Political Quotes

“In my closing remarks, I would like to highlight the findings of an economic impact analysis of the draft stream buffer zone rule, released in 2015, issued against the Obama administration regulation. The study was done by the ENVIRON International Corporation. ENVIRON found that 64 percent of the Nation's coal reserves would be sterilized, or frozen, resulting in an annual loss in value that ranges between $14 billion to $29 billion. The proposed rule hits longwall mining particularly hard, causing a decrease of 47 to 85 percent in recoverable longwall coal reserves. Longwall mining is considered the safest, most efficient, and most profitable type of underground mining. Sterilizing so much of the Nation's coal reserves will have a significant impact on employment, ranging from a loss of 40,000 to about 77,000 direct jobs and 112,000 to 280,000 indirect jobs from those businesses and industries that provide goods and services to the mining sector. These jobs are high-paying, family-wage jobs, with excellent benefits, including health care. The economic impact to the coal- producing States and counties will be staggering. The STREAM Act instills sanity into the Office of Surface Mining's rulemaking process by requiring transparency in the scientific products used by OSM in any rulemaking that they have. It narrowly focuses the stream buffer zone rule to actual stream buffer zones and not 474 other regulations.…”