Big Coal's backlash over the EPA crackdown on future mountaintop removal operations went from denial and anger to the outright absurd last week, as state legislatures conjured their own versions of a sagebrush rebellion and the new Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed a sheath of regulatory gutting amendments to its budget bill.
On the heels of its Tea Party-backed coal rallies last fall, the dirty coal lobby couldn't have paid for a better show. As millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosives continued to detonate daily in their ailing districts and affected residents held dramatic sit-ins to raise awareness of the growing health crisis in the central Appalachian coalfields, Big Coal-bankrolled sycophants fell over themselves from Virginia to Kentucky to West Virginia, and in the halls of Congress, to see who could introduce the most ridiculous and dangerous bills to shield the coal industry.
Their breathless message: "The EPA don't understand mining," as Kentucky’s House Natural Resources and Environment Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, declared to his colleagues.
That misunderstanding dates back to last spring's breakthrough announcement by the EPA, following up a memorandum of understanding between the numerous federal agencies, including the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation Enforcement, on finally issuing guidance rules and cracking down on the irreversible and pervasive destruction of mountaintop removal mining operations to waterways. Based on government studies that conclusively demonstrate that "burial of headwater streams by valley fills causes permanent loss of ecosystems," the EPA issued new conductivity levels "to protect 95% of aquatic life and fresh water streams in central Appalachia" and effectively bring an end to the process of valley fills (and the dumping of toxic coal mining waste into the valleys and waterways).
After an eight-year hiatus of enforcement under the George W. Bush administration, in which an estimated 1,000-2,000 miles of the headwater streams were jammed and sullied by toxic coal waste(my emphasis), along with the destruction of hundreds of mountains and tens of thousands of hardwood forests and the depopulation of historic Appalachia communities, the EPA's return to its true role as enforcer of the Clean Water Act made it a convenient target for Big Coal outrage...
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