On Trial: Peabody Energy's Bankrupt Climate Change Denial

If you’ve scanned the headlines for Peabody Energy, in the last few months, the story is that one of the largest companies comprising King Coal is now going through bankruptcy. But there is a curious development that I came close to overlooking, as it seems that the U.S. press is concentrating more on Paul Ryan and Donald Trump than it is on some of the legal and civil actions around climate change.

            In something of a Scopes Monkey Trial for the 21^st century, in which truth and science are put on trial against big money and anti-science, science and truth have won. The case was to determine if the state of Minnesota could continue to use its “social cost of carbon,” which is set quite low, or adopt the higher federal cost estimates.

            Peabody Energy was involved in the case because the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the costs to society because of the damage of carbon pollution, affects their bottom line.

            Peabody Energy relied on the tactics that are useful to sway portions of public opinion. But as this case showed, their reliance on obfuscation, setting unrealistic requirements of proof, and cherry picking data, falls apart under facile scrutiny.

            Peabody has just been in some hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission for not fully disclosing to their shareholders the risks that climate change poses to their business.
            We know that Peabody faces financial bankruptcy. With the coal giant are we seeing intellectual and moral bankruptcy as well?

The Depths To Which Men Will Sink Themselves For King Coal

It amazes me how shamefully some people can act, even when they are in public, even when they know that there are microphones and cameras running, even when they are in a House Subcommittee hearing room.

This video shows Representative John Fleming, a GOP representative from Louisiana, questioning Dr Michael Hendryx during a hearing of the House Energy and Minerals Resources Subcommittee today. Hendryx is  the former Director of West Virginia Rural Health Research Center and Founding Chair of the Department of Health Policy Management and Leadership in the School of Public Health at West Virginia University. Among his dozens of published scientific papers are studies of the health effects of mountaintop removal on the residents of Appalachia. In this “hearing” Fleming badgers Hendryx about one of his studies that found cancer rates among residents who live near Mountaintop mining to be twice that of their fellow Appalachians.

            This video is embarrassing. It shows you, like a drunkard lying in a trash strewn ditch, the depths to which men will sink themselves just for that next campaign contribution from King Coal.

Mountaintop Removal Affecting Bird Populations

This is just out from the U.S. Geological Survey. Mountaintop mining is not only changing the landscape, it is, unsurprisingly, changing the ecology of the Appalachians. According to a new study published in Landscape Ecology, songbirds that thrive in forested areas are in decline in areas adjacent to reclaimed mountaintop removal mines, while birds that live in shrub lands are increasing in these areas.

            The results make sense on the face of things. Even when MTR mines are reclaimed, they are mostly large grassland areas devoid of trees. And as you can surmise, it will take a while for trees to take root, grow, and reach maturity in reclaimed mines. Most optimistically the forests will grow to maturity in the mines in a matter of a few decades, but in most cases it will probably take longer.

            Here are some details from the USGS news release:

The study evaluated the bird communities in the forest that remains around the reclaimed habitats in West Virginia and Kentucky. Researchers found that even small amounts of forest lost to mineland or grassland within a landscape resulted in lower abundance for the majority of bird species in the forest that remained adjacent to the reclaimed lands.  Declines in abundance were detected for 12 species of forest interior birds and 11 species of interior edge birds including species of conservation concern such as Cerulean Warbler and Worm-eating Warbler.  But the numbers of some species did go up.

“Some shrubland species, for example the brown thrasher and song sparrow, or forest generalist species such as the brown-headed cowbird and the yellow-throated vireo, did have a positive response to the loss of forest and the gain in mineland or grassland, but most bird species did not,” said Doug Becker, professor of biology at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and senior author of the study.  “If managers want to take actions that may benefit sensitive, forest-dependent species, they need to minimize the amount of forest lost in a landscape.”

A reclaimed mountaintop mine. No trees here. photo: ovec.org

The Cerulean Warbler, one of the bird species in decline around the mountaintop removal mines photo: nc.audubon.org

Other ecological effects have been documented, including the recent finding that the mining was threatening rare endemic crayfish. And it is needless to say that for years and decades we will be finding even more effects that mountaintop removal coal mining has had on the lives of Appalachians and the environment of their mountains.

Mountains that have not been removed for their coal, where many songbirds want to live

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.

