rather see the tested format of the Federal criteria and local implementation plans supervised by EPA employed than any other administrative set-up I can think of.

Senator STEVENS. What is there in the world that man does that is not an environmental problem?

Senator BAKER. I don't know, but I don't want him doing it without careful regard for the ecology in my part of the country.

Senator STEVENS. I know, but I think we should stick with the expertise of the State line agencies that we know and impress on them our environmental concerns, and still have the people who are experts in the individuals tell us what can be done within the guidelines to be

set.

Senator BAKER. I think, in effect, we have two semiseparate considerations in surface mining; one, the mining aspect which the Bureau of Mines wou'd take and develop and promote; and the other would be the environmental aspect, which EPA would regulate. Senator STEVENS Thank you.

Senator Moss. Senator Fannin?

Senator FANNIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I feel not only that the Federal guidelines would be a more acceptable plan, but perhaps the least costly plan. I am very much concerned with EPA, some of the work they have been doing. I realize it is extremely valuable. At the same time we can't lose sight, with the tremendous thought involved, perhaps where the benefits do not justify that cost. I think we must have a balance.

I am vitally concerned over, as you know, trying to compete with the other countries of the world. We are not in a position to do so if we do not have low-cost power.

At the same time, I feel we can have this balance, if we can have a good environment and low-cost power. We are very dependent upon our coal reserves, because of the depletion of our natural gas and other petroleum products. I know in the West now we are becoming more and more dependent. I know you have been very active as far as nuclear power is concerned.

In the Tennessee area, do you think nuclear power will become a factor?

Senator BAKER. I think it will gradually. I don't think we can depend on it to pick up the slack, so to speak, created by growth and expansion. I think we have to find a way to produce this coal for the foreseeable future. We can't produce it by environmental debt accumulating.

Senator FANNIN. I have witnessed some of the results that have happened to the areas you are speaking about, and I am concerned. I don't want that to happen to my State. I will pay tribute to the Department of Interior when this is all completed in 30 years. The land there will be in much better condition than when it started. In fact, as it goes along, they will have a productivity they do not have now. They will have facilities that are not available now.

So, as an overall plan they will try to reclaim the land and have it back to its original state as far as possible.

Senator BAKER. I think your area is more fortunate than the Appalachian area. You can essentially restore and possibly improve much of the land that you are going to surface mine.

What I am saying is, I want the same thing in the mountains. We are going to essentially restore or substantially improve that area, and that may mean some parts of Appalachia cannot be stripped, because they are too steep.

Senator Bentsen, of Texas has been usually efficient in the field of cost ratio, but in that respect, I think we have to bear in mind that you can have a cost-benefit ratio, and it is a desirable thing to say strip coal, but you don't dare have a cost-benefit ratio when you are talking about a hazardous substance or poisonous material.

What I am saying is that strip mining in its present and unregulated form is such an undertaking that we can't yet apply the cost-benefit ratio. We have to bring it into decent standards of reclamation.

Senator FANNIN. I understand that we do have projects now that will bring forth the realization it can be done, and be done in an economic fashion. When we talk about what we are going to do in the future, when less than 1 percent of our power is produced by nuclear energy, and we have no suggestion that it is going to be produced any other way but by coal, I think we must work within that possibility. I appreciate your thoughts that the only area in which we may disagree is to the EPA, or what agency-I have great faith in what the Department of Interior is doing now. I feel if we can stick by them we will benefit much more than by any other agency.

Thank you.

Senator Moss. Senator Allott, do you have any questions?
Senator ALLOTT. Only one, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to say this: Trying to pick up in a few minutes the trend of the discussion, I must again express my concern of trying to establish regulations on a national basis. I don't know your statement very well. I know it well enough to know the general nature of it, and the things which regulations and guidelines that might be set down for your State might not, for example, be entirely applicable at all to the Four Corners area.

We have in Colorado, as you know, vast quantities of oil shale, as are contained also in the same formation in Utah and Wyoming. It constitutes by far the largest source of energy, unused energy, in the country at the present time. If you take the three States together.

