More than 80 miners are facing possible layoffs after a Montana mine’s plans for expansion were halted by a U.S. District Court, the Associated Press reports.
The Montana Environmental Information Center (MEIC) and several other environmental groups sued the mining company Signal Peak Energy after it announced plans to tap into a 176 million ton federal coal reserve next to one of its current mines.
“There are fires burning across the state. There are super-hurricanes (in the Gulf of Mexico). Climate change is here, it’s now, it’s real,” MEIC’s Anne Hedges told AP. “We cannot continue to say we are going to ignore those impacts.”
Judge Donald Malloy sided with the environmentalists, blocking the expansion. Malloy said government officials overvalued the mine’s economic impact while underestimating its potential impact on climate change, according to the AP.
Signal Peak President Bradley Hanson is confident the layoffs can be avoided if the court allows the expansion to go through while additional environmental studies are done.
“We believe that we can avoid the impacts that prompted the court’s order and, at the same time, preserve the jobs and the economic value of this mine,” Hanson said, according to the AP.
When approving the mine, Department of the Interior officials did not account for pollution caused by transporting and burning the coal mine, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SMME).
As much as 95 percent of the mine’s coal has been exported. Federal officials now need to calculate the carbon footprint of shipping coal to countries such as South Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands.
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Stupid enviromentalists and liberal actvists judges dont givea darn about the miners and their famlies all they want is their idiotic utopia where everybody romps naked in the flowers and comunes with gaia and makes their monthly sacrfice of virgins and children or unbelivers just like the Aztecs,incans and myahans did
“Federal officials now need to calculate the carbon footprint of shipping coal to countries such as South Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands.”
No, they do not need to calculate the carbon footprint. CO2 has no warming effect on the atmosphere. There is no such thing as a “greenhouse gas,” a concept that was made up to suit an agenda. CO2 and water vapor are “radiative gases” that save to cool the atmosphere. No gas at any concentration in the atmosphere can warm the atmosphere. Thermodynamically not possible, particularly as these gases are saturated in sunlight and have a null effect on air temperature.
Like what happned in the Klamath Basin just a few months before Sept 11th when the farmers water was cut off over some dumb worthless fish its like with the Spotted Owl and such the Eco-Freaks dont givea darn about the land owners and the wildlife all they want to do is to achieve their goals of The Wildlands Project