A federal appeals court ruling Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to rescind a dumping permit three years after it was granted by the Army Corps of Engineers drew cheers from environmentalists.
The decision reverses a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed Mingo Logan Coal Co. to proceed with plans for one of the nation’s largest mountaintop mines in southern West Virginia. Mingo Logan is a subsidiary of Arch Coal, the second largest producer of fossil fuel in the country.
But the case is far from over. The decision, written by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, returns the case to District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson. When Jackson sided with Arch Coal last year, she ruled on the company’s argument that the EPA lacked authority to rescind the permit but she must now rule on its contention that the agency was “arbitrary and capricious” in its arguments. Continue reading EPA’s Victory Moves Clean Water Act Fight Back to District Court
Mountain Laurel Complex in W.V. image from Google Earth
A standing-room only crowd packed a federal appeals courtroom in D.C. Thursday morning to hear arguments over whether the Environmental Protection Agency may rescind a dumping permit after it has been granted by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The high-profile case is being closely monitored by industry and the environmental community. The Chamber of Commerce, 34 industry trade groups and seven environmental organizations have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case. Mingo Logan Coal Co., a subsidiary of Arch Coal, the nation’s second largest producer of the fossil fuel, is represented by four lawyers from Hunton & Williams, a powerful law and lobby firm.
At issue is the proposed Spruce No. 1 mine in Logan County, West Va., which would be one of the largest mountaintop mining sites in the country. The EPA says in its brief to the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia that the project would disturb 3.5 square miles of earth and spew nearly 3 billion cubic feet of dirt and rubble into seven miles of mountain streams. Continue reading EPA Fights to Stop Large Mountaintop Coal Mine
On DCBureau are a story and timeline about the history of the Clean Water Act and the efforts to undermine it. Together they show an incremental, well-funded, organized campaign to weaken the law. On the 40th Anniversary of the Act, it is important to remember that environmental laws enjoyed bipartisan support for years. Weakening environmental regulations through the Congress and courts will have lasting, irreversible results.
Read in The New York Times about Russell E. Train, a Republican who spent a lifetime protecting the environment:
Virginia Albrecht (explore the Clean Water Timeline), dressed in a black double knit pantsuit and wearing small gold earrings, makes her way to the dais at the front of a large room in the law offices of Hunton & Williams, where she works. She is one of the last to arrive and has missed most of the small talk but waves to half a dozen colleagues as she crosses the front of the room, where she will lecture on the complexities of getting permits for building and other industry projects under the Clean Water Act.
Before the conference begins, Albrecht, 69, leans into the woman next to her as though she is consoling her. Fifteen minutes later, “Ginna,” as her friends call her, seems surprised when she is called on to talk, as though she does not think it is her turn yet. But she breezes through her lecture, in a plainspoken, this-really-isn’t-as-complicated-as-it-seems manner. Continue reading Virginia Albrecht: Undermining the Clean Water Act – Drop by Drop
A recent TEEB for Business report estimated that the world’s 100 largest corporations do $7.3 trillion in damages each year to the global environment. These “externalized” costs are not borne by the business itself, but by society as a whole. Changing the way that corporations do business is critical to solving global environmental crises such as climate change. In the book Corporation 2020, Pavan Sukhdev presents a vision of how » read more
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On DCBureau are a story and timeline about the history of the Clean Water Act and the efforts to undermine it. Together they show an incremental, well-funded, organized campaign to weaken the law. On the 40th Anniversary of the Act, it is important to remember that environmental laws enjoyed bipartisan support for years. Weakening environmental regulations through the Congress and courts will have lasting, irreversible results.
Read in The New York » read more
A new web documentary quotes security experts as saying the Savannah River Site, where massive amounts of weapons-grade plutonium and other dangerous substances are stored, is vulnerable to a terrorist attack that could have dire consequences for the entire southeastern United States. The documentary reveals the Site is guarded by a foreign-owned firm with a checkered security record. The radioactive material is stored in aging buildings. The small private guard force » read more
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