West Virginia AG Wants the Supreme Court to Hear Spruce Mine Case

Well, this is not a reversal, but it’s still not good news. Patrick Morrisey, the Attorney General of West Virginia, has joined 26 other states in filing a friend of the court brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review a case that challenges the EPA’s authority to withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for a mountaintop removal mine.

The mine is a currently existing mountaintop mining operation in Logan County, the Spruce Mine No 1. The permit was for an expansion of the mine and would have made it the largest surface mine in West Virginia.

In April of this year, the U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the EPA, and in July refused to rehear the case.

I’m not hopeful if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case. The conservative majority has been business friendly and not prone to supporting environmental regulations. John Roberts has worked as a lawyer for coal companies. The cases he worked on concerned labor issues—benefit payments and collective bargaining rights—and not those of environmental protections. Still, his relationship with the coal companies has been cozy and does not lend itself to the image of Justice blindly weighing the scales. Do you think he should recuse himself?

More than the status of one mine could be at stake here. The push from the right, the GOP, and big business has been to curtail the ability of the EPA to protect our air, land, and water. If the Court hears the case and rules in favor of Arch Coal, the owner of the Spruce Mine, the EPA’s ability to deny pollution permits across the country will be jeopardized.

From Crooks and Liars: GOP Holds 'Factual' Climate Hearing, Says Scientists Know It's All a Hoax

GOP Holds 'Factual' Climate Hearing, Says Scientists Know It's All A Hoax

Somehow or other I’m not finding references to this in the more standard press websites. This is from Crooks and Liars, a mostly liberal website. Maybe it’s just that most of the press realizes that this sort of thing is not newsworthy.

            It is nonetheless disquieting that such outlandish shenanigans go on in our nation’s capital. While cities, counties, and other local government agencies are working to reduce carbon emissions, the GOP has a hearing on climate change in which almost all of the witnesses are skeptical or downright hostile to the science of global warming. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This is the institution that brought us the witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee and filibusters, one going on for 24 hours, of basic civil rights legislation.

            I wouldn’t mind so much if our elected representatives opposed measures to limit greenhouse gasses or to make progress on climate change, if they were to simply acknowledge the truth of the matter. “Yes, our waste from fossil fuel is warming the planet, but I don’t care,” is still a crappy attitude, but at least it’s honest.

Industry Sues to Invalidate Colorado Communities' Fracking Bans

It seems that folks’ efforts to restrict fracking from their communities is in jeopardy in Colorado. Last month the citizens of Fort Collins approved a five-year moratorium on fracking within their city, and Lafayette has made similar changes to its city charter to make fracking illegal. Fracking is legal in the state as a whole; these are merely restrictions on fracking within the boundaries of these cities.

            Now the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA), an industry sponsored organization, is suing these two communities these two towns on the grounds that their fracking bans are in conflict with state law that regulates oil and gas extraction. COGA says that only the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has exclusive authority to regulate wells in Colorado. This story goes back to around a year ago, and I've blogged about it before.

            I’m not a lawyer, so I really can’t make a judgment on the merits of this case. Considering, however, how recent research indicates the hazards of fracking (see here, here, and here)  it seems perfectly reasonable that people should be able to restrict this extractive practice from their communities. Sound reasonable? What do you think?

Academy of Sciences Updates Report on Abrupt Changes From Global Warming

The National Academy of Sciences has just published an update to their 2002 publication Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises. Titled Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises, the new report XXX.

            The 2002 report emphasized that abrupt changes occur during times of changing forcings, such as today when we are pumping tons and tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. From the reports executive summary:

Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly. Thus, greenhouse warming and other human alterations of the earth system may increase the possibility of large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events. The abrupt changes of the past are not fully explained yet, and climate models typically underestimate the size, speed, and extent of those changes. Hence, future abrupt changes cannot be predicted with confidence, and climate surprises are to be expected.

These changes include greatly increased rainfall or storms, as well as droughts. The new report builds on the work of the previous report and also considers the tipping points that are the result of cumulative changes over long periods of time. 

Update on Mountaintop Removal From the Charleston Gazette: Mountaintop Removal Protester Still In Jail

Mountaintop removal protester still in jail  - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -

Here’s some of the latest news for Appalachia and mountaintop removal. Longtime community and environmental activist Mike Roselle has wound up in jail again, charged with trespass and disorderly conduct for leaving a container of dust from mountaintop removal on the porch of the West Virginia governor’s mansion.

