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