Please Do Not Tap On the Glass

My disappointment with the Obama Administration’s environmental decisions continues – unabated. Earlier I wrote about the EPA’s decision to approve 42 of 48 mountaintop removal permits and now the Obama Administration plans to regulate MTR.

I feel so much better knowing those 42 mountains will be blow to smithereens with EPA regulators standing by. I’m sure the wildlife and people in those communities will sleep better, too, with that 100-foot buffer between toxic debris and mountain streams.

Jackass.

Today’s Huffington Post features an editorial by Jeff Biggers titled “Breaking: Obama Says Mountain Crimes Can Be Regulated–Will Gore, Carter or Congress Intervene Now?” He cites quotes from Al Gore and James Hansen of NASA who both called MTR a crime, as well as today’s Washington Post editorial titled, “Obama is Right to Allow Mountaintop Removal Mining.”

The WaPo editorial is plain stupid. It’s clear that no one at the paper bothered to research MTR in the least or they wouldn’t have written in favor of it. The comments, for the moment, are running against today’s announced Memo of Understanding between the Army Corps of Engineers, the Interior Department and the EPA that “puts in place an interagency plan that the administration believes will strengthen regulations for mountaintop removal projects while allowing them to continue.”

According to Biggers, this plan amounts to total destruction of ecosystems vital to our survival. “All well-meaning intentions aside, if the Obama administration truly wanted to “enforce” mountaintop removal regulations and protect American watersheds, drinking water, and communities from catastrophic flooding and toxic blasting, it would simply reverse a 2002 Bush and dirty coal lobby manipulation of the Clean Water Act and restore the original definition of “fill” material to no longer include mining waste.

A growing number of Congress members understands this–and even conservatives like Sen. Lamar Alexander are now shepherding the Clean Water Protection Act. See: http://www.ilovemountains.org/appalachia-restoration-act/.”

Here are some MTR facts from the HuffPo editorial that you should consider:

• More than 3.5 million pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives rip across the most diverse and oldest mountains in America–and rain down silica dust and heavy metals on residents–in West Virginia alone EVERY DAY.
• Mountaintop removal provides less than 5-7 percent of our national coal production, at a time when coal demand is down, and mountaintop removal coal could EASILY be replaced by energy efficiency, conservation, renewable energy sources or underground coal.
• Not one person in the Obama administration involved in this outrageous decision has ever set a foot on a mountaintop removal site.
• If mountaintop removal is a crime, as former Vice President Al Gore has stated, then President Barack Obama and his EPA, CEQ and Department of Interior administrators are co-conspirators in this crime: When President Barack Obama’s staff turns on the lights to the Oval Office this morning, a signal will be sent from the Potomac Energy Company to the Chalk Point Generation Station, where the coal handling facility service of the power plant will shovel in coal strip-mined from mountains of West Virginia that have been clear cut, detonated with tons of explosives, and toppled into the valleys.

The bottom line is that the Obama Adminstration lied during the campaign about ending mountaintop removal and now they are co-conspirators in an enormous violation of our environmental rights. “Today’s announcement by the Obama administration paves the way for the criminals that conduct mountaintop removal to continue their bombing assault and hillbilly removal campaign against the people of the Coal River Valley and Appalachian mountain communities,” says Bo Webb, a Vietnam Vet, coal miner’s son, and resident in Coal River Valley, West Virginia.”

This pisses me off on a personal level. My family hails from the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky and these criminals are destroying my heritage. Be aware of what coal is costing the people and wildlife who live near these crime scenes and get active to make it stop.

s.

Filed under: environment, global climate change, wildlife conservation Tagged: | obama sells out mountains for coals