Coal news and updates

Environmentalists were outraged earlier this month after the Republican-led Congress used an obscure law to erase a new regulation aimed at reducing the environmental damage caused by coal mining. The votes to undo the so-called stream protection rule, released last month on President Barack Obama’s last day in office, were “a disgraceful opening salvo from this Congress, as they begin to try and do the bidding of big polluters,” Michael Brune, executive director of the San Francisco, California–based Sierra Club, said in a statement.

 

But the demise of the rule, which took regulators years to craft, drew a less impassioned reaction from a scientist on the front lines of the fight over coal mining. The regulation, which had been weakened during the rulemaking process, “was not a game changer,” says aquatic ecologist Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland in College Park, who has played a high-profile role in documenting coal mining’s toll on streams in the Appalachian Mountains. In particular, she says, if the rule had survived, it would not have barred one of the most destructive mining practices in Appalachia: blasting away mountaintops to uncover coal seams and piling the debris in adjacent stream valleys. And because the rule’s demise won’t do much to ease the economic headwinds buffeting the United States’s coalfields, it is unlikely to unleash a mining boom.

 

The rule was killed as part of an ongoing purge of science-based regulations approved late in the Obama administration. The reversals are allowed by the Congressional Review Act, a rarely used 1990s law that gives Congress 60 working days to reject new rules. In practice, that means lawmakers can review scores of regulations issued after June 2016. But Republicans are expected to repeal just about a half-dozen rules.

Source: Sciencemag