The Obama administration’s own experts estimate their proposal for protecting streams from coal mining would eliminate thousands of jobs and slash production across much of the country, according to a government document obtained by The Associated Press.
The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement document says the agency’s preferred rules would impose standards for water quality and restrictions on mining methods that would affect the quality or quantity of streams near coal mines. The rules are supposed to replace Bush-era regulations that set up buffer zones around streams and were aimed chiefly at mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia.
The proposal — part of a draft environmental impact statement — would affect coal mines from Louisiana to Alaska.
The office, a branch of the Interior Department, estimated that the protections would trim coal production to the point that an estimated 7,000 of the nation’s 80,600 coal mining jobs would be lost. Production would decrease or stay flat in 22 states, but climb 15 percent in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.
Peter Mail, a spokesman for the surface mining reclamation office, said the proposal’s aim is “to better strike the balance between protecting the public and the environment while providing for viable coal mining.”
Framed that way, I bet a lot of people are going to come away screaming about job-wrecking regulations. Why isn’t the real story that in America, there are thousands of people earning money poisoning your water? Because that’s what I took away from that piece- there are companies out there making big money dumping poison into streams and rivers. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that kind of pisses me off.
Pangloss
Who needs potable water when we have plenty of that sweet, precious coal?
dollared
John Cole, you just want to preserve West Virginia as a tourist attraction so that East Coast intelechual elites can come and look at the mountains and the quaint locals!
Jeff Spender
John, the simple answer is because Obama isn’t the one poisoning the water. This article is framed to make the question of responsibility fall solely on Obama’s feet.
“Oh, my! He’s going to cut jobs in this horrible economy! THAT MONSTER!”
There are several reasons for this, most of which are obvious. I just don’t believe that people really care about drinking water because, at least for now, in this country it is mostly a given. If people suddenly started puking blood because their drinking water was contaminated, they’d wake up.
And start bitchin’ that it’s Obama’s fault for letting it happen.
“Oh, my! He let the evil mining companies poison our water! THAT MONSTER!”
ruemara
The Free Market purifies.
AdamK
What about forming companies to clean up the water, and hiring 7000 people to help?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I’m assuming that your question is rhetorical since this is an AP article.
Maybe we should start talking about how ending abortions would take doctors’ jobs away. And those newborns are just coming out take take your job as well.
PhoenixRising
What about hiring thousands of WV and KY youth who would otherwise be cooking meth under the trailer to restore watersheds? Or is that too New Deal-y?
ETA: I may be slow, but I get there.
hells littlest angel
Yes, how can we compete in the world economy without plenty of good jobs in coal mining? Soon our spats factories and whale-oil refineries will be shuttering their windows.
aimai
@AdamK:
Go Adam K. And what about framing the decision in terms of “man hours lost to illness” or “deaths due to poisoned water?”
aimai
Apathy
Obama’s own analysts show that outlawing mugging people in the streets will cost America nearly two million mugging jobs over the next six years…
cleek
fuck WV’s water. if those people are so thirsty, they can import their water from Fiji, like the rest of us.
hrprogressive
If American companies can’t have the intrinsic right to destroy the way of life or harm the lives of others in the name of profit, we will stop being America, damn it.
Linnaeus
Yeah, you should be pissed off about companies making money off of poisoning water by design.
I can understand, though, why this would make some people nervous, particularly in our current economic environment, and even more so in a poverty-stricken part of our country. When you hear that one of the few paths to a job could be narrowed of blocked even further, you get a little nervous. Especially in our new age of austerity.
ppcli
All those Mafia prosecutions that were just initiated? The administration knew full well that they were eliminating dozens, maybe even hundreds of middle-class jobs. Jobs with good pay, and you don’t even need a college degree. With a recession on.
Doesn’t he know that the Soviet Union fell because it cracked down on the Odessa mob?
merrinc
Well, it should piss you off, Cole. Coal barons have been raping the land and the people of West Virginia for a couple of centuries now. How can anyone look at this and not be completely outraged? How can anyone not understand that literally blowing the top of a fucking mountain and dumping it in the streams below is not a good thing?
grandpajohn
Silly boy , they framed it the way they did because llllthey are instructed to always slant stories to make Obama and the Dems look bad, Just like it has been for the last 20 years.