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

The Waters - and the People - of West Virginia Are Unsafe Again

This is one of those bits of news that sends my cynicism meter into the stratosphere. On Monday, the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee passed, by a 13 to 12 vote, SB 423. This bill will undo the chemical tank safety legislation that was passed last year after a coal-cleaning chemical from a tank owned by Freedom Industries spilled into the Elk River and poisoned the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians, some of whom had to rely on bottled water for weeks. Schools were closed, and many businesses, such as restaurants, lost business.

The bill would give West Virginia’s Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management more power to withhold from the public information on the chemical tanks in the state. I don’t know about you, but that certainly makes me feel more secure. The bill also reduces the number of tanks administered by last year’s safety law from around 50,000 down to about 12,000. State mandated inspections will be cut back under this bill, and information concerning hazardous materials stored near drinking water intakes will be blocked from the public. The bill has already passed the West Virginia Senate. Governor Tomblin’s signature is almost a certainty.

Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette has more detail of the story here, and you can read his Coal Tattoo blog about it here.

How is a fiasco like this possible? Is it that the folks in West Virginia are too distracted by driving their kids to school and getting themselves off to work that they don’t have the time or energy to care about the water they drink? Or have all those chemicals in the water affected the memories of all those people who had to go to the store just so they could have water to drink last year?

Bryan T. McNiel, in his book Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight Against Big Coal, says that West Virginia best resembles a third world country, one in which an outside industry extracts resources and, in order to do so, has all of the state, the political leaders and the populace, under its thumb. Even if you were to ignore the endemic poverty of West Virginia, the poorest state of the union, or the manner in which the coal industry keeps its message in the minds of the folks of the Mountain State—going so far as to inject itself into the classrooms of Appalachian schoolchildren—this latest turn by the elected officials in Charleston would be proof enough that McNiel is correct in thinking of West Virginia as the banana republic that rests somewhere between Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

I guess that it will be impossible to find out how this came about. Did this legislation come about only recently, the result of renewed backroom deals between politicians and the coal companies? Or had the fix been in from the start? That SB 373 was only a sham, a dog and pony show of politicians doing what’s right for the state of West Virginia and the people who live there, while they knew full well that months hence, possibly even a year later, that SB 373 would die and the laws to protect the water would be as flimsy as a rusted 50-year-old storage tank held together by duct tape and earnestly crossed fingers.

            I don’t think we’ll find out either way. Oh, and by the way, we still do not know about the toxicity of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol, the licorice smelling substance that fouled the waters of the Elk River.

Troubled waters again for West Virginia

Coal Miners Rally in Pittsburgh

Two days of public hearings began today in Pittsburgh on proposed rules by the EPA that would set more stringent standards for the emissions of CO2 from coal-burning power plants. These rules are being proposed to stave off global warming. Similar hearings were held earlier this week in Atlanta, Denver, and Washington, D.C., but these hearings in Pittsburgh, right in the middle of the coal-rich Appalachians, attracted a great deal of attention from the coal industry and its political supporters.

            Yesterday the coal industry held a rally. Called an affordable electricity and energy jobs rally, the gathering included Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, and labor leaders. The rally was attended by hundreds of West Virginia coal miners.

            Tomblin, an unabashed supporter of the coal industry, spoke at the rally in support of the coal companies and against the proposed new power plant rules. Now, before going much further, let me give credit to Tomblin, who, as he spoke at this rally, did not deny the connection between burning coal and warming up the world. He did, however, have a pretty harsh critique of the Environmental Protection Agency. He described the proposed carbon rules as “unreasonable restrictions” and “ideological policies” that would eliminate jobs in the coal region. He also used a race-to-the-bottom argument that reducing the emissions of U.S. power plants would raise electricity rates and send manufacturers overseas to countries that don’t govern their power production so well or don’t govern it at all.

            I don’t claim that Tomblin or other politicians’ concern for jobs is insincere. It is nonetheless interesting to me how well their concern for the employment of their constituents dovetails with the concerns of industry.  Back when the auto industry and the steel industry decided to move operations overseas and allow America’s industrial belt to crumble and turn into the rust belt I don’t recall a great number of politicians pontificating on the concern to keep Detroiters or Pittsburghers in their jobs.

 

When did politicians hold rallies to keep jobs in Detroit and Pittsburgh?

