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I’m sure Coal Tattoo readers are anxious to start weighing in on tonight’s big debate between Massey Energy Chief Executive Don Blankenship and environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So please have at it below in the comments section … just keep it clean and respectful of each other, and both Kennedy and Blankenship.

We’ve got tomorrow morning’s print story online now, and here’s the link to that. Here on the blog, I’m going to try to do a little bit of deconstructing, a little bit of fact-checking and just generally give some more perspective on what we all heard over across the Kanawha River in the University of Charleston’s Geary Auditorium.

UPDATED: If you missed it, the complete audio is available from West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

My guess is most of the commentary is going to say Kennedy won the debate. And let’s face it, Kennedy is a great public speaker and a very charismatic guy.  In a post-debate media briefing, even Blankenship admitted that public speaking isn’t his favorite thing — he says he’s a small-town guy, kind of shy and reserved. I don’t know about that, but Blankenship does sometimes mumble a bit and tonight he failed to really offer much of a detailed response to some of Kennedy’s major points.

Several times, Blankenship expressed frustration as he tried to respond to Kennedy as bombarded him with a litany of problems Kennedy linked to the coal industry:

There is so much rhetoric that it’s tough to deal with in these kinds of discussions.

At the same time, Kennedy certainly was far from perfect and made a few statements that were just way wrong or don’t really hold water. A few examples:

– Kennedy said that wind power provides 85,000 jobs, more than the 81,000 provided by the coal industry nationwide. As I’ve blogged before, that comparison is bogus. The wind industry figure includes construction jobs and manufacturing jobs (folks who make and built the turbines). But the coal industry figure, while accurate as far as it goes, does not include spin-off jobs, vendors, etc.

– Kennedy said that tens of thousands of miners — I think the exact number he used was 90,000 –  had lost their jobs since the 1950s, and none of them were forced out of work by environmental regulations. It’s always dangerous to use always or never … and in this case, anybody who follows the coal industry closely knows Kennedy was wrong. As Gene Trisko of the United Mine Workers testified to the U.S. Senate last year, the acid-rain provisions of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 cost something like 30,000 jobs in the high-sulfur coalfields of places like northern West Virginia and southern Illinois.

University of Charleston officials set up giant video screens for the overflow crowd at Thursday’s debate. Gazette photo by Chip Ellis.

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Climate Ground Zero just announced that three of its supporters have taken to the trees at Massey Energy’s operations on Coal River Mountain:

The sitters plan to remain in the trees as long as it takes to stop blasting on Coal River Mountain. Climate Ground Zero’s action campaign, begun in February of last year, has kept up a sustained series of direct actions since that time continuing decades-long resistance to strip mining in Appalachia.

The sitters are calling for the EPA to put an end to mountaintop removal and encourage the land-holding companies to develop clean energy production.

Gazette photo by Chip Ellis

Given the numerous challenges working against any substantial recovery of the region’s coal industry, and that production is projected to decline significantly in the coming decades, diversification of Central Appalachian economies is now more critical than ever. State and local leaders should support new economic development across the region, especially in the rural areas set to be the most impacted by a sharp decline in the region’s coal economy.

That’s the take-home message from a major new report issued today by the Morgantown consulting group Downstream Strategies. The report is called, “The Decline of Central Appalachian Coal and the Need for Economic Diversification.”

It’s must-read material for anyone who cares about the future of the Appalachian coalfields, and especially for elected officials who keep hoping that the next coal boom is just around the corner.

Authors Rory McIlmoil and Evan Hansen  make the case that a host of factors — competition from other coal-producing regions, rising interest in natural gas and renewable energy, and the depletion of Central Appalachia’s best reserves — has prompted a decline in regional coal production that is unlikely to be reversed. In fact, they report:

After strong and increased production through the mid-1990s, regional production last peaked in 1997 at 290 million tons. Even as national production continued to grow, by 2008, Central Appalachian production has fallen 20 percent to 235 million tons.

Recent projections indicate that — despite substantial coal reserves — annual production may decline another 46 percent by 2020, and 58 percent by 2035, to 99 million tons.

And, importantly, that’s without considering the potential impacts of climate change legislation or new restrictions on mountaintop removal coal mining. Both of those policies are likely to further squeeze the region’s coal industry, the report says, making it all the more important to begin planning for such events:

Should substantial declines occur as projected, coal-producing counties will face significant losses in employment and tax revenue, and state government will collect fewer taxes from the coal industry. State policy-makers across the Central Appalachian region should therefore begin taking the necessary steps to ensure that new jobs and sources of revenue will be available in the counties likely to experience the greatest impact from the decline.

The report adds:

While there are numerous options available, the development of the region’s renewable energy resources and a strong focus on energy efficiency offer immediate and significant opportunities to begin diversifying the economy.

In a news release, Rory said:

Coal has contributed significantly to local and state economies in Central Appalachia, but production has fallen substantially over the last 12 years as other coal basins and sources of fuel have become more competitive. This trend is expected to continue as mining costs increase due to the depletion of the lowest cost coal reserves, and as new environmental regulations are implemented. As this happens, local and state economies will need new sources of jobs and revenue to replace coal mining jobs and taxes.

And Evan added:

Given that coal production is projected to decline significantly in the coming decades, diversification of Central Appalachian economies is now more critical than ever. State leaders should use this legislative session to increase support for new economic development across the region, especially in the rural areas set to be the most impacted by a sharp decline in the region’s coal economy.

We’ve talked a lot on Coal Tattoo about the concept of “peak coal,” and  about what greenhouse gas limits and new restrictions on valley fills would mean for the coal industry and the region as a whole. We’ve discussed options for “green jobs” in the coalfields, including an op-ed Evan co-wrote about an abandoned mine cleanup project that Downstream Strategies was working on as one example, and Rory’s project in his former job promoting the Coal River Wind Project (and Evan’s report on the economic benefits of it).

