Thank God For Pope Francis

A big thumbs up for the pope

This is big. Really big. In anticipation of his upcoming encyclical on global warming, Pope Francis held a summit meeting yesterday called “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development,”

So often when I hear people talk about global warming, what is put forward are technological fixes, everything from switching to hybrid cars to turning the oceans into mechanisms to sequester vast amounts of the carbon that we’ve thrown up in the atmosphere. We certainly need to consider and implement some of these technology changes. Driving a Prius is better than driving a gas-guzzler.

            But technology alone will not get us out of the corner that we have painted ourselves into. For what has driven all of our tech advances since the birth of the industrial revolution is the consumption of resources. That’s what the whole paradigm is all about. Technology cannot save us from technology.

            What the pope is calling for to save us and our planet is a change in our spirit. One top Vatican official, Cardinal Peter Turkson, said during the meeting that a “full conversion” of hearts and minds is necessary to solving the problem of global warming. He is right. Turkson went on to say:

In our recklessness, we are traversing some of the planet’s most fundamental natural boundaries. And the lesson from the Garden of Eden still rings true today: pride, hubris, self-centeredness are always perilous, indeed destructive. The very technology that has brought great reward is now poised to bring great ruin.

As long as we are geared and programed to consume and have the hubris that blinds us to the effects of our actions we will continue to warm the world. And this message is not just something for Catholics or just for Christians. Jewish,Muslim, Protestant, Buddhist and Hindu leaders accompanied the pope at the meeting today.

Interactive Map Highlights the Communities Affected By the Mountaintop Removal Mines

Working with Google and SkyTruth, an environmental mapping organization, Appalachian Voices has developed an interactive map that illustrates how the mountaintop mines have encroached on the communities of Appalachia. There are hundreds of towns and communities that are affected by the mines. This map concentrates on the 50 communities thought to be the most horribly affected by the mountaintop removal coalmines. The map is here.

The Heartland Institute To Pope Francis: Don't Believe the Science of Global Warming

I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of embarrassment when I read about this. Apparently the Heartland Institute, possibly the most rabid of the conservative “think tanks” when it comes to denying the existence of global warming, is sending a contingent of its folks to Rome to, in their eyes, set the pope straight about climate change.

            The American organization sponsors an annual bizarro world version of the UN’s IPCC, in which they bloviate as best they can about conspiracies, money-grubbing climate scientists falsifying data, and imaginary cooling trends. They even call their get together the International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in the hope, I image, that the initials are close enough to fool people into thinking that they are the same as the UN’s IPCC.

The Heartland folks are on their way to Rome as they anticipate the Pontiff’s upcoming encyclical. The pope is expected to say that, given our present situation, reducing greenhouse gasses has become a moral imperative.

The pope is called upon to be gracious to those who seek his audience, so Pope Francis will meet with the representatives from the Heartland Institute. But they should already know that the pope receives some of the best council when it comes to science. OK, the Church really blew it with Bruno and Galileo, but that was over 300 years ago. Things have changed since then.

            Years ago, when scientists were uncertain if other factors besides CO2 might mitigate the warming effects of our release of greenhouse gasses, the Heartland Institute could gain some traction in the news and opinion pieces. But since that time they have painted themselves into an intellectual corner, and now they are quite stuck.

Pope Francis is expected to say that reducing greenhouse gasses is a moral imperative.

And they are now desperate. Until now global warming has been something scientists studied; it has been an issue for which governments and politicians have made laws and created policies. It has been something that most people ignored, too.

But with this his encyclical, Pope Francis takes global warming into our spiritual realm, a place where the Heartland Institute does not go. The “think tank” can have success with some folks as they sow doubt, and they can have even more success as they lobby Congress and make their large campaign contributions. But the pope, particularly this pope, holds great influence over his Catholic Church, as well as a great deal of the rest of the Christian world. With his upcoming encyclical, climate change becomes part of our spiritual lives, the subject of homilies from the pulpit, and a concern of our prayers. It goes from an abstract thing to something quite human.

In their campaign to keep us from addressing climate change, with this latest development with the pope, the Heartland Institute should know that they no longer have a prayer.

