Environmental newsgroups are topped with discussions about the United States’ existing mountaintop removal regulations and how they are inadequate, leading to “pervasive and irreversible” damage to the environment and threatening human health.
As these Usenet newsgroups have explained, mountaintop coal mining, common in the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern part of the nation, is a form of mining where mountains peaks are removed to access the coal seams below. Reports have come through that a team of 12 scientists, hydrologists and engineers conducted the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage done by mountaintop mining. Their finding have since surprised the research team and moved its members to urge the federal government to stop issuing permits for mountaintop mining.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to this growing scientific evidence of the damages: “Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science.” read one quote from a published article in a science journal about the matter. New permits shouldn’t be granted, they argued, “Unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.”

The article “Mountaintop Mining Consequences” appears in the Jan. 8, 2010, edition of “Science”. The internationally recognized group of hydrologists, ecologists, and engineers, on newsgroups, which includes several members of the National Academy of Sciences, says the United States should stop issuing mountaintop mining permits.

Coal is both a blessing and a curse for the United States and the planet. Coal is plentiful–far more plentiful than petroleum, for example–and power plants currently supply about half of the electricity used by the United States. At the same time, burning coal contributes 36.5 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, a greenhouse gas that is partly responsible for global warming, as well as a significant percentage of other pollutants. Despite some of the drawbacks of burning coal, for the time being at least we need coal–although we also need cleaner ways to use it–but we don’t need mountaintop mining.