Interior to Restrict Mountaintop Coal Mining

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.