PTirebiter
My first thought was, oh God, here it comes. You make an important point about framing. Seems like we’re always on the defensive right out of the gate.
O.T. My first thought after reading you’re Ted Haggard post was,I can’t believe this guy was ever a Republican. It’s getting easier to forget there was a time when the GOP was a positive and needed force in the country.
Nick
Because Americans are selfish and don’t care who they kill to make a buck, duh.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Pangloss:
It takes energy to purify water.
Energy supplied by America’s energy companies.
Without coal, we would not have any clean water to drink for lack of the energy to clean it.
Liberal Fascists want to make ordinary hard-working Americans drink dirty water in order to keep Algore fat.
sukabi
some one should ask the assholes whining about the loss of 7K jobs for environmental protection reasons, why the mining industry hasn’t developed methods of mining that doesn’t rely on dumping poison into our waterways, and then ask them if by doing some R&D if they couldn’t find a way to employ those that would loose their jobs under these regulations doing cleanup work at their existing mining sites…
then they should ask how much coal will be mined in the future and what the profit margin will be if WE’RE ALL DEAD from drinking poisoned water.
Assholes.
Svensker
Do you drive a car? Have heat and/or air conditioning? Does the energy you use everyday have no downside? There’s always a tradeoff, but where do you draw the line between the pollution you will accept for comfort and jobs and that which you won’t accept?
Tom Q
The many people who are, from a distance, outraged over the poisoning of the water will cast votes in future elections based on a multitude of issues, this very likely not being one of them.
The limited number of people who will directly lose jobs over this (or will at least claim they did) will vote Republican on this specific issue.
And this is why so many things stay shitty in America despite general consensus they should change.
batemapa
@Jeff Spender:
I don’t know about specifically puking up blood, but seriously major health issues are already prevelant in the towns and regions where coal mining occurs.
There is a town called Prenter Hollow where 5 or 6 people have been diagnosed with 1 in 100,000 brain tumors, that all live on the same 50 yard stretch of the same street. All cancer rates in some of these towns are off the charts. Young girls get their periods and have them constantly, all year round.
Look up pictures of Marsh Fork Elementary School. It is located directly underneath a coal processing plant AND a coal sludge dam. I’ve been there, and it is the strangest, most infuriating place i’ve ever been to. I rubbed my hand on the grass field where the kids play for recess, and my hand was covered in coal dust.
Not to mention blowing up of mountains (which has killed innocent locals), and the militaristic tactics of the coal companies to make sure the local people stay in line with them.
Sorry to rant, but this is one of those things i’ve seen first hand, and it feels like no one is paying attention. Truly an American tragedy that’s happening before our eyes.
Conservative Scholar
I believe in personal responsibility, as in persons, not corporations are responsible for things. If you don’t want to drink polluted groundwater, you should have had the foresight and personal responsibility to move into a home where ten years later a mining operation wouldn’t open up and dump toxic chemicals onto your property.
Kryptik
Honestly, 7k jobs overall in order to have cleaner water?
My apologies for sounding callous, but while 7k is a fairly big number, it’s a drop in the bucket in the overall economy, and considering how many people are affected by dirty water…fuck ’em. Those are jobs that should be shucked if it’s deciding between that and actual clean water.
KG
Don’t worry, once Senator Paul’s budget becomes law, the 78% cut to the Interior Department will make it pretty much impossible to enforce any regulations
KG
@Kryptik: for the industry as a whole, though, with only 80,000-some jobs, 7,000 is a pretty big hit, nearly 10%
batemapa
@batemapa:
Sorry meant to type “500”, not “50”
sukabi
@Kryptik: that’s the thing… it isn’t an “either or” problem… those 7K jobs lost to regiggering EPA rules could be offset with jobs in waterway reclamation, or in R&D to figure out how to extract coal & minerals without dumping poisons in the waterways… they don’t do it because it cuts into their profit margins…
fouro
“….the agency’s preferred rules would impose standards for water quality and restrictions on mining methods that would affect the quality or quantity of streams near coal mines.”
