King Coal Gins Up Animus For Obama and the EPA

Mines have been closing throughout Appalachia, with hundreds of miners laid off. Some of these men have been on the job for years; others have worked decades in the mines. These men are laid off in an area that has been economically depressed since at least the early eighties. Prospects for finding other well-paying work are not good.

            Mine closings also affect the barbers, restaurant owners, waitresses, and just about everybody else who works for a living in a mining community. Paychecks that no longer come in also affect the children.

            Mines close and everybody suffers.

Poverty reigns where they mine coal. Lose your job and the chances of finding other good-paying work are slim.

Miners and residents of coal communities have a right to be upset and angry when their mines close. I just don’t like it when the coal companies spend time and money to channel that anger to advance their agenda.

            Coal companies are spending big bucks to sponsor rallies, and PR campaigns to get the message out that miners have lost their jobs and Appalachians suffer because of Barack Obama, the EPA, and environmentalists. Big Coal and its supporters have created organizations such as Coal Mining Our Future that sponsor rallies and distribute T-shirts with pro coal industry messages. These organizations also encourage Appalachians to contact politicians with pro coal mining memes. Like any other industry, King Coal has always had its lobbyists. But by enlisting the public to contact their Congressional representatives, they have created a coal constituency to support their industry in the state houses and Capitol Hill.

            Apparently, these campaigns are paying off for King Coal.  Public opinion favoring the coal companies and their mining practices has increased in the last six years. In a speech titled “From Villain to Victim: The Coal Industry’s New Image in Appalachian Kentucky,” Al Cross, the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, said of the coal companies, “[They] are in a defensive mode, and they’re gathering their friends around them. This has created, I think, kind of a siege mentality and a regional solidarity. There used to just be sympathy for miners. Now there is sympathy for an industry.”

            Traditionally, miners viewed their employers with a jaundiced eye. For good reason. They knew that without their union, the coal companies would have them working under extremely hazardous conditions for subsistence wages. So for me, having grown up in West Virginia, it’s a little disorienting to see miners taking the side of the coal companies, but I guess that a well-planned and financed PR campaign can bring over a lot of people to your side.

A scene from Matewan, about the beginnings of the United Mine Workers, when miners trusted water moccasins more than the coal companies

Regulations on power plants aside, coal mines have closed because of increased transportation costs and a great decline in the price of natural gas. Warmer than average winters also mean that people are burning less coal and lessening the demand for the mineral. Are these reasons for the decline in coal mining brought up at the industry sponsored rallies?

            I didn’t think so.

            Burning coal throws more CO2 in the atmosphere than anything else; one of the best strategies to reduce our CO2 emissions would be to phase out its use. I can understand that miners’ discontent, and if we as we as a country make the decision to turn away from coal, we owe the miners and other Appalachians a path for them to move on economically, whether that be through regional economic development, education and job training, or aided migration to other areas of the country that aren’t as economically depressed.

            Whether it be the automobile industry exiting Detroit and leaving that city in an economic vacuum or clothing companies buying garments from unsafe factories in Asia, the track record of corporations caring about their workers is not a good one. I don’t believe that the coal companies really care about the miners holding onto their jobs. The coal industry wants less regulation, and they are successfully channeling the anger of the miners, their families, and their neighbors to achieve that goal. But while they hold rallies and hand out T-shirts, mountains crumble, people get sick and die from polluted waters, and others lose their homes and communities to rising seas.

             

            

A Speech on Climate Change That I Can Believe In

While I have criticized the president before for his lack of action on global warming, I applaud the speech he made yesterday. It is a stance on climate change that I can believe in. While the GOP has delivered to the moneyed interests exactly what they want, a Congress that is legislatively stalled during a Democratic presidency, this speech, and the resulting actions that Obama promises by his administration, is all the president can do.

            He gave us what the second Bush administration denied us, an unequivocal statement on what the science is telling us about CO2 and our warming world. It’s a sad comment on our politics and a testament to the power of the energy companies and their ability to obfuscate the facts at hand, that long after the science has been concluded we have to wait years, decades really, for our president to make such a statement. But I guess it always works that way. “Separate is note equal” is a pretty simple and obvious observation, but it took generations after Emancipation before the Supreme Court made that ruling on civil rights.

Mostly by restricting emissions from power plants, president Obama’s proposed set of rules and regulations could reduce our country’s greenhouse gas emissions in the next seven years by close to 20 percent of 2005 levels.

            Of course, the coal companies don’t like it. Fox News is, predictably, not pleased. And Mitch McConnell has said that the president’s proposed course of action on the climate is a “war on jobs” and “tantamount to kicking the ladder out from beneath the feet of many Americans struggling in today’s economy.” What I’d like to know from Mitch McConnell is why, if he is so concerned about American’s having and keeping jobs, has he gotten in the way of any effort to help the economy recover after the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression?

            Over at Appalachian Voices, they rightly applaud the president, even urging him to do more. Executive Director Tom Cormons had this to say:

The president’s plan represents a good first step toward a 21st Century climate and energy policy for America. It’s essential that his administration implement one of the centerpieces of that plan–strong controls on power plant emissions.

Beyond what he spoke of today, there’s more the president must do to build a robust clean energy economy and ensure that heavily impacted areas like Appalachia don’t get left behind.

The devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining has no place in a 21st Century energy plan, nor in a positive environmental legacy for this president.

