The Obama administration’s dance with mountaintop mining continued this week, as the administration pledged to revise the Bush administration’s policy on protections, or lack thereof, for rivers and streams. Environmentalists are hopeful that the Department of the Interior will set standards that prevent mountaintop mining from destroying waterways. 

Interior's Office of Surface Mining (OSM) will propose a new rule by February 2011, which seems a long way off, and finalize the rule by June 2012. The cynic in me thinks the timing is intended to prevent the proposed rule, which will anger coal states, from being unveiled in 2010 while the Obama administration is pushing for cap-and-trade legislation – legislation that will require the support of a few coal state representatives. But, skepticism aside, spending 11 months developing a proposed rule is not unheard of.

The plan was announced as environmental groups agreed to drop a lawsuit against the December 2008 revision to the stream buffer zone rule. The rule, one of the Bush administration’s midnight regulations, lifted restrictions intended to prevent the dumping of excess rock and debris into streams and rivers. The stream buffer zone rule had existed in a stronger form since the 1980s, prohibiting mining activity within 100 feet of rivers and streams.

Even before Bush’s Interior Department deregulated the disposal of mining waste, mountaintop mining’s impact on water quality was a big problem. According to Earthjustice, “[I]n the decades since the rule was adopted OSM has allowed coal companies to permanently bury thousands of miles of headwater and perennial streams in Appalachia under millions of tons of waste generated by mountaintop removal and other large scale surface coal mining.” OSM’s new strategy will need to include both changes to the rule and stronger enforcement if environmental quality is truly to be preserved.

Photo by Flickr user NRDC media, used under a Creative Commons license.