Demise of stream rule won’t revitalize coal industry.
But the demise of the rule, which took regulators years to craft, drew a less impassioned reaction from a scientist on the front lines of the fight over coal mining. The regulation, which had been weakened during the rulemaking process, “was not a game changer,” says aquatic ecologist Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland in College Park, who has played a high-profile role in documenting coal mining’s toll on streams in the Appalachian Mountains. In particular, she says, if the rule had survived, it would not have barred one of the most destructive mining practices in Appalachia: blasting away mountaintops to uncover coal seams and piling the debris in adjacent stream valleys. And because the rule’s demise won’t do much to ease the economic headwinds buffeting the United States’s coalfields, it is unlikely to unleash a mining boom.
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Meanwhile, the U.S. coal industry continues to face economic difficulties largely caused by low-cost natural gas. Coal jobs fell by 18,000 between 2012 and 2015, to 69,500, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And production has fallen by 38% since 2008, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA). This month, EIA predicted a slight uptick in production by 2018, but it expects production to keep sliding in Appalachia because operations there are more costly than, for example, in the open-pit mines of the West. As Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School in South Royalton, puts it, “we’re pretty much done with coal mining in Appalachia.”