The Obama administration has expressed approved of at least two dozen new ‘mountaintop removal’ projects, an environmentally destructive mining method used in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, to expose coal by removing the entire tops of mountains .

As detailed here in the Chicago Tribune, environmental groups expected support for their opposition to the practice, after Obama made statements on the campaign trail indicating he favors “strong enforcement of the Clean Water Act.”
   
Now that Obama is in office, it appears that his administration favors mountaintop removal, no matter what it does to water quality in the surrounding area, in order to create more union mining jobs and to keep energy prices low.
 
“It was a big disappointment,” comments a lawyer for Earthjustice, a law firm that has challenged mountaintop removal in court.