“affect”? As in, improve? Who the fuck writes like that when they’re trying to convey usable information? The canapes at Massey press conferences musty be really good.
Zifnab
@AdamK:
Because that would raise the price of coal, by cutting into state mandated and nationally required sweet, sweet coal company profits. You can’t just require people to clean up their own toxic filth. You need to let the free market charge people for bottled water from Fiji. Only imported foreign water can meet our domestic potability needs. Also, it gives us a great reason to bomb Fiji.
dave
Even in a shitty labor market, some jobs should be regulated out of existence. You know what other regulation was a job killer?
Child labor laws.
SiubhanDuinne
@batemapa: @batemapa:
Toxic water broke your calculator.
Nick
@Tom Q:
which also explains how the good people of Louisiana, even with oil soaking their shorelines, threw a hissy fit when Obama stopped drilling temporarily.
Linnaeus
@dave:
Sure, if the overall social gains warrant it. Child labor is an obvious example of that. I would say that this also applies in this case as well. But I can understand someone in the region affected wondering if anything will be done to offset the job losses.
PeakVT
estimated that the protections would trim coal production to the point that an estimated 7,000 of the nation’s 80,600 coal mining jobs would be lost.
What about all the jobs treating people sickened by coal mining? Gotta protect those people, too. Also.
Somewhat related: James Hansen dropped a bombshell paper a few days ago.
ETA: Cleek for the win.
Zifnab
@Svensker:
If only there was some fairly inexpensive, renewable, omni-prevalent energy source that could fulfill the vast majority of our energy needs for the foreseeable future. But such an energy source is as ephemeral as the wind and as distant as the sun.
*sigh*
Redshift
@PTirebiter:
When was that? Certainly not in Ted Haggard’s adult lifetime.
Maude
@dave:
Apple found a way around that.
Zifnab
@Nick:
I’ve read about plenty of fishermen and beach-front restaurant owners and local property owners who were thrilled to see any kind of action taken to address the mess and prevent it in the future. Of course, I got my news from the Guardian and Mother Jones and the BBC, rather than the NYTimes, the WaPo, and the Politico.
Zifnab
@Maude: And China’s unemployment numbers dropped accordingly.
RobertB
I get to visit the in-laws in Morgantown, and my take on it is that Coal is still King in WV. John probably remembers the Dunkard Creek fish kill last year, courtesy of Consol. Nobody on my wife’s side of the family seemed particularly surprised or upset.
basement cat
I am a lurker, not sure if I have ever commented before, but my family’s roots are in Prenter Hollow and the surrounding area. I still have lots of family members there. It’s so depressing that it’s become an enviro-catastrophe cautionary tale. I think the last time I was back there was for a funeral for someone who died in the prime of life of a rare type of cancer and we heard all about how bad the water is.
Cris
One of our national weirdnesses is our refusal to acknowledge long-term consequences (which is probably a characteristic of all humans). If drinking the water doesn’t make you drop dead on the spot, it’s not really poisonous, is it?
Comrade Dread
@sukabi: “That’s Future Homer’s problem. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”
Mnemosyne
@Linnaeus:
Particularly since the coal companies are going to be whipping people into a frenzy and telling them that the only reason the government is doing this is to kill their jobs. And the media will help the coal companies do that all the way to the end.
Linnaeus
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, exactly. There needs to be some way to counter that message.
Nick
@Zifnab:
Did pollster make up the numbers too?
http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2010/06/fallout-from-spill.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37116587/ns/politics-more_politics/
http://www.examiner.com/political-spin-in-national/poll-bp-oil-spill-disaster-changes-few-minds-on-offshore-oil-drilling-louisiana#ixzz1CGPi3GZL
The Moar You Know
My dying from a cancer contracted from Galtian-flavored water is not nearly so important as the maintenance – nay, the never-ending increase – of Massey’s profit margin.