            Roselle insists that the governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, should have the material tested, as scientific studies show that residents who live near mountaintop mines are at greater risk of illness and premature death.

UPDATE 12/4/13: I guess this is an update to an update. Anyway, having served more time than any conviction for his alleged crimes, Mike Roselle has been released from jail on a personal recognizance bond. Details of this event can be found at this story by Ken Ward in the Charleston Gazette. As Ward points out, Governor Tomblin, despite scientific evidence that indicates a link between mountaintop removal and increased health risks to residents who live nearby these massive mines, has not shown any interest in the studies and has refused to meet with folks like Roselle who want to discuss the issue with him.

Dear Cato: Climate Action Delayed Is Climate Action Denied

It might be easy to imagine that the folks at the Cato Institute aren’t as bad as some other “think tanks” that work at the denial of the science that reveals and explains the phenomenon of global warming. After all, right up front, on their web page on global warming, they clearly say, “Global warming is indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975.”

OK, before we go any further, the part about 1975 is a little weird. Does the Cato Institute demarcate the start of our warming of the globe to when “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting” hit the airwaves? Or do they want to pin it on the start of Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign? The Cato Institute has never liked Jimmy Carter.  Just to be clear, we’ve been warming the world since we started burning fossil fuels, more like 1750 instead of 1975. But I’m not going to ding them for being off by about 225 years.

            The rest of the sentence is something that seems incredibly reasonable coming from a “think tank” that was started in part by Charles Koch and whose purpose is to support oil industries and an economy based on the extraction and use of fossil fuels. They acknowledge that global warming is real and we’re part of the problem. Wow! How reasonable. These folks sound like they’ve done their homework and are willing to follow through and do their part to reduce carbon emissions.

            That’s the way it seems until you read the rest of what Cato has to say:

But global warming is also a very complicated and difficult issue that can provoke very unwise policy in response to political pressure. Although there are many different legislative proposals for substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, there is no operational or tested suite of technologies that can accomplish the goals of such legislation.

Fortunately, and contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, there is ample time to develop such technologies, which will require substantial capital investment by individuals.

Where do I start with this? Global warming is “very complicated.” OK, I guess it is. What does that have to do with reducing carbon emissions? In some cases it might be complicated, and in others it might be quite simple. The other red flag here is the use of the word “provoke,” which can simply mean to stir to action, but also carries the connotation of inciting anger and rashness, and here in this case insinuates that climate policy may not be well thought out or poorly designed.

And while the phrase about “no operational or tested suite of technologies” that can accomplish the goals of climate change legislation has a germ of truth to it—we are, after all, on untested territory here with global warming. We have never tossed up tons and tons of carbon in the air and substantially warmed the entire earth—that does not mean that we should not work to remedy the tight spot that we’ve put ourselves in. I could cite a hundred examples of the past, from Columbus to Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, to illustrate that although we sometimes find ourselves in uncharted territory, we can still be successful in our efforts.

And renewable energy, hybrid cars, and other technologies that are to help us reduce or mitigate climate change are only part of the solution. A lot of economists will tell you that the easiest way to bring about reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is a carbon tax. A carbon tax can be simple, designed to be fair to the poor and lower classes, and be quite effective in making all of our carbon footprints smaller and smaller.

As the Cato Institute wraps things up, they swerve into outright falsehood when they say that there is plenty of time to develop the technologies to stave off global warming. This is risible. We have pushed the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere up to 400 ppm, the planet is sufficiently warmed, and we are seeing some of the consequences of the forcing caused by all this new carbon dioxide in the air. Glaciers melt, the oceans rise, and our weather patterns are changing.

The Cato Institute tries to come off as being responsible and reasonable, acknowledging our contributions to climate change. But they are as bad as any of the organizations or industry hired guns who deny the link between our carbon emissions and a warmer world. They remind me of the “responsible voices” who claimed that they themselves were not racists yet were quick to caution Martin Luther King that he was asking for too much too quickly.

In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King clarified what was at the core of this delaying tactic. In the letter he wrote, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

And so it is with Cato. Their “ample time” is the same as the racist “Wait.” Saying that we should take our time to work on climate change means that they don’t ever want to work on climate change. Their “ample time” rings in the ears of Alaskan natives loosing their towns and homes; it rings in the ears of Filipinos whose homes and villages were ravaged by Haiyan; it rings in the ears of all of us whose food, water, and safety is jeopardized by global warming with piercing familiarity.

