Late last week the Department of the Interior announced that it was going to conduct stricter oversight of mountaintop coal mining, a process by which coal seams under mountaintops are exposed to mining equipment by dumping the rock and soil above it into lower-elevation areas nearby. This practice is common in the Appalachian Mountains.
I suspected something was underway a few months ago when I discovered that the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement scrubbed post-reclamation photos of such sites. It turns out that the flat land created by this practice is actually often welcomed by locals as something with economic benefits.
It's true that disrupting that much rock and earth has environmental consequences. When rock is newly exposed to rainwater, soluble minerals including heavy metals will leach out until they've been depleted. Mountaintop mining can be disruptive to seasonal and minor streams and can diminish the water quality of larger streams and rivers.
But water pollution is primarily a local issue. Yes, water flows, but only in one direction. It's not clear why states, alone or acting jointly, couldn't deal with these issues in most cases.
Mountaintop mining is, however, a big deal for environmentalists for at least two reasons. First, they dislike the local effects--disruption of natural landscapes, water pollution, et cetera.
Perhaps more importantly, however, coal is the declared enemy of environmentalists. Burning it is carbon intensive and can produce unpleasant pollution (carbon dioxide is not a pollutant).
But coal-produced electricity is cheap, and electricity runs the modern world. For most people, it's a tradeoff worth making. For the most radical of environmentalists, those who pine for a world unsullied by man, it's not.
Fortunately for the rest of us, there aren't that many of them. Unfortunately for us, they currently have friends in high places.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
You have a cute assessment of MTR impacts: "water only flows one way", is a hilarious attempt at brushing away the impacts of MTR on water and people.
It takes 1000 years at least for waterways in valleys filled with blast slag to recover from such a practice. Would you drink chemical laden water? Would you bathe in it? Perhaps you can afford a water filtration system.
Do you think the residents around MTR sites have enough cash on hand to plop in a water filtration system to their home? Let alone test their water for bio-accumulative heavy metal toxins like Mercury?
It's clear you aren't looking at the whole picture, but highlighting what sounds good for the coal industry. If you cared about the communities around MTR sites, you would care about their quality of life.
MTR is a slap in the face to those residents, and there are certainly other ways to economically support these areas (wind power) with jobs that last, keeping the mountains they love intact for generations to come.
Post a Comment