The Bush Administration put Mountain Top Removal (MTR) on its list of "midnight rules" - a parting shot at the end of this administration in favor of an environmentally destructive industry, a final gut punch undermining of ecosystems in Appalachia. The Times wrote about this a few weeks ago and Friend of the Fair Jody Roberts wrote about it last week over at The Center. Roberts points out that the new ruling "makes it easier for coal-mining companies to deposit the "waste" they create (otherwise known as "mountain") into adjacent valleys."
Here is an extended quote from Roberts, summarizing what's going on:
Under the Clean Water Act dumping mining waste into U.S. waterways is illegal. Mining companies are responsible for proper removal and disposal of all waste created at a mining site. This process is already difficult and expensive in traditional mining, but in MTR mining the quantity of waste being created increases exponentially. Coal companies would be responsible for disposing of entire mountaintops--costly indeed! There's really only one good way around this problem: don't call it waste.
So, the ruling has coal companies changing what they call "waste" into what they now call "fill." The "fill" "can be neatly discarded in the valleys between what were previously known as mountains." (The Washington Post, I found out from The Center's post, has a nice sketch of the process here.) As Roberts goes on to say:
All of this spells trouble. Fill buries one of the richest and most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Streams are filled, decimated by the overburden filling their paths. The water that remains is poisoned with leftovers of the mining process: heavy metals exposed during coal excavation and washed free of the coal before shipment. The holding ponds for the slurries are unstable at best, deadly at worst. Without any vegetation to slow the rains, massive flooding takes place in these valleys, and the holding ponds burst open, spewing their soup of heavy metals into the valleys--and the villages that populate them.
Noting that coal mining is an environmentally destructive industry doesn't necessarily lead to a specific social or political response -- as in, they are bad, we are good, let's get rid of bad coal mining companies. The reason they are mining coal is to provide fuel for power plants, power that, as this post shows, allows me to type on this computer. I am part of the system, you are part of the system, everyone is part of the system. Given that we are all implicated in the energy production process, it seems we have at least two options for response. One is to seek alternative forms of energy, forms that are less destructive to ecosystems and public health. This alternative is good, as far as it goes, but it only goes as far as continuing our patterns of consumption that will eventually have us continuing to search for evermore sources of fuel. The second alternative is to reduce our energy consumption, so that energy production is less necessary. This runs in the face of dominant cultural patterns in American society that have come to equate consumption with the good life. Those patterns have changed over time, are not immutable, and could thus shift again. They likely will. But it won't be simple or straightforward to overcome the deeply held notion that consuming goods and services and experiences is what it means to be modern. So there's that.
But this notion of "necessity," that we all need and use energy, is used as a false prop on top of which to justify morally specious reasoning about how to produce that energy. In any configuration of the problem and its possible solutions, the third option, the most insidious one, the one Bush has now codified into law with the rhetorical maneuver of renaming a "mountain" as "overburden" is unjustifiable all around, on moral, environmental, cultural, and health terms. Apparently, though, it is politically justifiable, at least for the next five weeks. As Roberts notes, "The [Obama] White House can work to undo these rules, but that is time intensive (and with the other emergencies that they'll be facing this likely won't be a top priority)." Maybe all that's left is to throw shoes at the outgoing Bush.
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