Last week, Republicans in Congress took their first steps toward dismantling some Obama-era regulations. The first regulation to be dumped was the Stream Protection Rule. ADVERTISING Last week, Republicans in Congress took their first steps toward dismantling some Obama-era regulations.
Last week, Republicans in Congress took their first steps toward dismantling some Obama-era regulations. The first regulation to be dumped was the Stream Protection Rule.
Thanks to the Senate and House, coal mining companies will face fewer hurdles dumping mine waste into streams and rivers. They won’t have to pay for destroying resources that belong to the American people, nor for the potential health hazards of dumping waste containing arsenic, lead, manganese, iron, sodium, strontium and sulfate into the water.
Trickle-down economics don’t work, but trickle-down water does. What goes into streams in Appalachia eventually makes its way into the Mississippi watershed, polluting public water supplies along the way.
Mine waste, of course, has been a problem for years. In recent decades, coal companies in Kentucky, West Virginia and elsewhere ripped the tops off more than 500 mountains to get at the coal underneath. The spoil is dumped into Appalachian valleys, burying almost 2,000 miles of headwater streams. The slurry created by washing coal is injected into underground shafts and crevices, putting groundwater at risk.
The government was slow to address the problem, but in December the Interior Department adopted the Stream Protection Rule. Getting rid of it will increase profits for coal-mining corporations if they don’t have to worry about environmental review — much less the morality of trashing the planet. But it won’t save many jobs and it certainly won’t help fulfill President Donald Trump’s promise to revive the coal industry.
Coal’s big problem is that natural gas is cheaper; gas-fired generating plants are cheaper and faster to build and emit less than half the planet-warming carbon dioxide that coal-fired plants do. When costs aren’t an issue, consumers show a preference for more environmentally friendly energy sources.
Despite the economics, despite the environment, Republicans made trashing the planet in defense of a dying industry their first priority. Nice.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
