There has been an angry backlash from the US mining industry to the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Arch Coal’s challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) veto of its permit for the Spruce No. 1 mining project – a veto that occurred four years after the Army Corps of Engineers approved the project.
Criticising the decision, Hal Quinn, CEO of the National Mining Association, accused the court of allowing a “cloud of uncertainty to continue to hang over any project.” As a result, “companies will lack the assurance required to make investments and create US jobs."
“Anyone familiar with EPA’s growing record of fabricating whatever justification it takes to gain bigger budgets and more power knows [the court’s decision] is a ‘blank check’ for an agency whose actions now threaten everything anyone does anywhere,” said Daniel Kish, senior vice president of the Institute for Energy Research, in his scathing assessment of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Kish continued: “For those who have looked to the Supreme Court to protect the interests of individuals and contract sanctity, it is becoming clear that the justices are now becoming part of the Washington elite, which accepts power in the hands of the government as the coin of the realm. It is too bad they condone taking those coins from the hands of working men and women who can ill afford them.”
Edited from various sources by Jonathan Rowland