During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama spoke critically of mountaintop removal, a mining method that involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the waste into valleys below. During an August 2007 stump speech, for example, Obama made it clear he disapproved of the destructive practice, which so far has leveled more than 470 peaks across Appalachia.
"We're tearing up the Appalachian Mountains because of our dependence on fossil fuels," he told an approving crowd in Lexington, Ky.
But since taking office this year, the Obama administration has sent mixed signals about its stance on mountaintop removal, troubling activists working to stop the destruction.
On the one hand, the Environmental Protection Agency announced in March that it was asking the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take a closer look at mountaintop removal's "potential harmful impacts on water quality" through its permitting process. (UPDATE: Shortly after posting this story, we learned that the Obama administration has cleared for approval almost all of the mountaintop mining permits it had been reviewing.)
Then last month, the Department of Justice filed a brief with the 4th U.S. Circuit court of Appeals opposing further review of a lower court ruling that would have more strictly regulated mountaintop removal, as Ken Ward of the Charleston (W.V.) Gazette reported at his Coal Tattoo blog.
Adding to the uncertainty, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar held a press conference recently to announce his agency plan's to reverse Bush administration's changes to a rule that allowed mountaintop removal operations to dump waste in streams. But at the same press conference, he reassured the coal industry that the President didn't want to hamper production.
"Basically, we're totally confused," said Julia "Judy" Bonds of Coal River Mountain Watch, a grassroots group fighting mountaintop removal in West Virginia. While the federal government dithers, coal companies appear to be stepping up operations, she added.
Bonds made the comments during a conference call on mountaintop removal held this week by the Orion Grassroots Network, a program of the Massachusetts-based Orion Society, publisher of Orion Magazine. Also speaking on the call was Maria Gunnoe, an organizer with the West Virginia-based Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and this year's winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, which Bonds won in 2003.
With the Obama administration vacillating on the issue, lawmakers in several states are trying to build momentum by introducing legislation to prohibit electric utilities from burning mountaintop removal coal. They include North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison, who introduced the Appalachian Mountains Preservation Act in February. Similar legislation is also being considered in other states including Georgia and South Carolina.
Harrison said leaders in Washington have told her that if states take an active role in trying to stop mountaintop removal, that will provide the support needed for action on the federal level.
"That way it's not just a federal dictate," she explained.
But the legislation is running into stiff resistance at the state level from coal companies as well as electric utilities, which wield considerable power over legislatures. In North Carolina, which is the nation's second-largest user of mountaintop removal coal after Georgia, Harrison says utilities including Duke Energy and Progress Energy have been "lobbying the heck out of" the proposal, arguing it would raise power bills.
Just how much the law would raise bills is disputed. While Harrison has heard utility representatives claim her proposal would increase power bills by 30%, mining expert Matt Wasson of the North Carolina-based advocacy group Appalachian Voices says the average price difference between underground and surface-mined coal from central Appalachia is about $3 per ton -- a difference of about 5%. (Appalachian coal is already among the most expensive, selling for $70 to $140 per ton in recent months compared to $12 to $14 per ton for Wyoming coal.)
What is undisputed, though, is the political power utilities wield over the North Carolina legislature. A 2007 report by the campaign finance watchdog group Democracy North Carolina noted that Duke Energy and Progress Energy -- the state's two biggest utilities -- invested about $1.7 million in N.C. lawmakers over the previous four years.
And it's not just the utilities that are expressing their unhappiness with Harrison's bill: A discussion about the measure held last month in the N.C. House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources drew leading out-of-state coal executives, who chartered a private jet to attend the meeting, High Country Press reports:
More than a dozen mountaintop mining stakeholders made the trip, including Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Friends of Coal Association; Chris Hamilton, president of the National Mountaintop Mining Association; and Bill Crowley, president of the Kentucky Friends of Coal Association.
And of course, the power wielded by the coal companies is even greater in mining states like West Virginia.
"The coal industry and the government here are almost considered one and the same," Gunnoe said during this week's conference call. "Citizens feel like you can't go up against it."
In fact, Bonds' and Gunnoe's organizations recently petitioned the U.S. EPA and the federal Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement to take over the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, arguing that the state agency puts coal companies' profits ahead of environmental justice for citizens.
When asked about the federal government's reluctance to step in until states take action against mountaintop removal, Bonds drew a parallel to an earlier human rights struggle in the South -- the black freedom movement against Jim Crow -- and the critical role the federal government played then.
"Southern states resisted giving people their rights," Bonds said. "Pricey should ask if we're going to follow that example."
Meanwhile, activists are also pressing Congress to take action by passing a bipartisan bill that would help limit mountaintop removal. The Clean Water Protection Act -- which has more than 100 co-sponsors in the U.S. House -- would strike the Bush administration rule change that loosened limits on the dumping of mountaintop removal waste into streams.
On a positive note, activists say they've noticed a change in the attitudes of federal lawmakers who they've visited in Washington to discuss mountaintop removal. For example, Gunnoe said that in the past Sen. Robert Byrd's (D-W.V.) office rushed them right out -- but this year his staff actually took the time to sit down and listen to their concerns.
That's why -- despite the uncertainty coming from the Obama administration and the coal lobby's resistance -- activists haven't given up hope for change.
"In order to fight this fight, you have to be hopeful," Gunnoe said. "You have to believe there will be an end to it. It's a matter of how many mountains will have to be sacrificed.
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