This Is NOT From The Onion: Undercover Activist Who Exposed Animal Cruelty Is Cited For Animal Cruelty

Worthy of the most absurd of  The Onion headlines, one that would even set Orwell’s head spinning, reads Undercover Activist Who Exposed Animal Cruelty Is Cited For Animal Cruelty. The undercover activist, Taylor Radig, went undercover to document animal abuse at the Quanah Cattle Company in Kersey, Colorado. The videos she took showed employees kicking, throwing, and performing other abusive acts on young calves. After the activist group she was working with, Compassion Over Killing, released the video, employees at the cattle facility were fired.

            As the Weld County Sheriff’s Office cited three employees of the Quanah Cattle Company with misdemeanor animal cruelty, the office went on to charge Radig with the same charge. According to Lindsay Abrams in Slate:

“Radig’s failure to report the alleged abuse of the animals in a timely manner adheres to the definition of acting with negligence and substantiates the charge Animal Cruelty,” a statement signed by the sheriff explained. They’re also accusing her of having participated in the abuse. If convicted, she faces up to 18 months in jail.

This sort of reasoning on the part of the Weld County sheriff’s department would seem to indict just about any whistleblower reporting any sort of corporate criminality. The sheriff could go so far as to indict police or FBI agents that infiltrate terrorist groups or organized crime.

Colorado, where a great deal of today’s meat packing occurs, currently has no “ag-gag” laws, legal restrictions on activists or reporters that make it difficult or impossible to report animal cruelty, unsafe working conditions, or unsanitary conditions or practices at slaughterhouses and meat pacing facilities. With sheriff departments like the one in Weld County, however, it seems that the big agricultural interests don’t need them. They can just charge the whistleblowers with the crimes that they report.

From Coal Tattoo: EPA Approves Industry-Backed Selenium Rule For Kentucky

EPA approves industry-backed selenium rule for Ky.

Another blog from Ken Ward and his Coal Tattoo. Apparently bowing to pressure from the coal industry, the EPA is allowing Kentucky to lower the standards of how selenium is measured in streams.

            Surface mining for coal, particularly mountaintop removal, raises the level of selenium in nearby streams, and this can harm ecosystems. West Virginia wants weaker standards. We'll see if the same thing happens there.

UPDATE 12/13/13: Today the Sierra Club, along with other community and environmental groups sued the EPA to keep these weaker standards in Kentucky from going forward. The text of the full complaint can be found here.

From Coal Tattoo: Coal’s ‘Bad Arguments’ On Climate Change Rules

Coal’s ‘bad arguments’ on climate change rules

It may seem like a stretch to connect the dots between the destruction of the mountains in West Virginia with the deadly havoc unleashed upon the Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan. But those billions of tons of coal that have been removed from the Appalachians have been turned into CO2 and make up a portion of the greenhouse gasses that are warming our planet. And a warmer planet makes way for more unstable and destructive weather.

Less that a year after Typhoon Bopha, which killed 1,900, and faced with the deaths and destruction of Haiyan and the possibility of ever more destruction from future extreme weather events, the Filipinos are calling for action. Naderev “Yeb” Sano, the Philippines’ representative to the United Nations’ current round of climate change talks is quoted in U.S. News & World Report as saying:

To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare you to get off your ivory tower and away from the comfort of your armchair. I dare you to go to the islands of the Pacific, the islands of the Caribbean and the islands of the Indian ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods, to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling polar ice caps, to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon, and the Nile where lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that confronts similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannas of Africa where climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and water becomes scarce. Not to forget the massive hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard of North America.

And if that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now.

Sano added, “What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness. We can stop this madness.”

As Ken Ward in his Coal Tattoo blog points out in the above link, Sano will not be able to count on Joe Manchin and the other politicians in West Virginia, who continue to deny or ignore climate change. The powers that be in the Mountain State keep on wanting to dig up all the coal and turn it into carbon dioxide no matter what.

This kind of destruction, Appalachian mountaintop removal

Gives you this kind of destruction, Typhoon Haiyan image from theaustralian.com

The Mountaintop Removal Word For the Day: Thwart

Thwart is the word for the day, when it comes to mountaintop removal.

According to this story from The Hill, the GOP in the House of Representatives is set to thwart efforts by the Interior Department to reset environmental standards that protect Appalachian streams from the harmful effects of mountaintop mining.

