Green Elephant Line Media Backgrounder

Yes We Can ... Blow the Tops Off Mountains, That Is

June 4, 2009

Last year, partisan environmentalists convinced themselves that electing a Democratic president would mean an end to mountaintop removal (MTR), the destructive coal mining practice that blasts away the tops of mountains, decimating forests, burying rivers, and permanently disfiguring the landscape throughout the central Appalachians. The simplistic reasoning was that Barack Obama, despite his hedging on MTR, is a Democrat and Democrats are inherently good on environmental issues.

Except when they're not, which seems to be the case with mountaintop removal. The Los Angeles Times and the Charleston (WV) Gazette reported that the Obama administration has cleared the way for 42 mining projects, including some two dozen mountaintop removal mines, after hearing pleadings from West Virginia politicians, including Democratic Congressman Nick Rahall, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, and Governor Joe Manchin, also a Democrat.

The administration's action shocked liberal environmentalists. It shouldn't have, but the groups allowed their partisan inclinations and last year's campaign rhetoric to cloud their thinking about what was likely to happen when coal country politicians, R or D, put pressure on the White House, especially with the administration looking to shore up backing from coal state Democrats.

As environmental groups must know by now, the coal industry enjoys bipartisan backing. On June 1, Rahall and eight other House Democrats sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers demanding that the agency get cracking on finalizing some 200 pending coal mining permits.

During last year's presidential campaign, Obama's Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, pledged to ban MTR, while Obama was less resolute in his criticism of the practice. McCain's pledge gained him little traction with most environmental organizations, however.

The lesson for environmental groups is that putting all their political eggs into one basket is likely to result in significant breakage. Aligning the environmental movement with one political party is a strategic error that is bad for the country in general and for the environmental cause in particular. First, it reinforces the unfortunate political polarization of environmental stewardship. Second, it results in one party dismissing environmental advocates and the other taking them for granted.

It is time for the environmental community to shake off its post-inaugural bliss, remove the partisan blinders, and give the Obama administration the criticism it deserves on MTR.

As one sadder but wiser West Virginian wrote on a blog: "I'd suggest we all scrape the Obama stickers off our cars and send them to the White House."