Democrats try to revive health-effects-of-mining study that Trump administration halted in 2017; Senate stands athwart

Nearly two years ago, the Trump administration halted a $1 million study on whether surface mining in Central Appalachia has caused health problems for residents. House Democrats protested at the time but couldn't do much as the minority; now that they have the majority, several are trying to revive the study, including Natural Resources Committee chairman Raúl Grijalva, D-Arizona.

"Rep. John Yarmuth, the sole Democrat in the Kentucky congressional delegation, is seeking to halt all new mountaintop coal removal mining permits until federal officials investigate potential health effects," Lesley Clark reports for McClatchy Newspapers, including the Lexington Herald-Leader. Yarmuth's effort is almost sure to fail because the Senate is controlled by Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a friend of the coal industry.

In a Natural Resources subcommittee hearing Tuesday, Michael McCawley, an associate professor in West Virginia University's Department of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences, testified that he thought the study got canceled because the administration knew the results would be bad for the industry, Kate Mishkin reports for the Charleston Gazette-Mail. "I think they believed that the study was going to come out with evidence that supported banning mountaintop mining, that they knew what the evidence was," McCawley said, adding that he knew that because "I know most of the panel members; they’re colleagues of mine."

The study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was funded in 2016 by the Obama administration, but halted in August 2017. The Interior Department initially claimed it was reviewing all projects costing more than $100,000 because of budget cuts, but that wasn't true. Nearly a year later, the Pacific Standard reported that a top Interior official met repeatedly with coal-industry lobbyists just before canceling the study.