Under president George W. Bush, the Interior Department rewrote a section of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act to do away with the 100-foot buffer zone rule. That rule restricted mining companies from dumping mining waste and overburden to areas 100 feet or more from rivers and streams. The proposed legislation, H.R. 2824, would keep the present administration from reinstating that rule and returning the regulation to what it was before George W. Bush entered the White House. The Hill says that the bill, called “Preventing Government Waste and Protecting Coal Mining Jobs in America,” will likely pass the House Natural Resources Committee. If it becomes law, regulating the areas where mining companies can dump their waste would be given over to the individual states, with their tradition of more lax regulation and oversight giving way to the federal rule.

The second example of thwarting comes from my old college town of Huntington. According to Huntington’s Herald Dispatch newspaper, an Energy and Natural Resource Symposium, sponsored by the Huntington Regional Chamber of Commerce, is to be held at a conference center at Huntington’s Saint Mary’s Hospital. Robert M. (Mike) Duncan, president and CEO for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an organization set up by the coal industry to promote coal and coal mining, is to give the keynote address.

            The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC), a nonprofit that has worked for decades to end or mitigate mountaintop removal, has planned a rally in opposition to the hospital hosting the event. The hospital is seeking an injunction to thwart the efforts of the environmental group. The hospital says that it seeks the injunction to prevent disruption to its normal functions. The environmental group says, however, that disrupting the hospital is not their goal, as reported in the Herald Dispatch:

Janet Keating, OHVEC's executive director, said the rally is based on the principle that it's inappropriate for a facility meant to heal to host an event promoting coal mining, which numerous medical studies have linked to health problems.

“There's been a lot of silence from our state leaders about these health studies and the impacts on communities around coal,” Keating said. “It's a mystery to me why a hospital would want to host this. Our whole thing is, ‘Let's not have it at a hospital, where you're supposed to be helping people.’”

She said the organization has a reputation for peaceful protests and those who join the rally will be asked to remain on the sidewalks outside the property, which is located near the corner of 5th Avenue and 29th Street.

“We had no intention to be on their property or at the hospital,” she said.

As Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette, who gets a big hat tip for leading me onto this story from Huntington, points out in his blog, Coal Tattoo, there is something a little funny about a hospital hosting a function for an industry whose mining practices have been shown in a larger and larger body of studies to contribute to the ill health of the residents who live among the mines.

UPDATE 11/12/13: The judge in this case, Paul T. Farrell has denied the restraining order sought by the hospital. I guess you can only thwart so much.

UPDATE 11/14/13: The House Natural Resources Committee approved H.R. 2824. 

Yes, Virginia, There Is Global Warming: Reality-Based Democrat Defeats Science Denying GOP Candidate

This is an interesting take on the governor’s race in Virginia, in which Democrat Terry McAuliffe defeated the GOP tea party candidate Ken Cuccinelli in a narrow race. In this piece from the Guardian the British newspaper considers the role that global warming, and in particular, climate change denial had on the election results.

            While McAuliffe has acknowledged global warming and even made it a central part of his campaign, Cuccinelli has done all he could to stymie effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. As Virginia’s Attorney General he joined a lawsuit in Texas that claimed that the EPA lacked the authority to regulate tailpipe emissions. He also used his position of Attorney General in a strategy of harassment demanding all the personal emails of Michael Mann, a well-known physicist and climatologist, during his six-year tenure at the University of Virginia. Mann claims, I think rightly, that the effort to grab all those emails was simply an attempt to find something, even if it were only one teensy-weensy thing, to embarrass Mann.

            The piece in the Guardian acknowledges that this was not a single-issue election, but I believe that they are tapping into something that the domestic press has yet to delve into. Much about the tea party and Obamacare was mentioned on NPR this morning when they reported this story, but there was nothing about global warming or Cuccinelli’s harassment of Mann. And I haven't found anything else in the U.S. press that mentions global warming in relation to this story.

Big Surprise: Tea Partiers Don't Believe in Global Warming

This is more unsurprising news. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, it turns out that folks who identify themselves with the tea party are more likely to deny or question the existence of global warming, with only 25 percent of this faction of the GOP saying that global warming is a reality. That stands in stark contrast to the 67 percent of Americans (including 61 percent of Republicans) who say they believe that the world is warming.

