Charleston Gazette

THERE'S some suspense in West Virginia over whether Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA, is about to use regulations in the Clean Water Act to stop some coal-mining companies from blowing the tops off of mountains. On Friday, the's Ken Ward reported , the EPA said it would revoke the permit for the previously-approved Spruce Mine, which the EPA said "may result in unacceptable adverse impacts to fish and wildlife resources." The mine would, among other things, bury seven miles of streams in adjacent valleys with slurry and runoff. On Monday, Grist.org reported, seven activists were arrested at a sit-in at the office of Joe Manchin, West Virginia's governor, over an upcoming mountaintop removal mine at evocatively named Coal River Mountain. Residents of the mine area object to the environmental impact and, in an ironic touch, to the fact that the mine will eliminate the site of a proposed wind farm.

The increase in mountaintop-removal mining is in part due to a relaxation of regulations in 2002 under the Bush administration, which changed the definition of "fill materials" in the Clean Water Act to include mining waste. In mountaintop removal, the mining company first scares off animal life and clear-cuts the forest, then drops in explosives and massive drag lines to shear off the top 500-800 feet of the mountain. Then it harvests and washes the coal, generating coal slurry. Under previous rules, the rock, dirt, and slurry was considered "waste", which had to be expensively shipped to approved waste sites. But the new rule reclassified it as "fill material", allowing companies to dump the whole mess into adjacent stream valleys, which is much cheaper. In 2008, the Bush administration further cheapened the practice by eliminating requirements for "buffer zones" that prohibited mining within 100 feet of flowing streams.

With such lax rules in place, tangles between the EPA and companies running mountaintop-removal coal mines proceed over what seem to the observer to be peripheral details. The destruction of an entire mountain per se is perfectly legal; what's in question is the degree to which said destruction affects downstream water quality, the impact on local ecospheres, and so forth. So the EPA has to asses whether water quality in nearby streams is "above levels believed to cause excursion of water quality standards or significant degradation." But on the ground, mountaintop removal in the Appalachians is considerably more devastating. Jeff Biggers reports in the Nation that "mountaintop removal operations have destroyed more than 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of forest in our nation's oldest and most diverse range, and jammed more than 1,200 miles of streams with mining waste." Local residents who don't want to leave their homes tend to come to accommodations with the mining companies once the blasting starts up the hill. The damage to the local environment, Margaret Palmer, a water-quality scientist, testified to the Senate in June, is "immense and irreversible, and there are no scientifically credible plans for mitigating these impacts."

The Spruce Mine is the largest mountaintop-removal site ever, and the environmental dispute has been running since 1998. Jay Rockefeller, a senator from West Virginia, has protested to the EPA that Arch Coal, the company that runs the Spruce Mine, has already invested a lot of money to comply with previous demands from the Army Corps of Engineers and EPA, and it's unfair to pull their permit at this stage. The specific objection may have some merit, but the underlying question is why America allows this practice at all. Arch Coal should have had the foresight to see that such an environmentally-destructive practice risks drastic intervention by regulators, and to factor that calculation into their investments.

So why do we allow mountaintop removal? Well, it provides cheap coal, which means cheap coal-fired electricity. But we don't want electricity to be cheap, and we don't want it to be coal-fired. We want electricity to be expensive, so it encourages conservation, efficiency, and the development of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar (or nuclear, if that's how your CO2-reducing druthers tend). Making energy more expensive is crucial to slowing emissions of greenhouse gases and preventing catastrophic global warming; it's so important that we're now trying to enact cap-and-trade legislation, or failing that a carbon tax, purely in order to make fossil-fuel-generated energy more expensive. And yet at the same time, we're allowing coal companies to destroy the mountains of Appalachia in order to make fossil fuels cheaper. And, hence, to increase global warming. When a coal company blows the top off a mountain in West Virginia, it's destroying the environment in order to destroy the environment. Mr Rockefeller may be constrained by political exigencies to defend companies that do this, but it's pretty shameful stuff.