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Last week at Interior

A busy week at Interior began with the speculation that Secretary Salazar would resign his post and run for governor of his home state of Colorado. On Thursday, Salazar put an end to this speculation when he announced that he would endorse Denver mayor John Hickenlooper for the governorship. In the meantime, the Department made a couple of controversial decisions on the red hot issue of energy development and its impact on the environment, giving pretty much everyone something to laud and something to malign.

Mountaintop removal coal mining to continue. On Tuesday, the EPA announced a path forward on two infamous coal mining operations in West Virginia, green-lighting the Section 404 Clean Water Act permit approval for the Hobet 45 mountaintop removal mine and requesting additional time to work with operators of the Spruce No. 1 mine – one of the largest proposed mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia – to bring that plan under compliance with the Act.

The Army Corps of Engineers wasted no time after the EPA’s announcement, approving the permit for the Hobet 45 mine on Wednesday. The mine, as originally proposed, would have buried six miles of headwater streams and severely degraded downstream waters that now support healthy streamlife and are used by locals for fishing and swimming. After extensive negotiations with Hobet Mining and the Army Corps of Engineers the EPA says that the mine has been redesigned in a manner that eliminates nearly 50% of stream impacts.

“Our role, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, is to ensure that mining companies avoid environmental degradation and protect water quality so that Appalachian communities don’t have to choose between jobs and their health,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “Working closely with mining companies, our federal and state partners, and the public, our goal is to ensure Americans living in coal country are protected from environmental, health and economic damage.”

There is a strong difference of opinion as to whether the EPA should engage in these negotiations with mining companies at all. Although the process is purportedly aimed at mitigating the impacts of proposed mines, there are many who believe that the Environmental Protection Agency reaching a “meet-in-the-middle” sort of compromise on environmental protection is akin to the police negotiating with a thief to steal only half of your money.

For more information on the Hobet 45 mine, click here.

Oil and gas leasing. Secretary Salazar announced Wednesday that the Interior Department would more closely scrutinize oil and gas leasing on public lands, part of a series of reforms that are popular with conservationists and sportsmen seeking to “bring common sense back to public land management.”

Salazar said that the BLM would no longer be “a handmaiden of industry” as it was under the Bush administration, allowing oil companies to treat public lands like “a candy store, where they could just walk in and take anything they wanted.”

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Last Updated ( Monday, 11 January 2010 )

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