Doug Kendall: Justice Scalia Needs to Find Nemo

Where you stand often determines where you sit. If that maxim holds true, the Supreme Court is likely to divide sharply along ideological lines in the big environmental case argued yesterday, Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. Think of the froth-flotation gold mine operation at issue in the case as the mirror image of mountain-top removal coal mining, which has devastated wide swaths of West Virginia in recent years. Instead of blowing up a mountain and leveling a valley, modern gold mining operations typically take flat land and produce an enormous hole in the ground next to a mountain of contaminated mine tailings. But environmental regulations make above ground mine-tailing piles expensive, so Coeur Alaska proposed a cheaper alternative for their Kensington Mine: simply pipe the tailings into a nearby lake. The company wants to daily pump 210,000 gallons of slurry -- a suspension of solids in water consisting of chemical additives, heavy metals such as aluminum, ... (link)