            My guess about this is that tea party folks are twofold: First, it seems to me that many in the tea party are prone to believing fantastical unreal things. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, despite evidence to the contrary; Barack Obama is a Socialist, despite evidence to the contrary; Barack Obama is a Muslim, despite evidence to the contrary. Many in the tea party believe this stuff. Second, the folks who say they are in the tea party are more likely to get their “news” from Fox News, which has done really questionable reporting on climate change, as well as from talk radio, which can be even worse when it comes to global warming and mendacity.

            Given their disproportionate influence on the GOP, as well as the rest of our politics—remember these folks brought you the partial government shutdown—the misinformation and ignorance on the climate that the tea party embraces is even more destructive and dangerous than their partial government shutdown.

On Global Warming Australia Gets Plenty of Bad Press

Sorry to have let the blog posts drop off during October. I’ve been pretty busy working on some restoration projects (more about this in later blogs).

            Anyway, I noticed this story yesterday in the Guardian. An analysis of Australia’s press coverage of global warming reveals that one third of that nation’s news media rejects the science of climate change. This is head spinningly astounding. The Australians have always impressed me as being particularly reasonable folks. But the Guardian explains that:

A study of 602 articles in 10 newspapers found that 32% dismissed or questioned whether human activity was causing the climate to change. The articles were analyzed between February and April in 2011 and again in the same period in 2012.Significantly, newspapers based a small fraction of their coverage on peer-reviewed science, instead relying heavily on comment pieces penned by writers without a scientific background.

If there is someone or something blameworthy here, the Guardian lays it squarely with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which has increasingly treated the subject of global warming in opinion pieces rather than straightforward news coverage. The report, which was conducted by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, a non-profit organization based at the University of Technology in Sydney, said that, “By turning climate science into a debate, skepticism occupies space in Australian non-skeptic media that might otherwise be given to articles covering climate science.” Murdoch also owns Fox News in this country, which is pretty infamous for their questionable coverage of global warming.

Of course, things like this have consequences. Perhaps this had something to do with Australia’s last elections, in which the electorate voted out the Labor Party and replaced them with a two-party center-right coalition, whose leader, Tony Abbott, voiced as one of his objectives the end to Australia’s carbon tax.

Knowing this about the press coverage in Australia, the election starts to makes sense. If enough folks read in their newspapers that global warming is at best an iffy proposition, they will vote to rid themselves of a carbon tax. There is much more to the election than this one tax issue, but I’m certain that it played some part in the outcome.

Global Warming: It's Not Just the Polar Bears That Are Threatened

For climate change, the poster child is the polar bear. As depicted in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth we see an animation of a tiring bear swimming in the arctic and vainly searching for the sea ice that will be its safe haven. With less and less sea ice, the environment in which the polar bear hunts its prey, the seal, it is going to prove quite difficult for this species to survive.

            The polar bear’s range extends through millions of square miles through North America, Europe, and Asia. That a species with such a large range, with thousands of individuals, could be threatened by climate change is a tragedy.

            The greater tragedy is that the polar bear is only one of the wonderful creatures whose existence is threatened by a warmer world. National Geographic shows us thousands upon thousand of walruses crowded together on an island, a sight that is growing more common as northern sea is reduced by global warming. Because the walrus habitat is literally melting away, their numbers are in decline. Under the Endangered Species Act the species is listed as threatened and soon may be listed as endangered.

            The resulting crowding from the loss of habitat further exacerbates the plight of the Pacific walrus. Animals that get frightened by something like a helicopter could start a stampede, crushing other walruses. Close proximity to other individuals can also lead to diseases being spread more quickly and easily.

            There has also been a die-off of moose in North America, and global warming may be a big piece of the puzzle behind this phenomenon. In New Hampshire a longer fall season and less snow in the winter has lead to an increase in the number of winter ticks. These parasites can seriously affect the health of a moose. Some of the large mammals can be plagued with as many as 100,000 ticks. The moose can loose so much blood that they become anemic. Moose are not adapted to dealing with such heavy tick populations. They scratch the ticks and can tear off large patches of hair. With the hair loss moose can experience hypothermia when it rains in the spring.

            On the other hand, winters are warmer and shorter across the range of the moose. This warmth may be contributing to the moose mortality. Being adapted to the cold, they expend extra energy to stay cool in the warmer weather, which exhausts the animals and can lead to death.

            Scientists are still looking into other factors, such as hunting and the presence of wolves that may be leading to the decline of the moose.

