Mountaintop removal not creating jobs, regulation not killing them

Mountaintop removal mining operations do not create coal jobs in local communities, concluded a new study published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. But that didn’t stop House Republicans from staging yet another show trial of a hearing yesterday to grill the Environmental Protection Agency over mountaintop removal regulation and its supposed effect on Appalachian jobs.

The kicker? Turns out the number of Appalachian mining jobs has increased since EPA upped its regulatory game. Yes, you read that right. Read on.  

The notion that mountaintop removal boosts jobs has been discredited many times. The bottom line is that mountaintop removal is much less labor intensive than traditional underground mining, and is in fact designed to increase coal companies’ profits by cutting human miners out of the process. (See our white paper "Appalachian Heartbreak" for some discussion of this.) But the new geographic study, entitled “Mountaintop Removal and Job Creation: Exploring the Relationship Using Spatial Regression,” adds some interesting local information to the story.

The authors looked at ten coal producing counties in West Virginia and compared mine size to the percentage of the working population employed in coal mining in surrounding communities.  They discovered no positive relationship between mine size and local employment. In other words, more coal mining, and particularly more MTR, does not mean more coal industry jobs.

As the authors concluded, “The lack of a statistically significant relationship between coal mine size and mining employment suggests that reliance on new methods of coal mining [such as MTR] for job growth is tenuous at best.”

Even as the geographic study made news, House Republicans were once again gearing up to put EPA’s nose to the figurative grindstone. You’ll remember that in May, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a pair of hearings  titled “"EPA Mining Policies: Assault on Appalachian Jobs” and larded up with coal industry witnesses.  Yesterday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee  got in on the action with a quite similar hearing of its own, in its regulatory affairs subcommittee.

This hearing yielded much of the same rhetoric as the Transportation Committee’s.  Industry spokespeople claimed that EPA is waging a “war on coal.” There were many laughable claims about the industry’s environmental performance; Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa himself asserted that the industry has reached “the gold standard,” environmentally speaking.  (Again, check out "Appalachian Heartbreak" to learn what these “gold standard” practices are doing to the environment). And a couple of subcommittee members, including Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), reminded witnesses that EPA’s current, appropriately stringent enforcement of MTR related regulations follows eight years of lax enforcement under the Bush administration.

Speier also brought up some very interesting job numbers crunched by our friends over at Appalachian Voices. It turns out that Appalachian coal mining jobs are up since the start of the current recession, and since the beginning of EPA’s enhanced review of MTR permits, and despite falling demand for Appalachian coal.

To paraphrase Mark Twain rather awkwardly, the reports of job loss have been greatly exaggerated.

All of which prompts the question: is it really jobs that the coal industry is concerned about when it fights MTR regulation? 

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