Environmentalists Turn to Obama for Help in Mining Decision

Last week, the Bush administration again favored the fossil fuel industry over the environment, when it allowed for new legislation, regulating the amount of debris that mountaintop mining companies could throw away into adjacent streams in valleys. As soon as the decision was announced, environmental groups started a massive lobby campaign for president-elect Barack Obama to reverse the procedures, and prevent the legislation from being published in the Federal Register.

 

In what the Appalachian Voices call a "parting gift" for the mining industry, the EPA stood by and allowed harmful legislation to pass. These regulations virtually pave the way for mining companies to start dumping enormous amounts of debris from their exploitations in the valleys and streams below, thus completely shifting the topology of the environment itself.

 

Other groups also fear that these measure could increase the number of mountaintop exploitations in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, the main states that share the Appalachian mountains, which are very rich in coal veins. In this type of mining, the forests are first thoroughly destroyed and removed from the mountaintop, which is then blown up. Giant machines move in afterwards and take the coal in their large buckets.

 

"Enforcing a law and removing a law are two different things. To me, it's the difference between having traffic cops that are sleeping on the job and having no speed limits," says Coal River Mountain Watch Co-Director Vernon Haltom, whose environmental group is trying to stop a mountaintop mine and preserve the site for a wind farm.

 

"The environmentalists are misleading the public into believing that this regulation will allow us to dump waste into rivers and dam up rivers. I don't know how to respond to that. It's just not true," says Kentucky Coal Association President Bill Caylor, who complains that the industry has to stay away from countless small streams and water bodies, although that's sometimes impossible.