By Derf Johnson
Montana’s only underground coal mine is Signal Peak’s Bull Mountain Mine north of Billings near Roundup. It has been an environmental nightmare for Montana, producing enormous amounts of air pollution and entirely destroying the sparse water sources in the arid Bull Mountains. The mine is responsible for more than 14 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, ranking it in the top tier of Montana’s “super polluters.” And even more alarming, the regulators responsible for ensuring environmental compliance – namely the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Office of Surface Mining (OSM) – have failed to fully consider or regulate the operation.
For example, due to a case brought by MEIC and our partner organizations, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found in April 2022 that OSM had conducted a shoddy environmental analysis that “hid the ball” on carbon pollution and ordered OSM to conduct a more thorough environmental analysis of the expansion that actually considered and evaluated the serious climate change pollution resulting from the mine. Since that time, OSM has been conducting a review under the National Environmental Policy Act that will ostensibly include an actual analysis of the mine’s climate impacts.
Cue Sen. Steve Daines, who obviously doesn’t have an interest in addressing the climate crisis and the incredibly alarming impacts it’s having in Montana. In early June, Sen. Daines introduced a suite of legislation that, if enacted, would allow for the mine to avoid its environmental compliance responsibilities, including the environmental analysis currently being conducted by OSM. One of the bills would also privatize federal land adjacent to the Bull Mountain Mine, taking it from public ownership and placing it in the hands of a private trust in a land swap with inholdings on the Crow Reservation.
In announcing the legislation, Sen. Daines also characterized it as providing “revenue to the Crow Tribe.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the Apsáalooké Allottees Alliance, an Indigenous organization whose members reside on the Crow Reservation, wrote a scathing editorial regarding the legislation, which you can read in full on pg. 26.
The legislation, misleadingly titled the “Crow Revenue Act (S.4444), had a hearing in the Committee on Indian Affairs in late September. It is crucial that you reach out to the committee and to Montana’s Senators Daines and Tester to let them know you oppose this cynical and dangerous legislation.
This article was published in the October 2024 issue of Down To Earth.
