The Continuing Evolution in Mine Permitting: EPA's War Against Coal Reaches New Heights

Elections, we have been told, have consequences. In the area of coal mine permitting, this apparently includes the dismantling of settled administrative law as a part of an effort to severely reduce the size of the Appalachian coal industry. An outright legislative abolition being unattainable, the Obama Administration has used one of its most powerful federal bureaucracies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to accomplish what it sees as the next best thing: a chokehold on the agencies that issue permits allowing for the opening of new mines and expansion of existing ones.

It began, symbolically enough, on January 20, 2009 -- the very day that President Obama was sworn into office. In a letter bearing that date, EPA's Region III first notified the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) that it would begin objecting to issuance of mining-related "dredge and fill" permits under Section 404 of the federal Clean