Guardians and allies filed suit today against the Trump administration’s approval of a coal mine expansion near Bryce Canyon National Park. The expanded mine will extract millions of tons of coal, exacerbating climate change impacts in addition to threatening the visitor experience at the park.
In 2018, the Bureau of Land Management approved an environmental report allowing Alton Coal to expand its mine onto 2,114 acres of public lands and to extract more than 30 million tons of coal. Guardians and allies argue that in approving this report, BLM did not consider the expansion’s impact on climate, the effects of mercury pollution from burning coal, or the enormous social costs of increased carbon emissions.
Paradoxically, the mine expansion approval comes at a time when Utahns are increasingly committing to clean energy goals, something the Trump administration ignored “as well as the more than 280,000 public comments filed in opposition to the proposal,” said Guardians’ Jeremy Nichols.
Read the press release.