Let the Mines Be Big and Toxic Because Those Hillbillies Just Don't Matter

Jeff Biggers gets it. The author of The United States of Appalachia and Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland and a man who grew up around coal mining and its legacy understands the hellishness that surface mining, and particularly mountaintop removal, unleashes on Appalachia. Here in his Guardian opinion piece, Would There Be More Regulation of Coal Mining If It Didn't Just Affect "Hillbillies," he explains that the Appalachian Mountains are ravaged and the streams and ecosystems are ruined because we simply disregard the lives of Appalachians. We think that they are just a bunch of dumb hillbillies who deserve their lot.

            There is obviously more to it than the larger prejudices of the country as a whole. There are the hand-in-gloveworkings of the coal companies and politicians of the region; the infection of school curricula in which students are given propaganda by King Coal to be learned as lessons in their classrooms; there is the endemic poverty that grinds down people’s spirits and keeps them ever distracted worrying about their mounting bills and being trapped in an economic system that gives them as much choice in their lives as their ancestors had in the company towns.

It's just a bunch of hillbillies who live nearby. So who cares?

But Biggers gets the larger picture of how mountaintop removal can be such a low priority, even for people and groups that care about poverty or environmental concerns. You really should read his opinion piece. Here is another link to it right here. And remember, Appalachian lives matter.

Mountaintop Removal, Just Not In the Press and Just Not On Our Minds

I know that this is something that bloggers are loath to admit, but often, particularly when I blog about mountaintop removal mining, the hits I get on this blog can be pretty meager, diving down from dozens or hundreds to only a few hits.

            The reason for this is quite simple. Mountaintop mining is simply not on the minds of most folks. This is due in part at least to the few stories about the mines in the press. In the past 15 years the New York Times ran 40 stories that were about mountaintop removal or mentioned mountaintop removal somewhere in a story.[1] Conversely, over the same period the Times ran 17,158 stories that were about or mentioned Israel.

            Certainly there is much that goes on in Israel that is newsworthy, and on the occasions when there are missiles flying or bombs going off there will be a lot of press coverage of that area of the world. But a scourge on the land and people of Appalachia—one that is occurring within our borders, one that has been investigated by the U.N. for human rights abuses, one which, unlike the politics or conflicts of a country thousands of miles away, we can actually do something about—why does it receive less than 0.3 percent of the coverage of that given to Israel?

            Because of the dearth of press coverage, we just aren’t curious about mountaintop removal and don’t try to find out more about it. Below is a graph showing the searches in Google[2] for mountaintop removal over the last ten years. The graph doesn’t give absolute numbers, but you’ll get my point in the next few graphs. You can see from the graph that interest in mountaintop coal mining peaked around 2010.

 

Goolging of mountaintop removal since 2005

Now take a look at the graph below. It shows the googling of mountaintop removal compared to the googling of fracking. The blue line is the one representing mountaintop removal and the red one is the fracking one. If you think about it, fracking has been in the headlines a lot more than MTR mining. Maybe this can be explained by more compelling and appealing documentaries about fracking. Perhaps the press covers the extractive practice more because more communities are affected by hydraulic fracturing than that of mountaintop removal.

 

Googling of mountaintop removal and fracking since 2005

OK, here’s the kicker. Below is a graph of the googling done on mountaintop removal, fracking, and Taylor Swift, the very popular singer. The line representing her Google searches is the dashed yellow one.

 

Googling of mountaintop removal, fracking, and Taylor Swift since 2005

Wow. The searches on fracking barely resister compared to the ones on Swift, and unless I knew that mountaintop removal was graphed, I would not know it was there.

            I don’t mean to take away from Taylor Swift and her popularity. She brings a great deal of joy to millions. I would like to see peace for the Middle East, and perhaps the press coverage of the region will help bring that about. The same can be said about fracking, that the press coverage and interest in the subject will help us to stop or severely restrict this dangerous extractive practice. But why such miniscule press coverage of the mines that are devastating our Appalachia? Why?

And here's a picture of Taylor Swift, just for good measure. photo: Jason Merritt/Getty Images 

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[1] This search in the Times and other searches were performed using Proquest.

[2] These graphs were generated in Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends/

Thank You, Mr. President

Three cheers for President Obama for this address. He took this opportunity in his weekly address, the week of Earth Day, to say that climate change is our greatest threat, which it is.

