Last week Republicans in Congress took their first steps toward dismantling some Obama-era regulations. This came as no surprise, but the optics of it were spectacularly brutal: 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 have 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. Environmentalists said it didn’t go far enough; mining interests said it was part of the Obama administration’s “war on coal.” As a candidate, President Donald Trump vowed to get rid of it, as did congressional Republicans.
Because the rule was new, it still had to pass through congressional review. On mostly party-line votes, the rule was killed. Other Obama-era regulations still subject to review will no doubt meet the same fate.
But consider: In their first move out of the gate, GOP congressional leaders sided with coal companies that trash mountains and then use draglines and bulldozers to dump tons of waste and debris into streams and creeks. Is this really what Republican voters thought they were getting? The last time we checked, Republicans cared just as much as Democrats about having their water supplies poisoned.
Getting rid of the Stream Protection Act 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 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
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