While the EIS produced by the Bush administration included some 5,000 pages of analysis documenting this destruction, there are instances where administration officials sought to soften the overwhelmingly negative findings. For example, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service (FWS) scientist says the Bush administration team ordered technical language rating the environmental impacts as "significant" or
"severe" be stripped away in the editing process.15 In addition, a Bush administration "steering committee" of the interagency EIS process initially removed an economic analysis prepared by an independent contractor that showed that limits on the size of individual valley fills would not have negative economic impacts on the region’s electric costs. The steering committee discredited the analysis for what it called a "fatally flawed" methodology.16 [...]
While administration officials included extensive scientific documentation of the negative consequences of the mining practice in the EIS, they violated a central tenet of an EIS18 by offering no proposed alternatives to mitigate the worst environmental consequences of mountaintop removal mining. "We were flabbergasted and outraged,"
says one high-ranking staff scientist at the FWS who had worked extensively on the preparation of the technical analysis for the EIS.19
I'm working on a mountaintop mining story right now, and until researching it hadn't been familiar with the full extent of the stovepiped scientific intelligence. The Union of Concerned Scientists breaks it down:
