After six years of the Obama presidency, mountaintop removal continues to put Appalachian communities at risk, leading many to wonder what his legacy on the issue will be.
The Obama administration has taken steps to limit mountaintop removal coal mining pollution in Appalachia. The president and agency officials have also made quite a few promises. But mountaintop removal continues, so what have they actually done?
The Alliance for Appalachia, a coalition of groups including Appalachian Voices, just released a Grassroots Progress Report examining the administration’s successes and shortfalls in dealing with mountaintop removal. There have been successes, to be sure, but as the report clearly demonstrates, there have been many failures.
Large scale surface coal mining is still a huge problem in Central Appalachia. Although the pace has slowed due to the declining coal economy, many new permits are issued every year. In 2013 Virginia issued 9 new surface mining permits and 2 acreage expansions, West Virginia issued 25 new permits, and Kentucky issued 30. Only Tennessee issued no new permits. – Grassroots Progress Report
The report covers not only the scale of ongoing mining, but paints a clear picture of the costs that mountaintop removal continues to have on Appalachian communities. The poor economic outcomes and human health problems associated with mountaintop removal have not improved over the past six years. These issues are closely linked, and neither can improve without action from the White House.
The White House has already made commitments. A 2009 Memorandum of Understanding, signed by all of the relevant regulatory agencies, outlined a series of actions the administration was prepared to take to deal with mountaintop removal. The Alliance report goes through those commitments one by one, pointing out the shortcomings of the actions taken, and the failure of the administration to take further, stronger actions.
The report is not simply a list of grievances, however. There are four policy recommendations as well.
1) a Selenium Standard to ensure that citizens maintain the ability to test for selenium pollution in their own water,
2) a strong Conductivity Rule based on scientific research US EPA has already conducted because we, and our federal agencies, know that high conductivity can be a key measure of dangerous water,
3) a Stream Protection Rule that preserves a strong stream buffer zone requirement so that mining waste can no longer be dumped into our streams, and
4) a strong Minefill Rule to address the currently unregulated dumping of coal burning waste into abandoned mine sites.
If you’re interested in what the Obama administration has and has not done in dealing with mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, take a moment to read the one-page summary or the full report.
Thom KayAV's Legislative Director, Thom spends his days between Durham, NC and Washington D.C., knee deep in politics and legislation, working to persuade decision-makers to protect Appalachian communities from mountaintop removal and to invest in a new economy for the region. He is the least outdoorsy person at Appalachian Voices, and he's just fine with that.
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