On the recordJuly 12, 2016
With great respect to the subcommittee chairman, I was at the hearing all morning at Natural Resources a few months ago when we had the Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement on this exact issue. He deeply resisted the idea, what he called, I think it was, the fix or the myth that we weren't working closely with the States. I completely agree with the subcommittee chairman that the Office of Surface Mining should work very closely with the States to develop this rule and, in fact, insisted that they had from the beginning of the Obama administration, picking up on what the Bush administration had done, right through today. I agree that this is appropriate, but I resist the wisdom of the truth that the States have been shut out of the process. One more small point, but a really important point. A 2009 report on the NIH Web site estimated that coal mining cost Appalachia five times more in premature deaths--$42 billion--than it provided the region in all jobs, taxes, and other economic benefits from coal mining--just $8 billion. We are not trying to get rid of coal. There is no war on coal. We just want to make sure that the people who are doing the work who live there are protected. I yield back the balance of my time.
