and maternal transfer in the mayfly Centroptilum triangulifer in a life-cycle, periphyton-biofilm trophic assay. Environmental Science and Technology 43: 7952- 7957.
Ferrari, JR, TR Lookingbill, B McCormick, PA Townsend and KN Eshleman. 2009. Surface mining and reclamation effects on flood response of watersheds in the central Appalachian Plateau region. Water Resources Research 45(W04407): 1-11.
Fox, JF and JE Campbell. 2010. Terrestrial carbon disturbance from mountaintop mining increases lifecycle emissions for clean coal. Environmental Science and Technology 44(6): 2144- 2149.
Fritz, KM, S Fulton, BR Johnson, CD Barton, JD Jack, DA Word and RA Burke. 2010. Structural and functional characteristics of natural and constructed channels draining a reclaimed mountaintop removal and valley fill coal mine. Journal of the North American Benthological Society 29(2): 673- 689.
Gaston, KJ and RA Fuller. 2009. The size of species’ geographic ranges. Journal of Applied Ecology 46: 1-9.
Griffith, MB, EM Barrows and SA Perry. 1998. Lateral dispersal of adult aquatic insects (Plecoptera, Trichoptera) following emergence from headwater streams in forested Appalachian catchments. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 91(2)” 195- 201.
Hancock, PJ. 2002. Human Impacts on the stream-groundwater exchange zone. Environmental Management 29(6): 763- 781.
Hartman, KJ, MD Kaller, JW Howell and JA Sweka. 2005. How much do valley fills influence headwater streams? Hydrobiologia 532: 91- 102.
Hellmann, JJ, JE Byers, BG Bierwagen and JS Dukes. 2008. Five potential consequences of climate change for invasive species. Conservation Biology 22(3): 534- 543.
Hull, MS, DS Cherry and RJ Neves. 2006. Use of bivalve metrics to quantify influences of coal-related activities in the Clinch River watershed, Virginia. Hydrobiologia 556: 341- 355.
Merricks, TC, DS Cherry, CE Zipper, RJ Currie, TW Valenti. 2007. Coal-mine hollow fill and settling pond influences on headwater streams in southern West Virginia, USA. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 129: 359- 378.
Negley, TL and KN Eshleman. 2006. Comparison of stormflow responses of surface-mined and forested watersheds in the Appalachian Mountains, USA. Hydrological Processes 20: 3467- 3483.
Parmesan, C and G Yohe. 2003. A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems. Nature 421(1): 37- 42.
Phillips, JD. 2004. Impacts of surface mine valley fills on headwater floods in eastern Kentucky. Environmental Geology 45: 367- 380.
Pond, GJ, ME Passmore, FA Borsuk, L Reynolds and CJ Rose. 2008. Downstream effects of mountaintop coal mining: comparing biological conditions using family and genus- level macroinvertebrate bioassessment tools. Journal of the North American Benthological Society 27(3): 717- 737.
Pond, GJ. 2010. Patterns of Ephemeroptera taxa loss in Appalachian headwater streams (Kentucky, USA). Hydrobiologia 641: 185- 201.
Pumure, I, JJ Renton and RB Smart. 2010. Ultrasonic extraction of arsenic and selenium from rocks associated with mountaintop removal/valley fills coal mining: Estimation of bioaccessible concentrations. Chemosphere 78: 1295- 1300.
Roux, DJ, JL Nel, PJ Ashton, AR Deacon, FC de Moor, D Hardwick, L Hill, CJ Kleynhans, GA Maree, J Moolman, RJ Scholes. 2008. Designing protected areas to conserve riverine biodiversity: Lessons from a hypothetical redesign of the Kruger National Park. Biological Conservation 141: 100- 117.
Shrestha, RK, R Lal. 2006. Ecosystem carbon budgeting and soil carbon sequestration in reclaimed mine soil. Environment International 32: 781- 796.
Soltis, DE, AB Morris, JS McLachlan, PS Manos and PS Soltis. 2006. Comparative phylogeography of unglaciated eastern North America. Molecular Ecology 15: 4261- 4293.
Spanhoff, B and J Arle. 2007. Setting attainable goals of stream habitat restoration from a macroinvertebrate view. Restoration Ecology 15(2): 317- 320.
Stoddard, JL. 2005. Use of ecological regions in aquatic assessments of ecological condition. Environmental Management 34(1): S61- S70.
Strombulak, SC and CA Frissell. 2000. Review of ecological effects of roads on terrestrial and aquatic communities. Conservation Biology 14(1): 18-30.