As I said above, I give credit to Tomblin for not denying climate change. And I guess in a weird way I have to give credit to Nick Casey, the former chairman of West Virginia’s Democratic Party who is now running for Congress. He doesn’t deny climate change either. But in a meeting with some of West Virginia’s largest lobbying groups he said that global warming is not a problem to be addressed by West Virginians. “It’s not our problem,” he said, because global warming is an international issue.

            Excuse me, I hope the quality of my writing doesn’t suffer as I keep pounding at the keyboard, but right now my head is spinning. Nick Casey is saying global warming is not a West Virginia problem because the problem belongs to the whole world. Well, well, well. I’m not even sure where to start with this. It is true that as the seas rise and the oceans grow more and more acidic West Virginia will not be immediately affected. The amount of warming that the Mountain State experiences may not be as great as what is expected in other places. So Casey could be right that global warming may not be a big problem for West Virginia. But, as a state with a lot of coal and natural gas, it is, undeniably, their responsibility.

            And my head still spins.

            

Pulling the Plug on Mountaintop Removal Health Research

The saying goes that coal keeps the lights on, but in at least this case the lights are going out. Apparently without much fanfare, the Obama administration pulled the plug on a research project being conducted by the USGS that had been looking into the health effects from mountaintop removal.

            In February of last year the USGS Energy Resources Program discontinued the funding for a study of the air quality in Artie, West Virginia, a very small community that has the misfortune to be surrounded by mountaintop removal mines. You can see Artie pinpointed below in the Google map. The expansive blotches across the landscape are the mountaintop mines.

The study is in its second year and had already resulted in some better understanding of how these large mines hurt the air quality around them and subsequently hurt the health of nearby residents. Folks who live close to mountaintop mining have higher rates of respiratory diseases, including lung cancer.

            The team working on this research has been told that they will be investigating health concerns over fracking. As all agencies have to prioritize their activities around limited budgets, this shift might be seen as a wise move, as fracking, being widespread across the country, has the potential to affect a lot more people than those living in Appalachia around mountaintop removal operations.

            But some folks think that politics may have played a part in the scientific switcheroo, among them Michael Hendryx. Hendryx is a former West Virginia University researcher who has more than two dozen peer-reviewed papers published that establish a link between mountaintop removal and poor health.

            Is this politics or prioritizing? The USGS is continuing other research on MTR, so I really can’t say. I just know it’s a shame that funding gets pulled on needed research, no matter what the reason might be. On the other hand, the science that has been done so far shows mountaintop removal to be harmful to salamanders, fish, people, and other creatures that live in the mountains. We know enough already to see that it should go on no longer.

Testing the Waters in West Virginia

Well, well, well. Maybe I should figure better late than never, but that is small consolation when your drinking water has smelled like licorice and made you nauseated and gave you headaches for weeks.

            The National Institute of Health, specifically the National Toxicology Program at the NIH, announced that they will conduct extensive tests on the health effects of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, the coal cleaning substance that spilled into the Elk River in West Virginia back in January and poisoned the drinking water for 300,000 residents.

            I’m glad that the NIH is doing its job, but it is unsettling that this announcement comes six months after the Elk River spill. It’s actually unsettling that MCHM, which has been used by the coal industry for decades, hadn’t been tested long ago.

The glass is half full and long overdue to be tested for toxicity

Matt Wasson Tells Washington About Mountaintop Removal, Science, and Ill Health

Today on Capitol Hill the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Environment and the Economy held hearings. The hearing was titled “Modernizing the Business of Environmental Regulation and Protection.”

            Persons testifying at the included a number of state regulators who explained programs and efforts to hasten the pace of the regulatory process. Perhaps to shed some light on the reality that for folks living in Appalachia there exists scant regulation when it comes to mountaintop removal Representative John Yarmuth (D-KY) brought in Matt Wasson, the Director of Programs for Appalachian Voices, to testify as to the large body of science that links mountaintop mining to the poor health of Appalachians living in proximity to the mines. Here is a short video of Wasson’s testimony:

Yarmuth is the author of the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act (H.R. 526), which would halt mountaintop removal until it is determined to be safe by the Director of Health and Human Services. The science is there, but I doubt if there is any way his bill could get through Congress. If you want to see the whole hearing, it is here in a hyperlink sort of way.