The suffering of those negatively effected by mountaintop removal is every bit as real as the fears of coal miners built up to an impassioned frenzy by friends of coal. Collaborating to find solutions, not confronting each other with yelling and screaming, will benefit us all.
– Clem Guttata, W.Va. Blue
Over at the West Virginia Blue blog, Clem Guttata has a new commentary out about mountaintop removal, climate change, the future of West Virginia, and this week’s rowdy showing by coal supporters at the Army Corps of Engineers public hearing in Charleston.
Called King Coal is shouting itself hoarse and deaf is well worth the read.
Among other things, it concludes:
Trying to out-shout, rather than reason with, people with valid concerns does little to prove the coal industry is ready to be a partner in providing oversight for a complex new technology like carbon capture and storage. Plugging your ears and shouting yourself hoarse is a sure-fire way to get uninvited from a debate.
And:
Instead of making wild claims about threats to coal, we need honest brokers to negotiate a viable future for the West Virginia economy. If West Virginia coal companies want a place at the negotiating table for the future energy economy, they need to start acting responsibly. They owe that to their employees, they owe that the communities they claim to support, and, quite frankly, they owe it to their shareholders, too.
The commentary talks about the efforts of Sen. Robert C. Byrd and Rep. Nick Rahall to help coal in Washington, without just yelling and name-calling. And it compares their work to the speech state Sen. Truman Chafin made during this week’s public hearing:
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The meeting I was at was filled with non sequitors and appeals to emotions. From nearly every speaker, no matter what their position was. There were a notable few exceptions. This is not a referendum on MTR, coal mining, or whether or not the Earth Goddess is our mother or how much we love trees and bunnies and the great spirit. Yet nearly every single poster wanted to talk about jobs, historical legacy or aesthetics. The merits of the ACE decision are supposed to be based on whether the permitting process has cumulative impacts. Almost no speakers addressed this, save some environmental scientists (arguing from science) and some financiers and coal executives (who apparently were ignorant that the science existed).
It is deeply saddening to see the needless tension between neighbors, a tension exploited by coal companies who maintain that this is about ending coal and a power grab by outsiders, and a tension furthered by culturally ignorant outsiders who seem to know jack squat about the people with whom they disagree. This tension is magnified by what seems to be a shared deep misunderstanding of the process that is in motion, which is (at least in theory) an attempt to evaluate the environmental protection merits of blanket vs individual 404 permits.
I for one don’t want to fight anyone. The science is clear, and the law is clear, and it seems to me to be a no brainer deduction what the necessary course of action entails. I hold that provisionally, of course, but I applaud Clem’s comments.
The first picture on that video if memory serves me correctly is the Wind River Mine. I sat as a juror on the first MTR lawsuit in this state. The residents of Bim vs Wind River. I had never heard of MTR before that. It hadn’t taken hold like it has today. The court took us up there ten years ago. It was a shocker to me and that is what made me turn into the avid anti MTR person that I am today. If that is a recent picture the site has not changed after all these years. It makes me heartsick to think that it still looks like that, and it reinforces the fact that it will never be worth anything again.
I come from a long line of coal miners, my husband was a coal miner, but never in my days did I ever see the destruction from them that I see from the coal extractors of today. I will never call them coal miners for they are not. They cast shame the very name of the men who came before them.
Clem you do wonderful work at WV Blue, thank you.
When discussing regulations a presentation of costs and benefits is certainly in order and Chafin has contributed. All economic activity has a certain detriment to the environment but is allowed and regulated to benefit society as a whole.
The video is another distortion against coal mining. It fails to show mature mining reclamation. By showing only current construction type activity it fails to be balanced and makes an appeal to emotions (a different type of yelling). How can the environmental community expect the pro-mining side to be held to a higher standard?
Everything is either mined or grown. Why force mining overseas where regulations are lax or nonexistent?
good points Casey
Does anyone have a statistic on how many mines get properly reclaimed versus how many are left abandoned by their companies, or improperly reclaimed? Does anyone have a statistic on how long a mine may be operating before reclamation begins? I know there are several mining sites down US 119 that have been in operation over 25 years.
One of the biggest problems with MTR is what it does to, and the danger it poses to, communities. That’s something the MTR community refuses to address, and that the images in the video above demonstrate. Whenever the environmental community talks about the dangers of flooding, or the damage to drinking water, or the air quality in a community (from the cleaning facilities located very near a school), the MTR community doesn’t want to talk, or talks about how there’s no danger or how it’s the price of doing business.
The other thing the MTR community doesn’t want to talk about is how MTR coal does NOT keep the lights on in West Virginia. Deep mine coal keeps the lights on, but MTR coal fires steel mills.
Environmentalists have no problem with coal. (maybe with coal fired power plants, but that’s another story) What they/we have a problem with is MTR practices. So when the MTR community is willing to talk about those practices, and act like good community citizens, then you can talk about holding anyone to a higher standard.