President Obama must stop industry from pushing the costs of doing business off on communities and our environment, while doing more to invest in energy efficiency and renewable sources particularly in Appalachia and other regions that have borne the brunt of a fossil-fuel economy.

For example, the administration’s plan to provide up to $250 million in loan guarantees to rural utilities to finance job-creating energy efficiency and renewable energy investments is a great start. Compare this to the $8 billion in the president’s plan for loan guarantees supporting fossil fuel projects, and its clear that we need to see a much stronger commitment.

Such investments will go far to create the jobs, economic security, and environmental health for these areas, consistent with President Obama’s goal of fulfilling a moral obligation to future generations.

Cormons is correct, and the warming of the planet and the devastation of Appalachia from out-of-control surface coal mining are most certainly linked. I’m willing, however, at least for now, to cheer president Obama for his actions on the climate.

Mountaintop Removal: The Damage Goes Beyond Appalachia

When I was a child growing up in West Virginia, on our way to school the school bus would drive us over a bridge that spanned a small stream. Out here, where I live in southern California, the waterway would be called a river, but in Appalachia small streams are called creeks. This one was called Simpson Creek. I remember that as we approached the bridge, and for a time after we crossed the span, an acrid smell would fill the school bus. The smell came from sulfur, as well as other toxins in the creek. Those pollutants came from the runoff of old surface mines that were farther upstream in the watershed of Simpson Creek. Besides the odor, the rocks in the stream were stained orange. And there weren’t any fish in the stream.

Simpson Creek earned some infamy back in the seventies. Mayf Nutter, a local native who had become a television star of soap operas Knott’s Landing and Days of Our Lives*, had a country music hit with “Simpson Creek Won’t Never Run Clean Again.” In the song Nutter sang of the freakish color of the creek and its lifeless waters. Simpson Creek was only one of the waterways close to where I grew up with sulfur stained rocks and streambeds devoid of life. I remember that some streams had a smell so strong that it seemed that I could taste the fouled river, although I might be 30 or 40 yards away from its shores.

A creek with acid mine runoff from strip mining (Photo: Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club ohiosierraclub.org)

Besides the fouling of Simpson Creek, in his song Nutter sang of the West Fork River, a waterway that claims Simpson Creek as a tributary, and how it’s waters were fouled by the contribution of Simpson Creek. You don’t need a degree in watershed management to understand the aquatic karma of tossing something in a creek: whatever goes into a creek flows downstream.

Mayf Nutter, musician, actor, and a man who understands acid mine runoff (Photo: mayfnutter.com)

So in a recent study we have a finding that a television star and country singer understood over thirty years ago: Acid mine runoff flows downstream.

And as the surface mining operations have expanded—when I was a child riding the school bus across Simpson Creek, those mines encompassed dozens or hundreds of acres; mountaintop removal mining now encompasses thousands of acres—that selfsame aquatic karma only grows. You don’t need to be a watershed manager, or even a 1970s country singer, to understand that.

Mountaintop removal does just that, removes mountains. And as the mountains are removed, so are the forests, streams, and ecosystems of those mountains. The lives of the people who live around those mountains are disturbed as well. Their wells are often contaminated from the mining, and they are subjected to noise and coal dust from the mines. They may be facing health risks as well.

But as we know that what you throw in a creek flows downstream, mountaintop removal goes beyond the mountains that it destroys. The pollutants flow downstream. Lives are disrupted or destroyed. And all that coal being burned adds more tons and tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, warming the planet. The problems of this type of extraction go beyond the hills of Appalachia.

* Nutter’s television and film credits exceed these two shows. You can check his website here: http://www.mayfnutter.com/

H.R. 5959 The Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act: Common Sense From Dennis Kucinich

Thank goodness for Dennis Kucinich. He has introduced to Congress the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act. It is heartening to know that there are members of Congress who are trying to help people and that there are 13 cosponsors for this bill.

            The Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act (H.R. 5959) simply makes the commonsensical requirement that before more West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky mountaintops are blown apart for their coal, the health implications of the residents around those mines need to be understood.

We currently do not have a comprehensive understanding of the health effects of mountaintop removal. Only ten investigators study the relationship between this type of mining and public health.[i]
There is nonetheless reason for concern. Recent evidence points to mountaintop mining as the root of many health problems for the residents of Appalachia. Among the recent investigations were a toxicologist and an associate professor in the department of Community Medicine at West Virginia University who found learning disabilities, kidney stones, tooth loss, diarrhea, rash, and some forms of cancer in individuals living close to MTR operations.[ii] Using GIS mapping techniques, a team of health professionals and geographers found higher rates of circulatory, respiratory, central nervous system, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, and urogenital birth defects in areas close to mountaintop removal.[iii]

            Kucinich’s bill would require a detailed review of these, and possibly other, health risks to be conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mountaintop removal would be suspended until the research is completed. If the research finds no health risks, then mountaintop mining could resume.

            As I said before, this is commonsensical. The FDA requires that new drugs be proven safe before doctors can prescribe them. And product safety is part of the process of other consumer goods hitting the market. Shouldn’t we do the same for the people who live around the mountaintop mines?

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[i] Holzman, David C. “Mountaintop Removal Mining.” Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 119, Issue 11 11/1/2011 electronic journal

[ii] ibid

[iii] Ahearn, Melissa M. et at. “The association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in central Appalachia, 1996–2003.” Environmental Research Vol. 111 Issue 6. Aug 2011, p 838-846 electronic journal