Waterkeeper call to action: NO on Pizarchik’s confirmation

We’re slapping our foreheads because this has to be the Obama Administration’s most Bush-league appointment: Joseph Pizarchik for Directory of the Office of Surface Mining, who has a record on coal that speaks for itself. A confirmation that means more mountaintop removal coal mining, more dangerous handling of toxic coal ash, and more climate change. The Appalachians run through Pennsylvania, where he held his previous position at the Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, and an estimated 750,000 to 1 million acres of hardwood forests, a thousand miles of waterways and more than 470 mountains and their surrounding communities have been obliterated in the last two decades. In fact, enough explosions equivalent of several Hiroshima atomic bombs are set off in Appalachia every year.

Please read about Pizarchik and his past at the inexplicably awesome, David Lynchian “The Dirty Lie.” (The video is sweet too.) They say the appointment is akin to letting the fox guard the chicken coop, and looking at his negligence of the Clean Water Act, we have to agree.



Most importantly, send a message to your legislator on this bad decision HERE .

We’re wondering how this happened? Of course, in this type of call to action, it’s occasionally protocol to tell senators they should call Senate Majoriy Leader Harry Reid and tell him the White House should withdraw Pizarchik’s nomination. Therein lies the problem. Dirty Harry might not save the day, let alone make it. He earned that nickname because he loves clean coal and has gone to great lengths to protect his mining interests in Nevada. Back in February we posted about his temper during a debate on the 1872 mining law and recalled when Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, said “I suspect that whatever he decides is good for mining is going to be on the table.” So here we are and a lot is on the table.

From the Waterkeeper Alliance : The Obama Administration recently nominated Joseph Pizarchik as the Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for overseeing mining in the United States. Pizarchik is currently the Director of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, where he has promoted practices and policies designed to facilitate the coal mining industry’s destructive practices. He is not the right person to enforce our laws and protect our communities from this dirty industry.

During an August 6 2009 hearing before a Senate Committee, Pizarchik was asked about his position on mountaintop mining, one of the most controversial and devastating aspects of the coal industry, and claimed that he would have to learn more about the details and history of the practice before being able to answer! Amazingly, the nominated head of OSM, and the current director of a state mining regulation agency, doesn’t know enough about mountaintop-removal coal mining to give an informed opinion? America must do a better job of protecting the environment and our citizens from the coal mining industry.








http://www.waterkeeper.org/

6:02 am ADDENDUM: “Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably the majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above.” George Orwell from the essay “Down the mine.” Orwell detailed the dirt and confusion of a coal mine in that essay, describing it as his own mental picture of what hell looks like.

Hopefully, we can appoint sombody who believes in clean alernatives and break Orwell’s vision as geothermal, solar, wind and hydroelectric and other renewables become the “necessary counterpart.”