“With the election of President Obama, environmentalists had expected to see the end of the "Appalachian apocalypse," their name for exposing coal deposits by blowing the tops off whole mountains.
But in recent weeks, the administration has quietly made a decision to open the way for at least two dozen more mountaintop removals. ... The list included some controversial mountaintop mines. ...
The administration's decision ... sheds on relations between the mining industry and the Obama White House,... environmentalists ... say they feel betrayed...
The issue is politically sensitive because environmentalists were an active force behind Obama's election, and the president's standing is tenuous among Democratic voters in coal states. ... Moreover,... halting mountaintop mining could eliminate jobs and put upward pressure on energy prices in a time of economic hardship.
Coal advocates have solicited help from officials as high up as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. And the issue has sparked contentious debates within the administration, including one shouting match...
Although environmentalists had expected the new administration to put the brakes on mountaintop removal, Rahall and other mining advocates have pointed out that Obama did not promise to end the practice and was more open to it than his Republican opponent, Arizona Sen. John McCain.
A review of Obama's campaign statements show that he had expressed concern about the practice without promising to end it. ... And his EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, has said that the agency ... would "use the best science and follow the letter of the law in ensuring we are protecting our environment." Soon afterward, the agency in effect blocked six major pending mountaintop removal projects...
But this month, after a series of White House meetings with coal companies and advocates..., the EPA released the little-noticed letter giving the green light to at least two dozen projects. ...
Ed Hopkins, a top Sierra Club official, said some of the projects that have now obtained the EPA's blessing "are ... large and potentially destructive..." "It makes us wonder what standards -- if any -- the administration is using," Hopkins said. ...
Environmentalists were stunned to learn from Rahall's office May 15 that the EPA had given its blessing to 42 out of the 48 mine projects it had reviewed so far -- including two dozen mountaintop removals.”
By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, “Obama walks a fine line over mining”, Los Angeles Times (May 31, 2009).
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mountaintop-mining31-2009may31,0,7589633.story
Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten are writers for the Los Angeles Times.
To quote one of the President’s strongest supporters (Ted Rall, writing recently in the State Journal Register of Illinois), who now has a very different view of the President:
“We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.
From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?
Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss”.
It is a truism in life that the act of governance is very different from the act of running for office. When running for office, politicians and their supporters believe in “free lunches” and that it is possible to have something for nothing, and there are only benefits associated with anything they might propose. They advocate all sorts of policies and programs that sound nice before the election but discover they have high costs once they face the prospect of actually implementing them after the election.
Supporters are shocked – SHOCKED!!! – at the dishonesty of politicians even though this “dishonesty”, if it is that, is obvious and never ending. Bad as politicians are, they are not the only problem. A worse problem than the dishonesty of politicians is the naivety of their supporters. More. What is telling, is that supporters always blame the politician rather than the failure of their own judgment to foresee that the policy they advocated had costs to be considered, and that the people who would ultimately bear those costs would be persistent in their opposition to what the candidate proposed to do.
Like all politicians, President Obama has broken some promises. It means little. Because I did not vote for him and object to much of what he wants to do, I hope he breaks many more promises. If he does, I realize it will not be because he wants to break them. It will be because the political system – that is, the costs, both political and economic – won’t let him keep his promises.
The country is broke, the economy is floundering, the deficit is widening, interest rates are rising, the dollar is falling, entitlement costs and state and local bailout expenses are skyrocketing, and now the head of the Fed has told Congress it is time to start reducing the deficit or we will have neither financial stability nor economic growth. We are reaching the end of the road on not only on Obama’s policy approach to the immediate crisis but his ambitious goals for expanding government-financed social services over the long-run. The only question is whether the Administration will recognize the dead end before them or they will lead the country into a far deeper crisis.
The constraints on the President’s aspirations for health care, energy independence, educational expansion and so much else have always been there and are not going away. I expect when all is said and done he will be a very disappointed President, and for reasons far more important than the removal of a mountaintop. His unthinking supporters, who never consider the difficulties involved in governance, will of course blame him. That is too bad, but it comes with the job.
I, on the other hand, will be very relieved and will praise the system for having constrained all the ill-thought out ideas this Administration has proposed, and I will celebrate that it prevented the worst of them from being implemented.
A Tdj by Doug Walker.
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