Svensker
@Zifnab:
Well, yes, but we don’t have that now, do we? How are we going to get there? What’s the best way? And what trade offs do we make along the way to getting there? What communities might be completely destroyed by a change in how energy is produced? (Hint: it won’t be rich folks living in cities.) What jobs will be lost, where, and how will that be offset by new jobs?
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be upset by the side effects of the way we live and try to mitigate those effects. But I am saying that pointing at other folks and saying “ew, those damn other people who pollute,” while living a normal, carbon-heavy life, might make us feel good about our own purity of intention, but doesn’t solve any of the problems we have.
Anne Laurie
Cole, you forgot the C.R.E.A.M. tag. ‘Cuz it’s Cash Rules the media members who ordered/wrote/published this Orwellian swill, and it’s (much less, but more essential) Cash Rules the poor bustards who’ll be lined up to protest this unAmerkun attempt by Obama to ‘turk thur jerbs’…
sukabi
@Svensker: I think the gist of his comment, although shining on your head, blew right past your ears…
he’s talking about solar and wind energies… which are clean, renewable and are being implemented across the world by countries with smaller budgets than we have… and all because they HAVE THE WILL AND FORESIGHT to do something other than the same thing they’ve done for the last 150 years…
and adding, that no one is talking about immediately ceasing mining, but changing the methods and requiring companies to clean up their messes… while at the same time moving to actually do the clean energy in a meaningful way
catclub
@PTirebiter: “A time when the GOP was a positive and needed force in the country. ”
1911?
WhyKnot241
As a 6th or 7th generation (not sure about what part of the old Monongalia county etc.) hillbilly my experience has been that most Mountaineers care more about jobs than their health or the environment. It’s why an uncle kept going into the mine even when he knew it was killing him (black lung). The culture of WV is steeped in people who never had anything when they emigrated from England, Scotland, and Ireland. And basically had nothing for the next 200 years. If the knuckleheads in the OSM would at least ‘think’ to say something like “…and we are looking at wind energy to help replace jobs lost to coal…” blah, blah, blah. Jeebus, it’s like an episode of Dumb (econ-dependent wv’ers) and Dumber (scat for brains DOI), except throw in the media and it’s dumb, dumber, and dumbest.
Ruckus
@Zifnab:
Wind and sunlight are pretty hard to own, which is probably one reason there is so much gnashing of teeth over their place in the energy stream. And a major reason why they both flourish in places that have more logical thought processes than IGMFU.
catclub
@Nick: I bet you could get Louisianians to oppose offshore drilling if you told them that 90% of the fees and taxes paid to the US to drill offshore are sent to New Yorkers and Californians. It is technically a lie, but true in principle. (It is also true that 95% of the FEMA money spent to rebuild after Katrina came from New Yorkers and Californians – ask me how much gratitude they have shown.)
burnspbesq
@batemapa:
There is a really moving video around somewhere (I think I saw it on YouTube) where Kathy Mattea (a West Virginian) loses it when she sees the impact of mountaintop-removal coal mining from the air. Trust me, there are a lot of folks outside WV who get this.
Coal mining is and always has been a dirty and dangerous business. The problem continues to be that burning coal continues to be the cheapest way to generate electricity. There’s a line-drawing exercise here. I am personally willing to pay more for electricity if that’s what it takes in order for coal mining companies to become responsible on safety and environmental issues, but there’s no “charge me more” box on my SCE bill that I can check.
Which goes to the larger issue. Real democracies with functioning markets would do better than the current piss-poor job that our crony-capitalist system does of making creators of negative externalities take care of the shit they create. But there’s no obvious path to get there.
The Raven
We’ll make a green out of you yet, monkey boy.
Croak!
khead
Good question. I believe that wherever it is drawn, many of the southern WV counties will end up on the shit side of the tradeoff – esp when it comes to the environment.
Also, see last week in WV wingnuttery here for more on EPA challenge.
Svensker
@sukabi:
Obviously. No need to be snide. But my question still remains, how do we get there? I’m not being antagonistic, I’m being serious.