From Appalachian Voices: The Fifth of the Five Worst Political Lies Used to Support of Mountaintop Removal

The 5 Worst Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal « Appalachian Voices

Thom actually posted this a while back. Sorry it took me so long to putting it up here. This is the fifth lie used to support the mountaintop mining industry, that we need to blow up our Appalachian mountains for what is called “energy security.”

            Thom Kay, Legislative Analyst for Appalachian Voices, explains how mountaintop removal provides such a small amount of the fossil fuel used for electricity production and how hollow this argument is. One thing that Thom could have mentioned is that ever since the original OPEC oil embargo the phrase “energy security” has been used by the fossil fuel industry as a rhetorical device anytime that the industry wants to loosen regulations on drilling and mining or when they are trying to pave the way for an additional pipeline.

            Once you couch your argument for more drilling or mining in terms of “security” you’re no longer talking about profits for your company or dividends for your investors, your talking about winning the war, Old Glory, mom, and apple pie. Industry knows how useful this rhetorical device is. Use it and those who oppose your efforts to loosen fracking restrictions, eliminate CO2 regulations, or get in the way of your mountaintop mine wind up looking like unpatriotic tree huggers.

            A brief Proquest search on “energy security” in the New York Times shows the term taking off in 1979, in the wake of the energy crisis, then gaining some currency during the eighties. It began to die off in the nineties but experienced a resurgence after 2000, perhaps due to the rise of more neocon rhetoric floating around during the second Bush administration.

How Can The French Achieve This? Court Rules No Fracking in France

France Cements Fracking Ban is the headline from the Guardian. Because of pressure from environmental groups, the French passed legislation banning fracking in 2011. Today’s headline is in reference to France’s Constitutional Court, their version of a Supreme Court, which ruled that the ban is constitutional; after this court ruling the fracking ban is, without a doubt, the law of the land in France.

How is it that the French can ban fracking, while here there seems to be no question that such a ban would be an impossibility? France seems to do a lot of things right. While that country has one of the best heath care systems in the world, we here in America have a paralyzed government because our Affordable Care Act, a system that, while it is an improvement, is not as good as what French residents enjoy. France didn’t go and invade Iraq with us. They are probably better off for it, too.

More and more, due to increasing evidence (here and here) I’ve grown suspicious of hydrolic fracturing's effects on the environment, people’s health, and even our public policy and politics (here, here, here, here, and here),  and perhaps it should be banned here in the U.S. France has powerful oil companies that can lobby the French Parliamentarians, yet that power was unable to influence this fracking ban. What is different about France that their system of government can, in my opinion, serve the public good? How do they do it?

Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia: Calculating the Psychological Costs of Mountaintop Removal

When I ran across this study this morning, I thought, “Well, duh. You needed a scientific study to find this out?” Michael Hendryx, who is at the School of Public Health at Indiana University but spearheaded research into the health effects that mountaintop removal while he was at West Virginia University, and Kestral A. Innes-Wimsatt, a researcher at WVU, looked into the prevalence of depression among those who live among the holocaust of mountaintop mining. Big surprise, removing the mountains for the coal inside leaves folks depressed.

            Overall, around seven percent of the U.S. population suffers some form of depression. Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt found that around 10 percent of residents in the coalfields of Appalachia suffer from depression and that around 17 percent of folks who live around mountaintop mines have some form of depression. Even after adjusting for other factors that might affect a person’s susceptibility to depression, such as race and poverty, Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt still found that mountaintop removal coal mining affected the mental well being of the people who live around the mines. From their research the authors conclude:

The odds of a score indicative of risk for major depression were 40% higher in MTR areas compared to non- mining areas after statistical adjustment for other risks. After control for covariates, the risk of major depression was statistically elevated only in the MTR areas and not in the areas where other forms of mining were practiced, compared to the non-mining referent.

Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia was published in the online peer-reviewed journal Ecopsychology.  Explaining their findings, the authors suggest that the mountaintop removal depression might be due to solistalgia, a condition of distress during periods of environmental change. This distress is most acute for people who feel particular connections to their environments, as many folks in Appalachia, who can trace their ancestors back for generations, feel.

