“EPA vetoes water permit for W.Va. mountaintop mine”:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is making good on a 9-month-old threat and revoking a permit for West Virginia’s largest mountaintop removal mine.
The agency said Thursday that Arch Coal’s Spruce No. 1 mine in Logan County would cause irreparable damage to the environment.
The nearly 2,300-acre operation would bury 7 miles of streams. EPA says it would likely hurt downstream water quality.
Arch has argued killing the project would hurt West Virginia’s economy and tax base.
The St. Louis-based coal company has planned to invest $250 million in the project, creating 250 jobs.
The mine was permitted in 2007 but has been delayed by lawsuits.
This is only the 13th time EPA has vetoed a water permit issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Sure. But it’s for the earth, this move. So it’s all good.
As for the loss of jobs? There’s a simple solution: have the out of work miners apply for bureaucratic jobs at the EPA. Win-win!
While tearing the tops off mountains may not be all that aesthetic, neither is being out of work. I would leave what is appropriate in West Virginia to West Virginians.
And it is not like the feds are unanimous in opposing this project? The Corps of Engineers approval hurdle is hardly a minor or insignificant one.
amazing to think this failshit little country won two world wars
Well, they’re energy jobs, so it’s more like job euthanasia.
Can’t get much more civil than that…
They weren’t real jobs; merely potential jobs. But don’t call it job-aborting, ‘cuz that would be even more uncivil, I think.
Wow. I’m torn. I really dislike mountaintop removal, but any other way of getting to that coal is probably just as bad for those streams. Plus, I like cheap electricity and dislike the EPA being used as a tool to enforce anti-carbon bullshit (which is what this is). Plus, I live in a town whose two largest employers are the hospital and the powerplant, and there’s no “environmental” group trying to shut down the hospital (even though it’s shutting down a perfectly good hospital in the middle of downtown to move to a new facility out in the county built on land that has been fallow for decades and when covered with blacktop won’t do much to help out the watershed, not to mention the giant empty, building downtown where a thousand people used to work in three shifts and go to lunch in local restaurants and buy groceries in the downtown supermarket and buy flowers from the local florists and live in the downtown houses. Let’s make all those people drive out to nowhere, and eat at the McDonald’s that they are planning, and buy groceries at the quickie mart/gas station they are planning, and live in the crappy, six room houses that are going to pop up in the new subdivisions they are planning on all the county roads.) like there is trying to put everyone who works at the powerplant out of work. Save the Valley. Save the Valley for what? Old, poor, unemployed people? Because that and a few LPN’s are all that’s going to be left in the fucking valley, assholes.
Oh jeeze. I ranted. Sorry.
They should just say that some endangered bird fell down one of their exploratory bore holes, and that they want to dig the poor thing out and save it. And if they expose a coal seam while they’re at it, well, win-win!
Personally, I like mountaintop removal. Stupid mountain tops block my view.
Plus, you end up with a flat place where you can build something. Very rare in that part of the world.
EPA says it would likely hurt downstream water quality.
Clean water: a commie plot to destroy Western Civilization.
Plus, there’s the issue of the pollution violating the property rights of those who live or have businesses nearby.
Why does AJB hate poor people in West Virginia?
The EPA also says that you exhale pollution, AJB.
— I agree, but not for the reasons they think.
the EPA is corrupt
We might as well go ahead and include the rest of the government for that matter. It’s a big assed ball of nasty.
How on earth did the mine get a permit in the first place, after submitting a full EIA? Seems more than a little odd for a developer to go through the time and expense of the regulatory process, for the project to be killed post hoc. Seems to suggest something is rotten with the planning phase.
AJB eats boogers.
Plus, there’s the issue of the pollution violating the property rights of those who live or have businesses nearby.
Here’s the bright side, for AJB: a year from now, there won’t be anyone living or having business nearby. It’ll be just trees and bunnies as far as the eye can see. None of those nasty, nasty humans who should really just kill themselves and save the planet a lot of trouble.
They would rather have people in Papua New Guinea dying, rather than improving their standard of living. They would rather have people in the Middle East living in horrible 8th-Century fundamentalist theocracies than allow them to live freely. And they would rather West Virginia revert to forest than to let the people their earn a living.
I say we let the Bos-Wash metropolis go without electricity for about 72 hours, and see if these assholes rearrange their priorities after.
Good Ghod. Even addressing the little vermin makes me illiterate.
“Seems to suggest something is rotten with the planning phase.”
Yes. The planning phase includes getting past the EPA. The EPA is a watermelon patch that hates mining in any form, coal most of all.
I think the EPA needs to die and any legitimate authority it had transferred to a committee in the House of Representatives.
They need to be accountable to the voters is what I’m getting at…
We don’t need to *kill* the EPA. We just need to drag it out into the parking lot and remind it, via some serious pummeling and maybe a few loosened teeth, that it isn’t a dictator and that WE decide what it can and cannot regulate.
Carbon Dioxide is NOT a “pollutant”, you asshole.
This is a “You’re Welcome!” from the won to Joe Manchin…And the people of WVa.
Let them eat coal!
There is a reason jobs go overseas.