Boosted by a recent victory in Colorado, an environmental group is expanding its legal campaign to try to stop coal mining — because of concerns about climate change — by challenging permits for some of the largest mines in the West.
This time, New Mexico-based WildEarth Guardians is asking a federal judge to block mining at the Antelope and Black Thunder mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the El Segundo mine in New Mexico and the Bowie No. 2 mine in Colorado. But it’s taking the argument farther.
Rather than just saying that federal regulators should consider the climate-change impacts of individual mines before approving permits, the group claims that they should be looking at the cumulative effect of mining as a whole and whether the nation should allow any more. The lawsuit is filed against Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, the Interior Department and its Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation.
In May, WildEarth Guardians persuaded a federal judge in Denver to order a new environmental review for the Colowyo mine in northwestern Colorado. This was in part because Judge R. Brooke Jackson thought regulators essentially rubber-stamped its permit rather than taking a serious look at the environmental impacts under federal law, including the effect that burning mined coal would have on greenhouse gases.
