A federal judge has overturned a controversial 2008 rule that environmental groups say didn’t adequately protect streams from coal mine pollution. But the rule’s intended successor has hit speed bumps in the regulatory process, and the Obama Administration has been accused of inaccurately estimating the economic impact of the rule. The Stream Buffer Zone rule went into effect in 2008, under President George W. Bush. It replaced a Reagan-era rule from 1983. The 1983 rule prohibited surface mining activities within 100 feet of a stream, essentially creating a buffer for mining activity. There were exceptions: if a company could show its mining activities wouldn’t violate state or federal water quality standards, it could get a waiver. But the rule’s replacement—the 2008 rule—gave more exceptions. “It exempted the most destructive surface mining activities entirely from the buffer rule,” said attorney Deborah Murray of the Southern Environmental Law Center. “So, for instance, it exempted valley fills, it exempted coal waste disposal facilities in streams.” The rule has been tied up in litigation for years, and last week, the federal district court in Washington DC invalidated it, reinstalling the 1983 rule. “I think it’s a significant victory for efforts to try to curb the worst excesses of mountaintop mining, surface coal mining generally,” Murray said. “The next step, though, is to try to actually enforce the 1983 rule so it’s not simply a paper exercise.”The switch back to the 1983 rule will have no practical implications for Kentucky. This is one of the states that administers its own mining programs, and regulators here have continued to operate under the 1983 rule, because the 2008 rule has been tied up in litigation from the beginning.But meanwhile, the federal government isn’t yet ready to roll out the stream buffer zone’s eventual successor: the Stream Protection Act. The Office of Surface Mining (OSM) has said it plans to finalize the Stream Protection Rule this year. But in the past three years, the rulemaking process has been dogged by accusations of political interference by Republicans. Some of those accusations were confirmed in an Inspector General’s report released late last year. The report found that once media reports leaked information that 7,000 jobs would be lost under the new rule, OSM directed the Lexington-based consulting firm working on the rule to use a different rubric to calculate the effect the rule would have on coal mining jobs. The end result was a smaller number of jobs lost.
