 The coal industry seems hell-bent on destroying the global climate, our Appalachian economy, and our state's ecology.
Why? To protect the jobs!!! of course!
In modern times its a dangerous joke to pretend that coal brings prosperity anywhere it is mined, but here's an urgent indicator that our country is headed in a new direction, and that Virginia has a chance to lead. Hopefully, its also another nail in the coffin of Dominion's dead talking point about jobs and prosperity from coal.
As of 2008, the wind industry now employs more people in the United States than coal mining.
Wind industry jobs jumped to 85,000 in 2008, a 70% increase from the previous year, according to a report released Tuesday from the American Wind Energy Association. In contrast, the coal industry employs about 81,000 workers. (Those figures are from a 2007 U.S. Department of Energy report but coal employment has remained steady in recent years though it's down by nearly 50% since 1986.) Wind industry employment includes 13,000 manufacturing jobs concentrated in regions of the country hard hit by the deindustrialization of the past two decades.
The big spike in wind jobs was a result of a record-setting 50% increase in installed wind capacity, with 8,358 megawatts coming online in 2008 (enough to power some 2 million homes). That's a third of the nation's total 25,170 megawatts of wind power generation. Wind farms generating more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity were completed in the last three months of 2008 alone.
 So next time some coal company executive or Virginia politician tells you that we need to keep mining coal because it brings economic prosperity; coal would be great if we could sequester the carbon; environmentalists hate the economy - you say; NAY sir.
Virginia mining employment is plunging due to the fact that there is less coal and we are replacing miners with machines to get whats left. This leaves our SW region fraught with some of the worst poverty in the United States.
This isn't some lofty, abstract, academic exercise we are talking about here. We can look at a single place on the map and see the whole story.Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, is currently permitted to be mined by mountaintop removal. Not only is Coal River Mountain the last in tact mountain in the Coal River Valley, but studies show that we can create more jobs and more energy with wind power than we could by turning the mountain into a mountaintop removal site.
And yet, because so many politicians and members of the coal industry are content to erase Appalachia for a dollar, the site at Coal River Mountain is already being cleared for blasting.
I can imagine the boon our state economy will get from an clean energy and efficiency industry! Its only a matter of time before all the coal in Virginia is gone. What kind of legacy are the Governor, our Senators, and Congressman Boucher going to leave if they don't renew the economy in Appalachian Virginia?
Lets put up wind towers. Lets build 'em here. Lets invest in an efficiency industry. Let's save our economy, and do our mountains a little favor in the process. |