Involved in this are going to be all sorts of techniques of mining. There is a big change that has come with respect to mining in this country. I have attended the oil shale symposium conducted in Denver by the Colorado School of Mines for the last 6 or 7 years. At the time those symposiums first began, there was little thought given. Maybe they are older than 7 years, but there was little thought given to the reclamation or rehabilitation of land.

But in attending those, in similar institutes, I find there is no major producing company today who isn't thinking in terms of putting the cost of reclamation or rehabilitation, land rehabilitation in as a prime factor in the cost of production of the raw material, whether it be coal or oil shale or something else.

I don't know whether you have had a chance to see, and I will be happy to show you personally, an investigation I made privately on my own this spring with respect to the work that has been done by the Brown Coal Co., southeast of Callon in Germany, by strip mining seams of lignite 900 feet below the surface, and they are about to open

up what appears to be one of the largest open pit mines in the world, in which they will mine lignite 1,200 feet below the surface by strip mining.

They have through the application of man's imagination and his ability not only replaced the land they have stripped there, they have established whole new villages; they have restored farmland to above its previous productivity level; in fact, they don't put it back in until it is 110 percent of the previous level. They have estabished farms and lakes and new forests so that the land can truthfully be said to be a more desirable area, recreation wise, visually and every other way than it was before.

I have this feeling that those of us who are genuinely interested in this do not lose sight of the goal, it is not our intention to extract minerals and then leave it, but we shall accompany that as an essential part of it with land rehabilitation. What man's technology can do to extract the minerals, can always do to-in your last paragraph you refer to the original topographical form. They have not always done that in every instance, but they certainly have not deteriorated the topographical conformity with the surrounding area.

I have nothing against NEPA at all, but I must say I think in the Interior Department we also have some very, very fine people capable of dealing with this, and would be concerned somewhat to lock my portion into a complete set of regulations that will be applicable to West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and what others may be involved here, which may have little applicability to the West and the different kinds of topography we have.

These are the only thoughts I wanted to say here, because too many times we in the West find that laws are enacted upon the theory that the entire country has the same problems and in the same situation as the eastern tier of States or first two eastern tiers of States, which isn't true.

The goals we want at the end, whether it be coal mining or oil shale, are not different than the goal you want, but I don't want to be rushed into a set of regulations which we have to conform to and which we are essentially treading water just to obtain a bureaucracy.

Senator BAKER. I think, Senator, it is clear you have to have different techniques in different parts of the country to account for the variations of the problem. The underlying concern to me is that there is no requirement now on the Federal level, and my experience has been that I have never seen, though I have made an active effort to find, a strip mine operation that was reclaimed as I thought it should be, except in flat land or semiflat land. Whether the Bureau of Mines or EPA or somebody else finally has charge of seeing that what is done is what must be done is really secondary.

I prefer EPA because I think it is an environmental problem, and it is one of the flexibilities I spoke of. However you do it, the crucial feature is that we mandate clearly to restore the land from which the mineral is removed.

Senator ALLOTT. What do you mean by restore?

Senator BAKER. The language I used was to require substantial restoration of the original topographical conformance of the land, unless a different conformance might seem as desirable or more desirable from environmental standpoints.

Senator ALLOTT. I think I could accept that very well. It can be done, and I have seen it done. I have seen forests where forests didn't exist. I have seen new, modern villages constructed which was stripped originally by strip mines. I have seen hunting areas, recreation areas established. I have seen this done.

In this area we are all alike. We want to see that. I can accept that term of restoration.

The thing I am concerned with is trying to have the Western States conform to a set of national regulations which may have no applicability to the West, to achieve the same end results you want to create. Senator BAKER. I agree. Regulations cannot be the same for Colorado, Wyoming, and others as they are for Kentucky, or West Virginia.

Senator ALLOTT. Thank you. That is all I have.

Senator Moss. Senator Jordan?

Senator JORDAN. Senator, you have made a fine statement. I think we are generally in agreement as to the need for reclamation restoration. You do inject a new thought into this, and I refer to your point five under what should we do.

