Clean Water: A blow against mountain top removal mining
Posted by susanna on 04 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: Coal, Federal Action, Mountaintop Removal, Virginia, climate change, global warming
In what could be a major victory for Virginia’s mountains, the Clean Water Protection Act was introduced in the Senate today with a record 115 co-sponsors. The act would outlaw the act of dumping mining waste into streams, a crucial and destructive step in mountain top removal mining.
607 Virginia students attended Power Shift this weekend, and lobbied their representatives to end the destructive practice of MTR. Many of these students are from areas in Virginia that have been devastated by this practice, which blows the tops off mountains and dumps the waste in the valleys and streams below, just to get at a seam of coal that could be only 4 inches thick. Wise County, where Dominion is planning to build a new coal plant, has already seen ¼ of their land destroyed by MTR.
The Alliance for Appalachia explains the bill:
“The Clean Water Protection Act is the first broad Congressional initiative aimed at reversing the Bush Administration’s eight-year effort to savage our national waterways and the popular laws that protect them,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr said, explaining his support of the bill.
The Clean Water Protection Act was introduced to address a 2002 Bush administration executive rule change that altered the long-standing definition of “fill material” in the Clean Water Act. The new definition permits mining waste to be used to fill streams, allowing companies to blast apart mountains for coal and place the resulting millions of tons of rubble, or “excess spoil” into nearby valleys, creating “valley fills” that cover hundreds of acres of land and bury hundreds of miles of streams.
Read more from the Huffington Post’s Jeff Biggers: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/black-waters-no-more-clea_b_171793.html
To see if your member of Congress has signed on as a co-sponsor, or needs to be prompted, go to: http://www.theallianceforappalachia.org/cwpa-cosponsors/
For more information on today’s events on the floor of Congress, go to www.TheAllianceForAppalachia.org.
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2 Comments »
on 04 Mar 2009 at 9:27 pm 1.iLoveMountains.org » Blog Archive - End Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining -- The Clean Water Protection Act is Back! said …
[...] – Congress takes a step toward regulating coal waste, but what about the EPA? – by Kate Sheppard http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/blog/?p=958 http://www.theallianceforappalachia.org/cwpa-introduced-200/ Support the Clean Water Protection [...]
on 06 Mar 2009 at 7:10 am 2.clean coal act said …
cost effective for businesses to adopt new clean energy technology instead of sticking with old systems that emit more greenhouse gases.