Gus
Can’t see talk about this topic without thinking of this
PTirebiter
@Redshift: @catclub: Specifically, I was thinking post war until around ’68. I wasn’t implying I’ve ever preferred the GOP, I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I do believe in the value of principled opposition. Republicans haven’t always had a stranglehold on terminal dumbass, Viet Nam comes to mind.
Comrade Dread
@catclub: Yeah, the era of Teddy Roosevelt sounds about right.
I’ve been really hoping for zombie Teddy to crawl out of his grave and kick some serious ass.
PhoenixRising
@Svensker: How do we get there.
Step 1: tell people the truth. The question of whether global warming is real or human caused is a distraction. The shell w the pea under it is actually the limited supply of coal that we’re burning faster than dinosaurs are currently dying. Our kids need renewable source power.
Step 2: invest in moonshot level funded engineering contests where the reward is seed money for the green energy production business.
Step 3: pay for step two by making extractive industries compensate the states for lost future value of their natural resources.
Step 4: also fund training in ecotourism, like they do in places like thailand. Your USAID dollars are being spent teaching Cambodians how to make money off tourists by showing them the sights that have been demined. Coal mining is a job in places where you can’t eat the view, so teach those who live there to feed their kids with the view.
It’s simple, but not easy.
Arclite
The Free Market has already solved this problem. It’s called a reverse osmosis water filter. People can just buy one if they want to drink clean water. There’s no need for clean stream water. Unless you’re a liberal commie bunnie hugger.
Nick
@catclub: :
For every gallon of oil drilled, one gay couple gets married.
BOOM!
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Svensker: There is no way to get there from here without destroying a lot of jobs. It will create other jobs, probably more numerously, but it will kill a bunch. That’s always the way change works. There are things to do to try to minimize that impact, but it won’t eliminate it.
So, on a certain level, I don’t blame the West Virginians for resisting change. It will wreck their way of life. But we also can’t let that prevent us from making the changes anyway. Even if we can’t get the mitigating factors passed, things have to change when it comes to energy production. There are any number of ways that we can do it, including regulation and some form of carbon pricing.
Liberals shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that a lot of the things we want *will* have costs that are borne disproportionately. Pretending that there is some way to get them in any other way is a fantasy. Again, we can mitigate, but we can’t prevent. Whenever bloggers mention that previous rounds of regulation did not cause a loss of jobs despite industry protestations, they mean a net loss of jobs. They hurt certain parties substantially, and not just the ones that were the villains.
This also demonstrates the dysfunction of the American political system. It’s dependent upon weak party discipline, such that legislators from all of the locales that will benefit from the changes will vote for the changes regardless of party. With one party maintaining tight discipline this doesn’t happen. It doesn’t even work all that well if both parties maintain discipline, given that power is split between Congress and the Executive.
Svensker
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
What you said.
West of the Cascades
One thing that strikes me is that we live in a single country where there are no barriers to internal migration … and hence that if production of coal is going to go up in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana as a result of those states having coal that is more accessible with fewer environmental impacts, then part of the solution (if you want to preserve jobs in the coal industry) is to pass a law providing (1) resettlement benefits for workers whose jobs are eliminated by these regulations and (2) incentives for companies in relatively-less-impact-production states to hire displaced coal workers from WV and other states where coal mining really sucks for the environment the way it’s done now.
This means uprooting some communities that have been based on coal in Appalachia – which is harsh – but as an alternative to mountaintop removal mining, it seems like a fair tradeoff for the folks that stay behind when the moving trucks leave for the new coal fields of the Rockies …
mclaren
More to the point, America shouldn’t have 86,000 jobs that depend on coal mining. Global warming, folks. Coal is going away. We’re roasting the goddamn planet. We simply cannot continue burning coal. It’s not feasible. It just won’t work.
So the big takeaway from this news item is that we really seriously need to shift those 86,000 jobs into some sustainable green industry. And we need to do it pronto. ‘Cause this summer downtown L.A. hit 114 degrees F, and that’s a new record, and there will very soon come a point at which coal just goes away.