Assuming now we are regulating and restoring this strip-mined land to nearly as good as it was in its original state, you go on to say:

We should consider the establishment of a severance tax on all coal and on other fuels at the Federal level to insure uniformity and make the proceeds thereof available to the States or locality if they elect so that the benefits of this resource can accrue to the area in which it is located.

Would you develop that a little for us?

Senator BAKER. Yes, sir. Let me go back to the genesis of the idea, Senator.

In virtually every area of the country, the ad valorem property taxes are the principal tax base for the local government. In virtually every mineral area, the ad valorem tax base is not realistic. I toyed with the idea of trying to find some way to see that the mineral being extracted from a given county or area paid its fair share of the taxload for that area, and I ran into a problem.

Coal underlies all of the Southeast United States. The question is, Is it minable or is it not?

Senator JORDAN. What is the practice in coal areas of taxing undeveloped coal lands? Is it taxed at a higher rate of mined land or not? Senator BAKER. There is not any clear-cut policy. The most general one in Tennessee, and I imagine it varies from Kentucky and West Virginia-in Tennessee, there is no act to tax coal mines per se. If there is an area of 5,000 acres being mined, there is an assessment increase. In other cases, you will have a separation of ownership of mineral and surface interests; and in those cases, there is a separate tax.

In 90 percent of the cases, there is no adequate assessment of the value of minerals in the ad valorem taxes. The mineral interest may or may not be valuable, when the minerals are undeveloped.

In lieu of an effort to find an ad valorem tax for undeveloped minerals, I came to think the best way would be to have a severance tax as the moment of extraction of the mineral. What I was thinking about was a Federal tax on minerals-particularly on coal-that a State, if it chose, or a city or county, could reclaim from the Federal Treasury.

A severance tax, I am convinced, is a far more equitable way to reach mineral values than an adjustment of property ad valorem taxes. Senator JORDAN. Thank you very much.

Senator Moss. Would you extend this tax to other minerals besides coal if they were surface mined?

Senator BAKER. Yes; I think this approach could be equally applicable to other minerals.

Senator Moss. Thank you very much. We do appreciate your testimony and for this colloquy we have all been able to conduct with you, and it has helped us a great deal to be able to talk it through.

Senator BAKER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator Moss. Senator Hansen has a statement that he put off to this point, and I ask him if he would like to make that statement now and call our next witness.

STATEMENT OF HON. CLIFFORD P. HANSEN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF WYOMING

Senator HANSEN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I am delighted, as most all of us are, that Senators Cooper and Baker could be here, and I think their statements and responses to questions have been very helpful in trying to help us understand more clearly the problem that exists in the important region known as Appalachia.

Mr. Chairman, I am very grateful to you, the members of the subcommittee, and the staff for scheduling these hearings today on S. 1160, legislation which I have introduced to permit the Secretary of the Interior to make grants to the States to seal and fill voids in abandoned coal mines and abandoned oil and gas wells.

The subcommittee has devoted much time and effort to several bills pending in the Congress concerning strip mining and underground mining, and the restoration and reclamation of mined lands. I am deeply concerned, however, that these bills do not provide for restoration and rehabilitation of areas which have been mined in the past and have been long since abandoned.

The Federal Government presently offers assistance to the Appalachian region of the Nation for the purpose of sealing and filling abandoned mines. The conscience of the Nation was awakened as cities such as Scranton, Pa., struggled to save buildings and homes which were breaking apart as the ground subsided beneath them. The Nation came to the aid of these people.

While the problem is most obvious in the more heavily populated and mined Appalachian area, the problem is widespread, involving 30 or more States. A family in another part of the Nation who loses their home to subsidence, suffers as greatly as their Appalachian brothers. Their situation is a little more isolated, but in both cases the family is left without a home which in many cases represents their life's savings and work.

Thirty of the 46 States where abandoned mines are known to exist have reported subsidence occurrences. While subsidence does not always occur in populated areas, I would like to submit for the record an incomplete list of the urban areas where mining has occurred and where it may be necessary to make specific studies to determine subsidence potential. This list will help illustrate the extent of the prob