            I would have been happier had he said these things on the occasion of his first Earth Day in office; and I would have been happier had he gone further than touting more efficient cars and solar energy and said that we need to transform large sectors of our society and much of the way we live in order to keep the planet from heating up like an oven. Even still, thank you, Mr. President, for addressing global warming in you weekly address.

Mountaintop Removal Linked to Health Hazards Again

It’s been pretty well established that mountaintop removal is bad for the health of the folks who live around the mines. Mountaintop mining kicks up a lot of dust, and many of the ailments that afflict those who live close to the mines is directly related to inhaling coal dust or silica associated with the mines.

            Well, it turns out that recent research indicates that the ultrafine dust from the mines can make people sick, too. This is dust so small that you cannot see it. It is so small that it can pass through the incredibly small holes in the cell walls of living tissue. Once the dust enters the cell through the cell wall, inflammation occurs, and inflammation can lead to a number of ailments.

            Lab research backs this up. In one case, rats exposed to dust composed of titanium oxide, the white pigment in paint, suffered no ill effect. If the titanium oxide dust was very, very small, the rats died.

This mine can make you very sick.

If these particles are so small they can pass through the pores of cells, they are too small to be stopped by dust masks or other prophylactic devices. On the other hand, getting rid of these ultrafine dust particles in Appalachia is pretty simple. End mountaintop removal.

Keeping West Virginia's Children Ignorant About Climate Change

Once again West Virginia Board of Education is trying to weaken the science standards when it comes to global warming.

This started in December of last year, when board member Wade Linger, who has said that, “[w]e need to look at all the theories about [climate change] rather than just the human changes in greenhouse gases,” and that he doesn’t believe that global warming is a “foregone conclusion,” had language inserted in the state’s science standards that portrayed climate change as something that is doubtful and debatable. His suggestion, that “and fall” followed the word “rise” in the sixth grade science standard, was adopted. Other changes included the following:

Original ninth grade science requirement: “Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.”

Adopted version: “Analyze geoscience data and the predictions made by computer climate models to assess their creditability [sic] for predicting future impacts on the Earth System.”

Original high school elective Environmental Science requirement: “Debate climate changes as it [sic] relates to greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Adopted version: “Debate climate changes as it relates to natural forces such as Milankovitch cycles, greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Other Board of Education members also expressed views that were skeptical about the reality of global warming. After the Charleston Gazette reported on the adopted changes, however, scientists, West Virginia residents, and educational and environmental activists pressured the Board of Education to correct the standards to be more in line with the accepted science on the subject. Linger’s changes to the standards were withdrawn. That was back in January.

            While not a word-for-word revamp of his original science standards changes, Linger’s latest move is very similar to the ones he proposed last December. We will see what sort of backlash this latest move generates.

            Members of the West Virginia Board of Education might simply be avid listeners to Rush Limbaugh and other AM radio folks who deny global warming. Or these changes to the curricula might be due to pressure from King Coal. The coal industry already has a big influence on the curricula of eastern Kentucky schools with their Coal Energy and Resource (CEDAR) program. This video below gives an idea of what CEDAR is all about. Watch it and try to tell me it is not indoctrination:

Those tons and tons of coal that are mined in Appalachia turn into tons and tons of CO2 when they are burned in power plants and factories. The coal industry knows this. They know that children who fully grasp this connection will not likely be supporters of their industry when they grow up. So it’s best to keep them in the dark on what the science says about coal and a warming world.

Appalachian Lives Matter

It is probably obvious that I care deeply about the things I write about in this blog. I love the mountains and the people of Appalachia where I grew up, the wonderful creatures that we share this world with, and the environment in general.

            Although these things are important to me, as I sit and write about them at my computer, these topics can become a little abstract for me. I’ll blog about the mines in Appalachia, but I’m thousands of miles away from them. I don’t wake up with coal dust on my windowsill, and I don’t see the yellow sulfur stains that the mining brings to streams and rivers.

            From the fieldwork that I’ve done, testing the water quality at the estuarial waters of the San Diego River, I’ve actually seen the salinity of the water increase over the last decade, evidence of rising seas and a warming world. Despite the concrete evidence, the numbers rising over time and the graphs inching upwards, I don’t perceive the world as being warmer than I remember it ten or fifteen years ago. I just don’t. Global warming remains a terrible abstraction for me.