Response to WVState:
OSM(RE) does annual evaluation reports on state regulatory and AML programs — these are targeted to be done by August 31st after each evaluation year, July 1 through June 30.
http://www.osmre.gov/Reports/EvalInfo/EvalInfo.shtm
The 2008 evaluation report (2009 is not yet done)
http://www.osmre.gov/Reports/EvalInfo/2008/WV-aml-reg.pdf
Table 5 shows there are 311, 949 acres bonded as of June 30, 2008, after 7,676 bonded acres had been final reclamation released; 322 bonded acres forfeited and 14,899 acres being newly bonded.
Table 6 shows 24,327 acres bond forfeited (318 permits) as of June 2008, after 1,062 bond forfeited acres were reclaimed (37 permits) and 322 acres were newly bond forfeited (11 permits) — these new forfeitures averaged just less than $300/acre of bond.
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From 1980 through 2008, there have been 1,117 bond forfeiture orders — about 40 per year; range from 111 (1994) to 6 (2007 — issued on coal mining operations in West Virginia according to the Applicant Violator System of OSMRE: ’80(21), ’81(24), ’82(25), ’83(26), ’84(41), ’85(61), ’86(28), ’87(33), ’88(38), ’89(48), ’90(43), ’91(59), ’92(94), ’93(61), ’94(111), ’95(70), ’96(50), ’97(35), ’98(28), ’99(23),’ 00(55), ’01(36), ’02(18), ’03(15), ’04(9), ’05(7), ’06(14), ’07(6), ’08(33)
Of the 7,193 since 1980, most of the bond forfietures occurred in the 1980s (60%) and 1990s (31%); since 2005 there have been 203 forfeitures (3%) in 7 states — IL(5), IN(4), KY(29), MD(12), PA(82), TN(11) and WV(60).
Three states together have 70% of all the bond forfeitures occurring since 1980 — KY (2,924 ),PA (1,020) and WV (1,117).
Six other states account for another 26% — AL(646), IN (215), OH (313), OK (178), TN (255) and VA (252). The remaining ones are in thirteen states.
More:
http://groups.google.com/group/bob-mooney/web/walk-away-reclamation
Manik Roy at the Pew Climate Center pointed out recently at http://www.pewclimate.org/blog/roym/kerry-graham-op-ed-toward-all-above-energy-policy
that climate policy is (at last!) becoming visibly bipartisan on a national level.
When Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joins Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts in calling for a rigorous cap-and-trade law, we have moved far beyond partisan posturing about “environment vs. jobs,” and well into truly bipartisan, truly compromising efforts to set up an architecture for achieving survival — in face of deadly threats to planetary civilization. (I’ve heard it said that a good compromise is one where all parties come away from the table pissed off.)
Here in the Appalachian coalfields, as Clem Guttata points out, our skewed public discourse, which has too much been based on fear and relatively short-term/narrow economic and political interests, may be injuring our chances to protect the long-term welfare of our region and our people — as bipartisan climate policy becomes a reality.
Nevertheless, I am hopeful that as the new realities become more and more clear, we will see more and more support for sensible and proactive adjustments and active leadership in the coming new energy economy. To see those new realities, we above all need to have our eyes wide open — which means, as a number of posters have said here, not being blinded by fear.
I want to say that I read every one of the foregoing series of posts (except mine, of course) as heartfelt and uniquely and personally expressed — so well, too — and I feel a real humility in each post.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to read what I wrote and to Ken Ward, Jr. for providing it with a wider audience.
Thank you, too, for the feedback (positive and otherwise) on the diary contents.
[...] Before the big news late on Friday that the EPA was escalating their war on coal and the state’s largest surface mine, Ken reposted one of Clem’s bleeding-heart / empty-headed rants. [...]
Folks,
A word about using the word “liar” or “lying.”
If some folks in the coal industry want to call me names, that’s fine.
But do not in Coal Tattoo’s comment section say that other readers are liars or are lying … if you do, your post will be removed and you will be blocked from further comments.
Let’s not let Coal Tattoo resort to name-calling. OK?
Ken.
Casey,
You analogy has some flaws. While you may be correct in saying that the video is not balanced because it doesn’t show completed mine reclamation, I hardly think that amounts to the same sort of action as yelling and screaming so the other side can’t be heard. A more correct analogy would be if someone tried to show video of a reclaimed mine site at a public hearing and the environmentalists stood up and blocked the screen.
I don’t think anyone expects a video put together to criticize Truman Chafin for his comments at the public hearing to be balanced, any more than I expected the Friends of Coal ads during the WVU-Marshall football game to show active mountaintop removal sites. Anyone who watched noticed that they showed only miners at underground jobs, not active surface mining.
Ken.
[...] gave quite a speech last month at the Army Corps of Engineers mountaintop removal hearing in Charleston. And Hoppy is [...]