            Some of the factors associated with depression, such as obesity, binge drinking, smoking, and poverty were adjusted for in this research. In the real world it is difficult to actually separate all this from mountaintop removal. As mountaintop removal reduces the amount of jobs and the economic well being of a community, people feel abandoned by friends and family as they move away. They also feel trapped into an economic system that offers them little chance for secure employment. All of these things depress people, and all of them are caused by mountaintop removal. What I’m suggesting here is that the scientific controls that Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt imposed on their research, which researchers have to do to maintain scientific integrity, actually winds up underestimating the amount of mental distress caused by the mountaintop mines.

A cemetery left amid the destruction of mountaintop removal. Would you feel good living around this?

            

More Science Reveals Fracking To Be a Bad Deal

It’s looking more and more like fracking is not such a great idea. I’ve avoided seeing Gasland, wanting to take a good look at fracking and see for myself what the process was all about. While visiting in West Virginia I’ve talked to frackers, and a lot of their defense of the drilling practice made some sense to me at the time.

            Well, there’s the stuff folks tell you, and then there’s the stuff that you read about in the news and what the science tells you. And as of right now, from the news and the science, it looks like fracking is a lousy deal.

            A report from Environment America, a federation of environmental advocacy organizations, gives some pretty scary numbers: Last year in the U.S. fracking produced 280 billion gallons of toxic waste water, enough to flood an area the size of Washington D.C. under 22 feet of bad water. Fracking by the Numbers concludes that damage from fracking, “is widespread and occurs on a scale unimagined just a few years ago.”

            Damage from fracking can also be acute. Just this last week a study from Duke University and published in Environmental Science & Technology found that fracking wastewater discharged into a stream in the Pittsburgh area had elevated the levels of radioactivity in the stream. Sediment collected downstream of a fracking operation had radium levels about 200 times greater than sediment collected upstream of the fracking operation. And as I’ve posted earlier, a recent study found that wells close to fracking were more likely to be contaminated with methane.

            It is true that not all the studies have found contamination problems. Is this one of those times when the typical scientific rejoined, “more research needs to be done,” can be heard? Perhaps there might be safe fracking, but I’m beginning to think that it is from a rare combination of certain geologies, very safe drilling practices, and a fair amount of luck.

The Huffingtonpost Lets the Agenda Driven Rhetoric of an Anti-Environmentalist to Twist a Headline and a Story

It’s surprising to me that journalists will allow their thoughts—as well as their headlines and stories—to be shaped by special interests. In this case, the Huffingtonpost has a story about 100 genetically modified papaya trees being hacked down in Hawaii.

            The story identifies the act as possibly being “eco-terrorism.” As I’ve blogged before, “eco-terrorism” was a term coined by Ron Arnold, who has been an executive with the Center For the Defense of Free Enterprise for the last 30 years. He opposes environmental concerns.

            Since he first came up with the smear that puts vandals and saboteurs in the same category as the Boston Marithon bombers and Osama bin Laden, Arnold’s neologism has become part of the lexicon of the FBI, which now has a definition of domestic eco-terrorism that is loosely defined to include vandalism. This obviously pleases Arnold. In an odd sort of cyber-tautology he now cites this FBI definition on the web site of the Center For the Defense of Free Enterprise to back up his lexicographic campaign.

            I don’t really know much about the Huffingtonpost, but it should be above using this sort of agenda driven rhetoric. Some folks in the FBI would be happy to drop eco-terrorism as term that the bureau uses. No one has ever been hurt by vandals who are motivated because of an environmental agenda, and some folks have criticized law enforcement agencies, believing that using the term “domestic terrorism” will get them more funds and more attention from the press.

From Appalachian Voices: The Fourth of the Five Worst Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal

The 5 Worst Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal « Appalachian Voices

The above link takes you to the fourth of Thom Kay’s Five Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal. In this post he reveals the mendacity of the claims of reclamation, that the mined lands can be restored to their former ecological intactness or that the mines can give Appalachia needed flatlands. As Thom says:

One reason that claiming more flat land will lead to economic development is such an egregious lie is that the vast majority of this reclaimed land sees no economic development whatsoever. In 2010, Appalachian Voices worked with the Natural Resources Defense Council on a survey of reclaimed mine sites and discovered that, of the 410 mine surveyed, 366 (89.3%) had no form of verifiable post-mining development, excluding forestry and pasture.

From Coal Tattoo: West Virginia's Leaders Embrace Coal's Past As the EPA Tries to Limit Greenhouse Gasses

EPA carbon rules: West Virginia leaders continue to grasp for the past, rather than embracing the future

The above link takes you to Ken Ward’s Coal Tattoo and describes the absolute backwards stance taken by both Democrats and GOP politicians in West Virginia. Only retiring Senator Rockefeller made any sense in this ever warming world.