That abstractness about the environment changed today. A Facebook friend sent the above video along to me. It’s a portion of a new film called Dear President Obama Americans Against Fracking in One Voice. The man who is talking about his work in fracking, his mishap, and his subsequent cancer diagnosis is Sal Bombardiere. I went to high school with Sal. He was a friend of mine. It is heartbreaking to see a man, any man, so sick and so broken. But I know this man. I remember Sal as a fun guy, a jokester. Somebody you certainly wanted as your friend.

            Although I’ve written critically about hydraulic fracturing (here) and (here), I have not read great deal on the topic; so I have been trying to keep an open mind. I’ve talked to folks in the industry, and they have been quite convincing when they have explained the safety of the extraction process.

            That has changed today. I don’t know how anyone can watch Sal in this video and dismiss the concerns of those worried about fracking operations close to or in their communities.

            Where I was suspicious, I am now angry. Chris Hedges, the journalist, author, and activist, in his recent book with cartoonist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction Days of Revolt, has called Appalachia an economic sacrifice zone. Along with the economy, Hedges can add the sacrifice of human lives. Maybe it’s time for people to start saying and repeating another simple phrase: Appalachian lives matter.

NASA Images Reveal Destruction of Mountaintop Removal

This page from NASA’s Earth Observatory shows the growth of the Hobet mine, one of the largest mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia, from 1984 through 2013. If you're in a good mood and don't want to spoil it, please don't click on the link! It's pretty depressing. Otherwise on the Earth Observatory page you can see the footprint of the mine grow across the landscape. Remember, this is only one mine.

The Hobet Mine in 1984, dwarfing the towns of Danville and Madison, West Virginia.
In the next 20 years it gets way worse. photo: NASA

Wisconsin Public Lands Commission Bans Employees From Working On Global Warming

The headlines from Wisconsin have been a little weird in the past few years, going back to when governor Scott Walker went and punished the unions who did not support his election.

            Now the three-member Board of Commissioners of Public Lands has voted 2-1to ban its employees from working on global warming issues during company time. The single vote against the ban, interestingly enough, came from Tia Nelson, the daughter of Gaylord Nelson, the U.S. Senator from Wisconsin who was the driving force behind the first Earth Day in 1970. The two votes in favor of the ban came from GOP members.

            I understand that those who work with public lands do a lot of things, the main purpose being the stewardship of a state’s lands. Now it seems to me that stewardship of lands of any state of the union would have to take into consideration climate change. How are these folks in Wisconsin going to be able to do their jobs?

ESA Protection Proposed For Two Appalachian Crayfish Threatened By Mountaintop Removal

Two crayfish that have died out throughout much of their range in Appalachia may have some hope. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to protect the two species under the Endangered Species Act.

            More than half of their habitats of the Big Sandy crayfish and the Guyandotte River crayfish have become too polluted, mostly from mountaintop removal coal mining, for these creatures to live in. The proposed protection by the Fish and Wildlife Service is in response to a petition and a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Big Sandy crayfish photo: Guenter Schuster

Though the evidence that mountaintop removal causes ecological damage has been mounting, and the health hazards to people because of mountaintop mining have become more evident, this is the first news that I’ve run across that any legislators or government agency is doing anything to mitigate the harm that this mining practice inflicts on the people or land of Appalachia.

            You can read more about the proposed listing in the press release from the Center for Biological Diversity.

ALEC Denies That We're Causing Global Warming, But They Don't Want Folks To Know That They Deny Global Warming

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been around since the eighties. They draft and support business friendly legislation. As part of their mission, they have received money from oil companies, such as Exxon, to deny the existence of climate change.[1]

            They have been a big part of the global warming denialist industry, but suddenly they don’t want folks to know that they are in the denialist industry. ALEC lawyers have sent letters to Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters telling them to immediately “cease making false statements” and “remove all false or misleading material” that may suggest that the conservative organization has any doubt about climate change.

            Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters certainly do call out ALEC for its global warming rhetoric. You can check out instances of where the do so here (League of Conservation Voters) and here (Common Cause).

