[Old School]

Again you keep spitting out the same BS, I dont like MTR, I am totally against ILLEGAL valley fills, I am not against all mining.

a lot of people from the pro-mtr side, and the "Friends of coal" nutcases, keep trying to persuade people the anyone against MTR is against coal and wants to take coal miners jobs. Which isnt true, machines and the practice of MTR has taken away more jobs from miners than any environmentalist will do.

And I wasn't talking about the 1998 West Virginia ruling, which under the proposal of the Clinton administration and the EPA, was used throughout Appalachia beginning in 2000. The ruling I was talking about was completed in may 2002, The bush administration changed the definition of fill material, and they changed the ruling on how and where this material could be placed. They changed many other things also like downgrading the label of "Hazardous" on mercury pollution from power plants, which gave power plants 15 more years to implement better controls, they also changed a ruling that made high level radioactive waste "incidental", which saved the government the time and money it takes to clean it up.

The ruling on the "fill material" consisted of the same type of tricks, one which is still ongoing, the "clarification" of the stream buffer rule. They also changed many of the rulings under the CWA from "discretionary" to "non discretionary", minor word changes that have major effects. They also changed the limits on the size of new MTR sites. I have mentioned this rule change at least a dozen times, and then you bring up a ruling from 1998, that was only in WV, and has nothing to do with Kentucky, or this topic.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn...ge=printer

The statement that MTR is taking jobs away from miners is absurd, the majority of MTR sites are either in areas that are unminable by underground methods. This could be due to the fact that most small underground mines need at least 250 ft. to 300' ft. of cover over them on top of the ridgelines to effectively mine that area or it could be that their are multiple coal seams in close proximity to each other making it impossible to mine the lower seam or either seam in certain circumstances. I will agree that better technology has improved the efficiency in the production of mining coal in both underground and surface mines, just like technology has helped the farmer, auto manufactures and everyone else for that matter, everyone is producing more with less people than they were 30 to 40 years ago. most call it progress.