Wishart, MJ and BR Davies. 2003. Beyond catchment considerations in the conservation of lotic biodiversity. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 13: 429- 437.
Sorry to spam your blog with citations Ken. That didn’t seem so long when I was cutting it out of my bibliography. BUT these papers are pertinent to the debate!
So what is the answer? Is deep mining and the burning of coal acceptable to those that want MTM eliminated? Deep mining requires valley fills in “streams” also. Is the answer wind power?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703792704575366700528078676.html
Per Bryce “Wind subsidies are more than 200 times as great as those given to oil and gas on the basis of per-unit-of-energy produced.” Therefore energy costs to the public and industry will greatly increase. Plus the “the potential savings from a nationwide 25% renewable electricity standard” results in an “expected reduction (that) will only equal about 4.9% of emissions (of CO2) nationwide.”
There’s no easy answer so you need to be careful with what you hope for unless the consequences are thought through. Like the previous poster stated “all land uses have impacts” and that includes wind power, solar power, roads, malls, suburbs, cattle, corn, wheat, and mining.
Conservation and population might be the most effective answers but there are of course economic (and therefore standards of living) downsides to these. And what are we going to do about all those in India and China wanting to live like us middle class Americans?
Oh, why aren’t there peer reviewed papers on road construction environmental damages? Because unlike coal mining there is not the well organized and well funded forces that have spent considerable years searching for impacts that could be used to shutdown the road industry. People like to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. They also like their electricity at affordable prices but a lot of them do not know what powers their light switch. Everything is grown or mined. I guess we just need some labels on products to explain the sources so everyone can understand the cost/benefit trade offs in life.
Casey you asked “Oh, why aren’t there peer reviewed papers on road construction environmental damages?” Three papers in that list (Allan 2004, Hancock 2002 and Strombulak and Frissell 2000) include reviews of literature regarding some of the effects of roads, with citations of hundreds of other studies.
Roads HAVE been studied a great deal by all sorts of biologists, my crude summary doesn’t even begin to cover it. A quick search of the Web of Science with the terms “road AND stream” yields 512 papers published between 1972 and 2010. “road AND water quality” yields 436 papers. Wanna guess how many “coal AND water quality” yields?
Even if what you were saying were true though it wouldn’t change the facts about the effects of surface mining. I understand that scientific facts, and the political will to manage from scientific facts, are two different things but it remains astonishing to hear these claims being made in indifference to the truth. Roads have been studied. mucho mucho mucho
I agree that your other questions are very compelling and the answers may not be palatable to some or perhaps many Americans but surely the best answers don’t require the systematic dismantling of an entire landscape!
Jason, you are correct. I made an incorrect statement out of pure ignorance and oversight regarding road studies. Obviously when Federal monies are used for anything including roads, copious environmental studies are required.
But I do think that my basic point is valid that “there is not the well organized and well funded forces that have spent considerable years searching for impacts that could be used to shutdown the road industry”.
Our society has certainly embraced the automobile and incorporated it into our basket of necessities and we demand non-local products that our transportation network provides. Although surface mining, especially in Appalachia, changes the landscape, at least highwalls are eliminated and vegetation and trees are established unlike the permanent losses from other land uses such as roads, parking lots, housing, etc.
I recognize that the vegetation is different and that the soils may take many, many years to return but it will. The water impacts lessen over time also, so I think there is healing on this temporary land use called modern surface coal mining. These statements on soils and water impacts reflect the Science article and press conference on MTM. Also there just is not a huge percent of Appalachia that has economically surface mineable coal reserves. So surface mining has a shorter life than deep mining in this region.
Jason,
It would be much more helpful if you posted links to those studies, rather than just spammed the blog with a copy-and-paste list … Ken.
ken no doubt. again, my apologies for the format of that list. most of those studies are not available online without institutional access to the journal. i have a pdf of most of them, so anyone please email me and I’ll try to get you a copy!
Jason,
Most of those journals also allow access at least to an abstract without a subscription or university library password or some such … links to those would be much more helpful than just a quick copy-and-paste job … Ken.
Every time I have tried putting multiple links on here I get caught in the spam filter. I’m pretty sure anyone interested can find these articles but here are a couple of links to the most pertinent ones. Sorry for the format, the blog is not excited about letting embedded links through.
JD Allan (2004) http://acousticfiles.com/4LRLRms/Ashley's%20papers/Allan_2004_landscapes%20and%20riverscapes%20review.pdf
Strombulak and Frissell (2000)
http://maps.wildrockies.org/ecosystem_defense/Science_Documents/Trombulak_Frissell_2000.pdf
Hancock (2002)
http://www.pebblescience.org/pdfs/Stream_Groundwater_Exchange_Zone.pdf
The ease at which I found these links makes me think that most folks can get this literature from a citation alone. If they know how to google.