            And ALEC really does, at least in a gobbledygook sort of way deny that we humans are causing global warming. The following is from ALEC’s Position Statement on Renewables and Climate Change:

Climate change is a historical phenomenon and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions. ALEC will continue to monitor the issue and support the use of sound science to guide policy, but ALEC will also incorporate economic and political realism. Unilateral efforts by the United States or regions within the United States will not significantly decrease carbon emissions globally, and international efforts to decrease emissions have proven politically infeasible and unenforceable. Policymakers in most cases are not willing to inflict economic harm on their citizens with no real benefit. ALEC discourages impractical visionary goals that ignore economic reality, and that will not be met without serious consequences for worldwide standard of living.

OK, nowhere in this statement do they come out and deny that we are making a very warm world with our power plants and automobiles, and I guess that ALEC’s lawyers could stand up in a court and expect to convince a judge or jury that this statement does not deny that climate change is real. But to me it’s obvious that such statements as “the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions,” reveal their intention to keep their obfuscation going.

If all of ALEC’s money came from the fossil fuel industry, they could brush aside the organizations that point out their denialism, but other companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have left ALEC because of its stance on global warming. Even British Petroleum left ALEC because of its denialist position.

So ALEC wants to have it both ways. They want to serve their supporters who want them to deny that global warming is happening. And they want to bring back Google and Yahoo into their tent as well. So they are left in the very awkward position of denying their denial.

The world keeps getting warmer and my head keeps spinning.

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[1] Lee, J. S. (2003, May 28). Exxon backs groups that question global warming. New York Times

Maybe It's Time to Talk About Geoengineering, and Maybe We'll Do Something About CO2

I’ve only blogged about geoengineering once or twice. My feeling has been that it is an inevitability. Most folks know of and are concerned about global warming, yet we still keep electing politicians who make no promise of reducing our carbon output. We even elect politicians who are hostile to the idea that climate change is even real.

Senator James Inhofe calling Climate Change a hoax on the Senate Floor

We elect individuals like this to Congress. Who is to blame? 

So nothing gets done. In the meantime the world warms. I see things going from bad to worse until desperation sinks in somewhere, possibly India or another powerful country with a lot of land giving way to a rising sea, and that government will start shooting sulfate aerosols into the air to cool things down. We will then have crossed the threshold from inadvertently rearranging the dynamics of the atmosphere to intentionally manipulating the atmosphere.

Most folks, me included, have a very natural reaction to these ideas, that they remind us of the workings of some mad scientist. We see Vincent Price or Bella Lugosi in a black and white B movie crazily using his evil genius to despoil an innocent world.

Atomic supermen? Or sulphate aerosols. You decide. 

Lex Luthor, Superman won't let him geoengineer the world.

So are you scared now? Are you sufficiently freaked out by the idea of scientists taking a monkey wrench to the atmosphere to cool down the world that we’re warming with our power plants and automobiles? It seems that this is the real irony of geoengineering. Climate change freaks out some folks, but not all that many. And there are folks who aren’t freaked by it at all or deny that it’s happening. But geoengineering freaks the bejesus out of everybody.

At least that seems to be the conclusion of a study by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who looks into how people’s values influence how they process information and assess risk. I won’t go into the details of the study. You can find it here, published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and there is a Grist article about the study here. I’ll just sum up that the study found that if you have folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for stricter controls on carbon emissions, it only made folks more entrenched in the beliefs they had before, whether they thought of global warming as a threat or were skeptical or doubtful.

If folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for geoengineering, then skeptics were open to the reality of climate change. Also, those who believed in global warming were left more ambivalent after reading about geoengineering.

 

Pumping sea water into the atmosphere, one proposed geoengineeering idea 

Besides cluing us in, once again, to the reality that people are quirky and don’t behave predictably, what does this study tell us? I think we all feel that if we talk more about geoengineering, then it will normalize the idea, making all that much easier to consider and make us complacent about reducing our CO2 emissions. But maybe if we started to include the topic more in our discussions, it might be a way to loosen the skepticism of a good number of people. And it might get them to sign on to reducing our emissions and adequately dealing with global warming, instead of waiting for somebody to come along and start making atomic supermen to suck up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

What do you think? Should we talk about geoengineering, even though we don’t want to do it?

Or we could throw these giant parasols into orbit Good idea, or scary?

Governor Brown Issues Executive Order to Save Water

Our governor, Jerry Brown, has issued an executive order directing our State Water Resources Control Board to impose on all of California’s local water supply agencies a 25 percent reduction in their water use.

