When Will it Ever End? Coal Mining Challenge for Obama

When it comes to coal mining in the United States, environmentalists have a simple goal: End it. For the Obama administration, it’s a little more complicated. It has restricted coal-mining waste from being dumped into streams and imposed new pollution controls on coal-fired power plants. It admits the twin goals of increased fossil fuel production and reducing US greenhouse gas emissions are necessarily in conflict, at least without a national cap on emissions.  Sierra Club and Wild-Earth Guardians have seven cases challenging federal coal leases in the Powder River Basin, the single largest source of coal mined in the US.

Administration reluctant to close federal lands.

By Juliet Eilperin in Washington Post (26 December 2011):

When it comes to coal mining in the United States, environmentalists have a simple goal: End it. For the Obama administration, it’s a little more complicated.

Since taking office nearly three years ago, the administration has restricted coal-mining waste from being dumped into streams and imposed new pollution controls on coal-fired power plants.

But on the fundamental question of whether the government should halt federal leasing, the answer has been: Not yet.

Instead, the federal government is analyzing the environmental impact of extracting coal from public land, drawing fire from both sides. Environmentalists say such action doesn’t go far enough, while industry officials question why it would pursue this analysis in the absence of a federal law on greenhouse gas emissions.

“On some level, the twin goals of increased fossil fuel production and reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are necessarily in conflict, at least without a national cap on emissions,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a special assistant at the Interior Department during the Clinton administration. “This fundamental contradiction in current U.S. energy policy is playing out on the Keystone oil pipeline, in our public lands policy and throughout the energy economy.”

Interior Deputy Secretary David Hayes said the agency is “committed to evaluating greenhouse gas emissions among the many important factors we analyze when considering whether or not a coal extraction lease sale makes sense for the environment, the economy and America’s energy security.”

Even as Interior has given added scrutiny to
leasing and pushed for the development of renewable energy alternatives, Hayes added, it hasn’t sought to shut down coal production.

“Coal is providing close to half the electricity in the United States, and 40 percent of the coal used in that mix comes from the public land — our land,” he said. “It’s an important part of our energy mix.”

Coal production totaled 1.17 billion short tons in 2008, according to the Energy Information Agency. It declined to 1.074 billion tons in 2009 and last year reached 1.084 billion. It is expected to be roughly 1.08 billion tons in 2011.

Increasingly, both the mining industry and environmentalists have focused on the Powder River Basin, where coal extraction has more than doubled during the past two decades. In 1990, the federal government made the decision to “decertify” the area as a coal production region, which allows coal companies to identify which tracts of land they’d like to lease rather than having the Bureau of Land Management select them.

Sierra Club and Wild-Earth Guardians have seven cases challenging federal coal leases there.

Source: www.mysanantonio.com