I certainly agree with Casey that roads are a threat to lots of fisheries wildlife and forest resources.
from the Strombulak and Frissell 2000 paper
“Even where only a small percentage of the land’s surface is directly occupied by roads, few corners of the landscape remain untouched by their off site ecological effects. The breadth of these effects cannot be appreciated unless one takes a broadly transdisciplinary view of ecosystems and biological communities”
This is so much more true when the entire surface is disturbed for enormous contiguous areas. This kind of coal mining may not leave highwalls but it has completely erased the biological and geological history of more square miles of Appalachian forests and streams than I can stand to imagine. In no way possible can these soils ever return, neither the seedbanks nor soil biogeochemical communities. “Reclaimed” or “healed” sites remain distinguishable from unmined sites 50 years after mining and reclamation (see Bonta and Dick 2003, Ferrari et al. 2009, Bulluck and Buehler 2006 (Forest Ecology and Management), Negley and Eshleman 2006, Fritz et al. 2010, and dozens more studies that I included in that SHORT list above).
Ken has a great point and I’ll try to remember it: just posting a citation to an article doesn’t mean that anyone reads it. But many of the comments made by MTR proponents are completely at odds with the science that has been steadily accumulating for longer than we have even had laws to govern surface mining. There is absolutely no evidence that reclaimed land “heals”. There is no evidence that streams may be “reclaimed” or “mitigated” or “restored” from complete surface obliteration of their containing watershed.
Jason,
The authors of the Science article held a press conference. In that press conference it was stated that:
1) It takes 10,000 yrs to recreate soils of pre-mining
2) Chemical impacts to streams persist for decades (forever was not mentioned)
I took this to mean that there is a healing of the land after mining. There is no question that the topography will never be the same but if the soils return then it stands to reason that the plants and animals return also.
My point is that with roads, malls, parking lots and other land uses, the plants and animals never return and the water resources are forever impacted as long as humans inhabit and use these areas.
Casey I am not familiar with what was said at that press conference but you are right, “forever” is a long time. It’s hard for me to comprehend 10,000 years much less forever. Hell, next week seems far away…
The “10,000 years” bit may be an estimate of the time since the last maximum glaciation, which “reset” soil genesis in glaciated areas. It doesn’t change the recognition of “soil” as a historical entity.
If you, like soil scientists, consider soils as historic entities, (e.g., the material outcome of historical processes) then no “soil” can ever “return”. That is true for geological parent material and organic parent material, most importantly (to me and others who love ginseng and other forest products) seed banks! Soils can’t return, that would be like saying “George Washington can return”. We might have other presidents (and soils) but none of them will be George Washington (or the soils being destroyed by surface mining).
With parking lots and buildings I agree completely. With roads, not so much. I have dug a lot of roots within spitting distance of a paved road. Not sure if that is “healing” but I could probably agree with you about that if we defined “healing” sufficiently broadly
Many of the other papers I listed above demonstrate that “healed” (or even “healing”) is not an appropriate descriptor of the biological function of reclaimed surface mines. “Impaired” would be a better adjective. The laws about these issues ignore so much of what we know. i listed papers from soil biogeochemistry, carbon sequestration, stormflow response, aquatic macroinvertebrate community abundance and species richness, freshwater mussel abundance and species richness, songbird abundance and breeding success and small mammal density and habitat use! Very few of those metrics are actionable w.r.t. the Clean Water Act or mine permitting (although the SMCRA should consider them and does not). This is a failure of the regulatory process that is not unique to surface coal mining I completely agree.
Across the board, nothing has been shown to “heal”. the wounds may close but these effects are a permanent part of the geological record in “reclaimed” areas.
Casey,
10,000 years seems like a pretty long time to me, too — but perhaps in the history of our planet it’s not …
Anybody who is interested, the press conference Casey mentioned can be heard here:
http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2010/01/07/bombshell-study-mtr-impacts-pervasive-and-irreversible/
Ken.
This is a more accurate opinion than the above editorial.
After November the political wind will be reversing directions, there’s no doubt about it.
However, the electric utilities will continue to move away from coal. (The nightmare from TVA coal ash spill is just beginning.)
8/26/10
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/08/26/26greenwire-appalachian-dems-seek-distance-from-obama-on-c-76384.html?pagewanted=all
(Excerpt)
Democrats in Appalachia are running away from the Obama administration’s coal record like their political lives depend on it.
They may be right.