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This bill (the Clean Water Protection Act), aims to stop the heinous practice known as "mountaintop removal coal mining." The bill already has 116 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. These are the co-sponsors from Virginia so far: Gerry Connolly (D-11), Jim Moran (D-8), and Frank Wolf (R-10). I'm hoping and expecting that Glenn Nye and Tom Perriello will also sign on soon as cosponsors.
With MTR, there's no "return to contour," no question that the mountain will be rebuilt, or that hardwood forest and glens ringed with blackberries will be restored. No attempt to unclog the streams or empty the valleys. Instead, it all becomes a moonscape of rubble and ruin. MTR is the destruction, for all time, of mountains that were hundreds of millions of years in the making, the ruin of some of the nation's most pristine forests, and the elimination of towns and villages that preserve America's unique mountain culture.
Though mountaintop removal only accounts for 5% of the coal mined, the area that is destroyed in the process is vast. Over 400 peaks in the Appalachians have been leveled. By next year, the EPA predicts that we will have carried out this destruction on over 1.4 million acres - an area larger than the state of Delaware. Thousands of miles of rivers have been ruined, and even those far downstream have to live with the pollution that bubbles through the exposed waste.
The good news is that it doesn't have to continue. Not only does MTR account for a small percentage of the nation's coal mining, almost all the coal mined in this manner can be extracted by other, less destructive means. If you're worried that stopping MTR will leave us short of coal, it won't. If you're thinking that Appalachia is an area known for its poverty and chronic high unemployment, and that stopping MTR will cost jobs, stop worrying. The reason companies have been so quick to use MTR isn't because it's necessary, it's because it's cheap. It's cheap because it uses fewer workers, and doesn't require that they hire the many jobs associated with reclamation in other types of mining.
It's high time to interpret and enforce the Clean Water Act the way it was intended to be interpreted and enforced. Pass the Clean Water Protection Act now!
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.
Appalachia has been mining coal for 150 years, exporting more wealth in the 20th century than almost anywhere else in the world. But prosperity never came to these hills and hollows, and the communities within these ancient mountains remain some of the poorest places in the United States.
Coal production in Virginia - like the rest of Appaachia - has peaked, and is plummeting.
With the faucet almost dry on Virginia coal and the work increasingly done by enormous machines, mining employment in Virginia - like the rest of Appalachia - is plummeting even faster.
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The coal industry seems hell-bent on destroying the global climate, our Appalachian economy, and our state's ecology.
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.