Scientists Discover That Mountaintop Removal Is Bad For Fish

One of the best things you can do in West Virginia is fish. I did some as a little boy, catching mostly bluegill in a lake not far from our home in Anmoore, West Virginia, and my uncle went often up to Elkins for some great fishing up around that area. Mountaintop removal, however, could be removing those fish from the rivers and streams of Appalachia.

            A new study[i] from the peer-reviewed journal Ecology of Freshwater Fish finds that mountaintop removal threatens the fish in the stream of Appalachia. Robert L. Hopkins, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rio Grande, and Jordan C. Roush of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, studied the effects that mountaintop mining had on six different fish species that live in different stream ecologies in eastern Kentucky. Unsurprisingly, the scientists found that populations of four of the species were negatively affected by the existence of mountaintop removal in their streams’ watershed. Perhaps surprisingly, the study found that the effect of mountaintop removal was less dependent on the overall acreage of land destroyed by mountaintop mining in a watershed and was affected more by how large the individual mining operations were.

            Effects of Mountaintop Mining on Fish Distributions in Central Appalachia has just been published, so I only have access to the abstract. I don’t even know what kinds of fish or which watersheds were included were in the study. I will update this post as I learn more.

---

[i] Hopkins, Robert L., and Jordan C. Roush. "Effects Of Mountaintop Mining On Fish Distributions In Central Appalachia." Ecology Of Freshwater Fish 22.4 (2013): 578-586. Environment Complete. Web. 27 Sept. 2013.

Danger: It's More Than Obamacare on the Chopping Block For the GOP

The political blackmail that the GOP is using, that of threatening a government shutdown in order to render the new healthcare legislation toothless by defunding it, has been the headline grabbing news over the last couple of weeks and has only intensified over the last few days. But there is more to the shenanigans that the Grand Old Party is up to.

            The Republicans are now using the mechanism of raising the debt ceiling as a way to give away a wish list to big oil, King Coal, and other industries. According to the New York Times, GOP leaders sent to their rank and file a laundry list of provisions they want attached to the bill to raise the debt ceiling. Besides delaying Obamacare and limits on malpractice, the wish list includes such anti-environmental provisions as giving a green light to the construction of the Keystone pipeline, more offshore oil and gas drilling, more permitting of oil and gas exploration on federal lands, rolling back regulation on coal ash, and blocking the EPA’s new regulations on greenhouse gas production.

            Wow.

            Politically, the GOP controls the House, but that is only due to some ingenious Gerrymandering that some of the states were recently able to pull off. The party of Lincoln has failed to gain the popular vote for the presidency in five of the last six elections, and the one win for the GOP was for a sitting president, George W. Bush, who barely won. This isn’t the only time that the Republican Party has become a loser. Things were so bad for them in the seventies after Nixon’s disgrace and resignation that they considered changing the name of the party.

All these latest giveaways to business and industry that the GOP is trying to work into the debt ceiling deal are, of course, all about campaign donations and money. But what they are proposing is so extreme that I sense a crazed sort of nihilism that wants to pull in and destroy what is good and great about this country while this political party experiences what may be a death spiral.

From Appalachian Voices: The Third of the Five Worst Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal

The 5 Worst Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal « Appalachian Voices

The above link gives the third lie about mountaintop removal. The common wisdom around Appalachia say that no politician opposed to mountaintop mining can get elected in Kentucky or West Virginia.

            Well, a Catholic could never be elected president, the same was said a of black candidate. Common wisdom, as Thom Kay, Legislative Associate for Appalachian Voices, points out here is often wrong. Besides, folks in West Virginia and Kentucky don’t like mountaintop removal. It messes up the states they call home.

From Thom Kay's blog, a 2011 poll on mountaintop removal

From Appalachian Voices: The Second of the Five Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal « Appalachian Voices

The 5 Worst Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal « Appalachian Voices

The above link is the second installment of the Five Political Lies that industry and their politicians use in support of their mountaintop removal. Appalachian Voices Legislative Associate Thom Kay points out the obvious absurdity of this lie: Mountaintop mining has increased and the jobs have gone away.

From Thom's post from Appalachian Voices. With mountaintop removal coal production has soared and jobs have plummeted.

And where there is mountaintop removal, that's where the poor people are.