GOP Set to Scrap Rule Protecting Coal Country Using Quick and Dirty Process in House Floor Vote Next Week
Washington, D.C. – House Republicans are expected to vote next week to eliminate the Department of the Interior’s Stream Protection Rule (SPR), which protects public health and the environment from the worst impacts of coal mining. As National Public Radio covered in a segment this morning, opposition to the move is widespread and extends to a fourth-generation West Virginia coal miner whose wife suffered severe asthma from coal dust exposure.
The piece notes that the miner, Chuck Nelson, began to support stronger environmental standards after the unnamed coal company in his town “ignored him” when he presented his concerns. Nelson laments that after years spent advocating for the protection of Appalachian communities like his, his work will be wiped out “with the stroke of a pen.”
Next week’s expected vote to eliminate the SPR – developed over the course of seven years that saw more than 30 public and stakeholder meetings and produced 114,000 public comments – will come after just one hour of floor debate likely to take place Wednesday. The rule updates 30-year-old coal mining regulations and, among other measures, prohibits a practice known as mountaintop removal mining (MTR) if streams or rivers would be permanently destroyed, as they often are when mountain waste and rubble are dumped into nearby water sources.
The rule is especially important to protect public health. From 2000 to 2003, birth defects in MTR mining counties were 42 percent higher compared to non-MTR Appalachian counties, according to a landmark study published in 2011 in the journal Environmental Research.
“Republicans’ corporate favoritism is going to sicken and kill the very people Donald Trump falsely promised to help,” said Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz). “They know wiping out this rule after a single hour of debate is indefensible, so they’re not even trying to defend it. Unless they cover the health costs of every American who stands to be hurt by this rollback, they will have American lives on their conscience.”
As Grijalva pointed out in a Nov. 18, 2015, New York Times op-ed, deregulating the coal industry will not save it from broader economic trends. “Coal companies are struggling largely because domestic coal is not economically competitive with the country’s cheap and abundant natural gas,” Grijalva wrote. “That would be true no matter who was president or what climate quality standards we had in place.”
The Republican majority on the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the rule’s enforcement, investigated the development of the SPR for four years, a process that included 12 hearings, the issuance of two subpoenas, and the collection of more than 25 hours of audio recordings and 13,500 pages of documents. That investigation, conducted at taxpayer expense, turned up no political interference, and Republicans have refused to hold a single hearing on the issue since the proposed SPR was released in July 2015.
A May 15, 2015, Washington Post piece headlined “If You Don’t Like the Answer, Question the Science” referred to Republican talking points on coal as “motivated skepticism,” particularly calling out Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) for his refusal to concede the validity of peer reviewed research on coal’s health impacts in Appalachia and his decision to personally insult the integrity of a study author who appeared as a hearing witness.
The SPR was finalized Dec. 20, 2016, putting it within the legal window to be overturned using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a law that allows Congress and the president to overturn federal agency rules within 60 congressional days of their finalization. While the law has seldom been used in the past, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have made clear their intention to use it to overturn major Obama-era standards regardless of the public cost.
Congressional Republicans and the coal industry have used inflated figures to overstate the SPR’s economic impact. The National Mining Association, in a widely rebuked study, suggested in 2015 that the rule could lead to the loss of as many as 78,000 coal mining jobs – even though there are currently less than 53,800 coal mining jobs nationwide. That figure is far fewer than the more than 200,000 Americans employed in the solar power industry alone.
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