A while back, I put up a post on Mountaintop Removal Mining, and how it's destroying Appalachia.
Well, today, I got an email from a friend with the following update:
I wanted to give you a heads up that the Clean Water Protection Act was introduced on the House floor today. Reps. Frank Pallone (D-NJ-06), Dave Reichert
(R-WA-08), and John Yarmouth (D-KY-03) introduced the bill this morning
with 117 bi-partisan co-sponsors, more than double the number of
original co-sponsors from the 110th Congress!
The Clean Water Protection Act restores the integrity of the landmark 1977 legislation, The Clean Water Act, which was enacted by Congress to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters." For 25 years, the Clean Water Act (CWA) allowed for the granting of permits to place "fill material" into waters of the United States, provided that the primary purpose of the "filling" was not for waste disposal. As such, the CWA prohibited mountaintop removal operations from using the nation's waterways as waste disposal sites. That changed in 2002, when the Army Corps of Engineers, under the direction of the Bush administration and without congressional approval, altered its longstanding definition of "fill material" to include mining waste. This change, which the CWPA would reverse, accelerated the devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining and the destruction of more than 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams.
The Clean Water Protection Act restores the integrity of the landmark 1977 legislation, The Clean Water Act, which was enacted by Congress to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters." For 25 years, the Clean Water Act (CWA) allowed for the granting of permits to place "fill material" into waters of the United States, provided that the primary purpose of the "filling" was not for waste disposal. As such, the CWA prohibited mountaintop removal operations from using the nation's waterways as waste disposal sites. That changed in 2002, when the Army Corps of Engineers, under the direction of the Bush administration and without congressional approval, altered its longstanding definition of "fill material" to include mining waste. This change, which the CWPA would reverse, accelerated the devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining and the destruction of more than 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams.
This is great news, and a step in the right direction, but we can't take our foot off the gas pedal quite yet. For more details, check out ILoveMountains.org.
The people who agree that coal and oil are bad things, do you really think that they're the same people who would vote for nuclear power.
Posted by: clean coal act | March 06, 2009 at 02:28 AM