Removing Mountain Top Removal

Readers of California Greening should know that I have been very critical of Mountaintop Removal Mining, of House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall, and very supportive of the efforts of the Green Party affiliated Mountain Party of West Virginia's efforts to stop that practice.

Ken Ward's Coal Tatoo post today provides a very good run down on what Rahall could be doing about the problems of the coal industry... but isn't.

As I’ve written before, Rahall is in quite a fix on mountaintop removal, and his position on it is certainly in conflict with his great leadership on so many other environmental and conservation measures:

Ward goes on to list the things that are not being done, the leadership that is not being shown.

And Rahall isn’t doing many of the things that he could … as chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Rahall has jurisdiction over the Department of Interior and he could use that position and that committee to hold some interesting hearings and push some tough legislation. I often wonder why he doesn’t do things like:

• Call in Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and OSMRE Director Joe Pizarchik for a committee hearing, and demand to know why they haven’t yet started writing a tougher and more clear definition of the approximate original contour reclamation standard. And if the Obama administration won’t take on the task, Rahall and his committee could put forward legislation to do it themselves.
• Haul some coal executives — maybe he could start with Blankenship — before his committee and ask them to explain why so few flattened mountaintop removal sites are being developed for new businesses or other community assets.
• Schedule another hearing with Salazar and Pizarchik, and demand to know how in the heck OSMRE is going to accomplish the tougher enforcement oversight it has promised given the budget cuts proposed for the agency by President Obama.

This is just one more example of the failures of Washington to match action to rhetoric and the result can only be a growing cynicism about the ability of Washington to do anything that has a time horizon beyond the next election. Even those Senators who appear to be bulletproof, like California's very senior Senator Feinstein, seem almost to go out of their way to kowtow to entrenched corporate interests, leaving most of the public to wonder who is running whom.

Toxic Sludge: Tennessee, West Virginia and DC.

I should not have read the latest post by Dave Roberts at Gristmill this late in the evening. This one suggests that there are more coal sludge disasters waiting to happen. We know about the recent containment pond spill at the Kingston Power Plant run by the TVA. Roberts and the rest of the crowd at Grist want us to keep on worrying. This time over a leaking pond in Raleigh County West Virginia. The problem with this is that there is a school and, for part of the day, 200 students directly in the path if it finally breaks loose.

What these Yes We Can blinded environmentalists don't say is that there is little hope anything is going to change. Much of what coal is allowed to do and the rules under which they have to operate is controlled by the House Committee on Natural Resources. That Committee is headed by Congressman Nick Rahall (WV-03) . There is little chance that any real oversight or real legislative leadership will come out of this Committee while Rahall is sitting in the Chair. I don't think that Massey Energy is going to miss much sleep.

Even as we are told that the new administration is taking science seriously... and it looks like that is the case with a Nobel Prize winner, Steven Chu named to head the Dept. of Energy and John Holdren to be Obama's Science and Technology Adviser... the funding for much work still has to come through the House Appropriations Commitee, where the SubCommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies, Alan Mohollan (WV-01) is sitting there to take care of making sure King Coal get its fair share of funding.

Then, if anything gets out of the House, we have the nominal Dean of the Senate, Robery Byrd ready to filibuster whatever coal does not like.

Now, you see why I am a Green, not a Democrat... and why I continue to push back at Roberts and all of the others when they forget how this really works. In order to get the right legislation regarding the Auto Industry, Waxman had to replace Dingell. If we want to get the right legislation and oversight regarding the Coal Mining Industry, we need someone to replace Nick Rahall. He is just too dependent on coal industry votes to be effective in doing what this entire country needs to have done.