Back-Door Attack on Mountaintop Removal

If President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is still too terrified of Big Coal to just outlaw MTR, I suppose this is better than nothing.

The number of Appalachian streams buried during surface mining should drop significantly under new guidelines, the nation's top environmental regulator announced Thursday in a move hailed by environmentalists.

The water-quality guidelines probably will limit creation of valley fills, which often bury parts of streams. Coal companies create fills by putting excess rock into valleys and hollows near the area being mined.

Few fills will be able to meet the new standards, Lisa Jackson, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said during a conference call.

"Obviously, we're talking about minimizing or zeroing out valley fills," Jackson said.

Groups opposed to mountaintop mining saw the move as a major victory. Many say federal regulators have not properly enforced water-quality rules on the coal industry for decades.

Read the whole thing.

If Tom Fitzgerald of the Kentucky Resources Council, who has been fighting the strip miners for decades, thinks it's a good idea, then it's OK with us.

But as Fitzgerald know better than anyone, the mountain-strippers have been defying laws and thumbing their nose at government regulations for a century. It's going to take putting corporate CEOs in prison to get them to stop.