The Washington Post’s final piece of its series of Bush’s regulatory changes is just as important as the previous items and really is a must-read. Today’s article highlights how much damage the administration can do just by changing a single word (and its meaning) in federal regulations.
“Mountaintop removal” in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky is a controversial environmental disaster that had been curtailed by the Clinton administration. The coal industry was destroying mountain peaks across the region, dumping thousand of tons of debris into valleys and hundreds of miles of streams. Clinton’s EPA and Interior Department, coupled by several lawsuits from affected families, had largely stopped the practice, much to the industry’s chagrin.
And then Bush got elected.
Today, mountaintop removal is booming again, and the practice of dumping mining debris into streambeds is explicitly protected, thanks to a small wording change to federal environmental regulations. U.S. officials simply reclassified the debris from objectionable “waste” to legally acceptable “fill.”
The “fill rule,” as the May 2002 rule change is now known, is a case study of how the Bush administration has attempted to reshape environmental policy in the face of fierce opposition from environmentalists, citizens groups and political opponents. Rather than proposing broad changes or drafting new legislation, administration officials often have taken existing regulations and made subtle tweaks that carry large consequences.
It’s not, of course, just the coal industry that benefits from the Bush administration’s destructive regulatory policies.
Sometimes the change hinges on a single critical phrase or definition. For example, when the Environmental Protection Agency announced proposals last year to control mercury emissions, it also moved to downgrade the “hazardous” classification of mercury pollution from power plants — a seemingly minor change that effectively gave utilities 15 more years to implement the most costly controls. Earlier this year, the Energy Department helped insert wording into a Senate bill to reclassify millions of gallons of “high-level” radioactive waste as “incidental,” a change that would spare the government the expense of removing and treating the waste.
Bush changes one word, cuts enforcement, and eliminates investigators. The results are disastrous. In West Virginia, I should note, Bush’s policies on mountaintop removal aren’t exactly popular with families in the affected areas.
Testifying at an Interior Department hearing on the proposal, Mary Miller of Sylvester, W.Va., said the value of her home had dropped from $144,000 to below $12,000. Residents in her coalfield town won economic damages last month suing a mining company over coal dust covering their homes, vehicles and other property.
“I’m out here now trying to save my home,” said Miller. “I don’t have much left anyway. I don’t have many years left. But I’m thinking about the water shortage for my children.”
The department in January proposed easing a 1983 rule that set limits on coal mining near streams. Current policy says land within 100 feet of a stream cannot be disturbed by mining unless a company can prove it will not affect the water’s quality and quantity.
The new rule would require coal operators to minimize only “to the extent possible” any damage to streams, fish and wildlife by “using the best technology currently available.”
Of course, the corporate polluters, who reap a windfall from the regulatory “assistance,” turn around and share some of their ill-gotten gains with Bush in the form of campaign contributions. Bush uses the money to buy ads that portray him as a champion of American families who’ll stand up to “special interests.” And so goes another campaign cycle…
Just 77 days until the election.