originally published @ treehugger,
by Daniel Kessler
Photo via planetsave.com
Enemy Number 1 for the Sierra Club is coal. In recent years, they have successfully stopped dozens of new coal plants from being built and now they have set their sights set on mountaintop removal, the devastating mining technique that blows up mountains and destroys communities.
The Obama administration recently made some news on MTR. On Daily Kos, the Sierra Club’s coal crusading Bruce Nilles says:
After a West Virginia court ruled against it recently, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers today proposed revoking the nationwide “one-size-fits-all” permit it had used to authorize the dumping of coal mining waste into hundreds of miles of Appalachian headwater streams. The bad news, though, is that the Obama administration says it will continue to allow mountaintop removal mining to bury streams under tons of mining waste.There is too much at stake in Appalachia for the administration to only go this far. Without a significant change in policy, mining companies will continue to destroy our mountains and bury our streams on the Obama administration’s watch. If the Obama Administration fully enforced the Clean Water Act, which would prohibit filling streams with mining waste, and closed regulatory loopholes created by the Bush administration, mountaintop removal coal mining would become nearly impossible.
The coal industry continues to find ways to pollute and use its influence to strong-arm its way around environmental regulations. They are more interested in profits than people, and in setting up roadblocks to progress on clean energy. We must all work together to clean up the coal industry.
