Giving Middle Finger to Appalachian Communities, Trump Kills Study of Mountaintop Removal Health Impacts

‘Outrage has followed the Trump administration’s decision late last week to put the brakes on a study into the health impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining in Central Appalachia.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said Monday it received a letter from the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement ordering it to put a halt on its two-year project “largely as a result of the Department’s changing budget situation.”
“Trump has once again shown the people of Appalachia that we mean nothing to him.” —Bill Price, Sierra Club”The OSM,” as journalist Ken Ward Jr. writes at the West Virginia Gazette-Mail, “had committed more than $1 million to the study, which was launched last year after a request from officials from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the state Bureau for Public Health” in light of scientific research linking “mountaintop removal to increased risks of birth defects, cancer, and premature death among residents living near large-scale surface coal mines in Appalachia.”‘
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