Poet, I am fine. The BR action is a little strange, I'm happy to snipe from time to time but when the metaphysical theologians of the righteous right get fired up, I tend to fade out. Once the RR content hits the 80% level, I just look at the subject page.
Anyway, elsewhere on the legal front, environmental division this time, there was this interesting but disturbing story today:
Panel Overturns Ruling Against Strip Mining nytimes.com
The panel, in a ruling issued on Tuesday, rejected the 1999 decision by a federal
district judge in West Virginia, Charles H. Haden II, to curtail "mountaintop
removal" severely. This is the decapitation of coal-rich hills with explosives and the
discarding of slag into surrounding hollows by mammoth bulldozers.
"If there is any life form that cannot acclimate to life deep in a rubble pile, it is
eliminated," Judge Haden ruled in siding with state residents who were alarmed at
the blockage and disappearance of Appalachian streams by large-scale backwoods
dumping. "No effect on related environmental values is more adverse than
obliteration."
But the appeals panel ruled that the citizens' complaints had no federal standing. It
held that federal oversight of the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act
ended as soon as West Virginia set up its own enforcement program under the act's
provisions. The act allows either state or federal regulation of surface coal mining
"but not both," Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote in the decision, holding that
complaints about abuses could be heard only in state courts.
Environmentalist groups here and in West Virginia immediately conferred on plans to
challenge the decision. They said the ruling reversed guidelines of state-federal
cooperation and invoked state primacy in a way never approved by Congress.
"The mining industry has effectively won in court what it lost in Congress in 1977,"
said Jim Hecker of Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, a lawyer in the suit brought by
state residents and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.
Mr. Hecker said the decision ignored that Congress, in writing the act, specifically
rejected the jurisdictional dichotomy posed by the appeals panel and invited citizens'
appeals to the federal government about state failures in enforcement.
Mr. Hecker said the Clinton administration's legal authorities had endorsed
continuing federal oversight of state enforcement.
"The appeal will be a crucial test of where the Bush administration is on whole issue
of cooperative federalism, the bedrock philosophy under many environmental
statutes," he said.
You got to wonder how W's going to come down on this. Not. It's all sort of odd, since the utilities don't seem to much want to use coal anymore anyway. On a pure environmental bases, coal is a disaster all around, of course. Too bad about nuclear, which is actually the best option environmentally. The odds are remote on any revival there, though. Background article from a few days ago: nytimes.com |
