News
Another Setback for Mountaintop Removal: ‘Overwhelming Majority’ of 43,000 Comments Flooding Into Office of Surface Mining Oppose Stream Buffer Zone Rule Change
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — No fewer than 43,000 Americans spoke out during the public comment period on a U.S. Department of Interior Office of Surface Mining (OSM) proposal to weaken the Stream Buffer Zone (SBZ) rule and unleash more mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining, according to information gathered by 700Mountains.org and the Citizens Lead for Energy Action Now (CLEAN) coalition.
The “overwhelming majority” of the 43,000 comments were opposed to the industry-backed draft rule that would weaken the SBZ rule and pave the way for significantly more MTR-related pollution, including the potential leveling of up to 700 mountains over the next 10 years.
In conversations with a representative of 700Mountains.org, two OSM officials confirmed the total number of comments and the extraordinarily high level of opposition to the SBZ rule proposal.
The strong opposition to OSM’s proposed SBZ rule is consistent with the findings of a September 2007 survey sponsored by 700Mountains.org project of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Civil Society Institute (CSI) think tank. That survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation that two out of three Americans (65 percent) oppose the Bush Administration’s proposed rule “to ease environmental regulations to permit wider use of ‘mountaintop removal’ coal mining in the U.S.” The survey also found that the Bush Administration plan to permit wider MTR coal mining is favored by only about one out of four Americans (26 percent), including just 14 percent of Democrats, 27 percent of Independents, and 42 percent of Republicans. Full survey findings are available online at 700Mountains.org
Under the industry’s proposed SBZ rule change, mining companies would be permitted to dump their waste into streams and other fresh drinking water supplies. The new rule would unleash more MTR coal mining, which buries fresh water streams and creates toxic coal slurry impoundments, while employing many fewer miners than are involved in traditional mining methods. MTR coal mining already has destroyed more than 1,000 miles of fresh water streams and 700 mountains in the U.S. Changing the SBZ rule would result in the destruction of 1,000 more miles of streams and up to 700 additional mountains.