 

Drought stricken Oroville Lake, which is north of Sacramento. Now how you gonna float your boat? photo: Rich Pedrocelli Associated Press

Snowpack in the Sierras, which gives California about 30 percent of our water supply, is right now only about five percent of average. Yes, that’s right, five percent. That’s the lowest recorded level going back to 1950. Locally, here in San Diego, we’ve received about six and a half inches of precipitation for the year. Normal rainfall ranges from 10 to 12 inches a year, which usually falls from November through March.

The executive order leaves it to the individual agencies as to the manner in which they might achieve their water savings. Certainly most agencies will target gardens and lawns, which consume about 30 percent of residential water use. The New York Times says that water conservation measures may even have us skipping showers.

The order directs the state to work with local agencies to replace grass with drought tolerant landscaping. Left out of the executive order are large farms, which use a lot of water, although the owners of large farms will be required to give detailed water use reports to state regulators. A number of large farms have already seen their water allocations reduced.

So what do you think? Is this too drastic? Too little too late? Or has the governor done the right thing?

West Virginia Leads the Country in Population Loss

The population of West Virginia continues to decline. Thirty years ago there were about Three million people living in the Mountain State. Now less than two million folks call West Virginia home. As the Charleston Gazette explains, with more than 3000 residents leaving the state last year, West Virginia is losing folks faster than any other state.

            As one among the many who have left the hollows and the mountains, this is bittersweet for me. I dearly love West Virginia. I grew up eating pepperoni rolls, and I’ve drunk more than my share of sassafras tea. My mom would make cobbler from the blackberries that I picked in our fields. And I remember how black my hands would stain when we’d gather walnuts in the fall.

            More than anything, it was wanderlust that lead me away. And I never really had a reason to go back for longer than a visit. So I now live in southern California instead of West Virginia. Although I am one of the many former West Virginians, my story is not typical of how and why it is that so many thousands of folks have left. When it comes right down to it, there are fewer and fewer jobs. And the jobs that are there don’t pay as well as they may have in the past. Poverty plagues the state, one of the poorest in the union. With a 18.5 percent of West Virginians living in poverty, the Center For American Progress ranks the Mountain State 41st in its state poverty raking.

Below is a map indicating the counties that have seen population loss and the ones that have seen increases in their numbers. The eastern panhandle has seen an increase in numbers, largely because now the eastern panhandle now serves as a large bedroom community for the D.C. area. Monongalia County has seen the largest increase, almost seven percent. As well, it may be that this area of the state is becoming a bedroom community for Pittsburgh.

 GIS mapping by Paul Hormick. Source files: West Virginia Broadband Mapping http://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/bb/data.html. Population information from West Virginia Public Broadcasting http://wvpublic.org/post/which-west-virginia-counties-have-seen-most-population-loss-recent-years

But of the 55 counties, only 15 have seen increases in their numbers. Forty counties have fewer folks than just a few years ago. Wyoming, Clay, Pendleton, and Mingo have seen population losses of over four percent each. If you take another look at the map, you’ll see that down in the southwestern section of the map are all counties that have lost folks. The one at the bottom, that’s McDowell County, which has lost almost seven percent of its population. Now take a look at the same map below that now shows where the great surface mines and mountaintop removal mines are.

 

GIS mapping by Paul Hormick. Source files: West Virginia Broadband Mappinghttp://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/bb/data.html and I Love Mountains http://ilovemountains.org/maps: Population information from West Virginia Public Broadcasting http://wvpublic.org/post/which-west-virginia-counties-have-seen-most-population-loss-recent-years

For all of those who equate coal with jobs, this second map reveals the falsehood of that claim. At one time, before the giant machines came in to make the giant mines in the mountains, dozens of men might be employed at a mine. And those jobs were union jobs paying good wages. As with the mountains, those jobs and good wages are gone.

 

A closer view of the footprint that the mines make across West Virginia

This has nothing to do with a fantasy world in which president Obama has a “war on coal” and much more to do with the loss of labor rights, cheaper natural gas from fracking, a criminally negligent West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (and the same can be said of the federal EPA), and politicians who are beholden to and serve King Coal instead of the West Virginia citizens who cast their votes and send them into high office.