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Well, Sen. James Inhofe’s crusade to be a one-man truth squad at the international climate talks in Copenhagen went so well for him (a reporter from Der Spiegel told him “You’re ridiculous” when Inhofe tried to spin his views that global warming science is a hoax), that the Oklahoma Republican is now going to enter the debate over mountaintop removal coal mining.

Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, this morning issued a report that purports to show, according to a press release, that the Obama administration’s review of mountaintop removal permits is “killing jobs, threatening energy security.” According to Inhofe:

Since President Obama took office, the Obama administration has taken several actions to obstruct, delay and ultimately halt surface coal mining operations in Appalachia. Unfortunately, such action by the Obama administration will destroy jobs in the Appalachian region and threaten our nation’s energy security.

The report focuses on EPA’s review — and threatened veto — of the Clean Water Act permit issued by the federal Army Corps of Engineers for the Spruce No. 1 Mine, the largest mountaintop removal mine in West Virginia history.

But the report ignores some major developments in the last few weeks. Perhaps that’s because it’s based in large part on a response from West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman to questions posed by Inhofe several months ago. It’s also interesting to note that the Inhofe report mirrors arguments Arch Coal Inc. has made against EPA’s efforts to force the company to reduce the impacts of this huge mining proposal.

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Last year, Coal Tattoo was less than a week old when West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin delivered his State of the State address for 2009.  I was just beginning to learn how to fit blogging in with my daily print duties for the Gazette. But I managed to do a couple of posts that focused on coal portions of the governor’s speech. See them here, here, here and here.

Well, here we are, awaiting Gov. Manchin’s speech tomorrow night, his 2010 State of the State address. It starts at 7 p.m. and will be broadcast live on the Web. I hope to do some blogging about it, as well as writing something for our print edition about whatever the governor has to say about coal, energy and other environmental and workplace safety issues. And maybe I’ll find time to tweet about it too, so if you use Twitter, follow me.

Anyway, I thought I would update the post below, which was one that I did in 2009 to remind myself of what Gov. Manchin had previously said about coal in his earlier State of the State addresses. I’ve added his comments from last year to this … anybody care to guess or predict what he’ll say this year?

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Two years ago, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reached a record $20 million Clean Water Act settlement with Massey Energy, this was the lead of my Gazette story on the deal:

Federal environmental regulators believe a record $20 million fine, new pollution monitoring requirements and the threat of automatic penalties for additional violations will force Massey Energy co. to change the way it does business.

Well … it hasn’t turned out that way, at least according to a new formal Notice of Intent to Sue sent to Massey last week by the Sierra Club, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.

According to the legal notice, which I’ve posted here:

Remarkably, Massey’s violations have grown more frequent after the settlement with EPA than they were before EPA brought its enforcement action.

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“Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for the losses.”

 Photo by Paul Corbit Brown

That quote above is the conclusion of a blockbuster study being published tomorrow by a group of the nation’s top scientists, detailing the incredibly damaging environmental impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining and the failed efforts at reclaiming mined land or mitigating the effects.

Based on a comprehensive analysis of the latest scientific findings, the paper calls on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Army Corps of Engineers to stay all new mountaintop removal mining permits unless new mining and reclamation techniques “can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.”

According to the paper:

.. Clearly, current attempts to regulate MTM/VF practices are inadequate … Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science.

A press release explained that:

In their paper, the authors outline severe environmental degradation taking place at mining sites and downstream. The practice destroys extensive tracts of deciduous forests and buries small streams that play essential roles in the overall health of entire watersheds. Waterborne contaminants enter streams that remain below valley fills and can be transported great distances into larger bodies of water.

The peer-reviewed paper, “Mountaintop Mining Consequences,” is being published in Science, which is considered one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals. Science is the academic journal for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has an estimated readership of more than a million people.The paper was authored by a dozen scientists from various fields — from biology and hydrology to forestry and ecology — including several members of the National Academy of Sciences. A summary of the paper is available here for free. The full thing is subscription only. Updated: Here’s a link to the full paper, available for free. Scroll down to where it says “link to article and supporting material.” [Read more →]

Photo by Vivian Stockman, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

We’ve got a much more detailed story on the Gazette Web site now about the Hobet 45 permit deal announced today by the Obama administration.  But the agreement raises lots of questions — enough to go around and for all sides of the mountaintop removal issue.

First, for environmental groups: Will they file some sort of legal challenge to try to derail this agreement? Doing so would certainly set up a big battle with the United Mine Workers union.

This joint statement issued by various citizen organizations had some harsh words for EPA.

For example, Cindy Rank of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy said, “Allowing this newest addition to the over 25 square miles of devastation at the Hobet complex to proceed makes one seriously question if EPA is truly interested in making a real difference.”  And Joan Mulhern, senior legislative counsel for Earthjustice, said:

The Obama administration rings in the new year by allowing coal companies to bury more miles of streams. There is no excuse for approving this permit when the science is clear that mountaintop removal coal mining permanently destroys streams. The administration claims to be making progress on mountaintop removal, but in reality they are still following the flawed policies put in place by the Bush administration. It is time for them to make a commitment to ending this abominable practice.

Clearly, environmental groups are hoping that, in the words of Judy Bonds of Coal River Mountain Watch, “this is the last destructive permit approved that will allow the coal industry to continue to blast our homes and pollute our streams.”

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has just issued this statement to formally announce its deal to allow the Army Corps of Engineers to issue the Clean Water Act permit for the Hobet 45 mountaintop removal mine.EPA notes in its statement that:

As originally proposed, the Hobet 45 mine would have buried nearly six miles of headwater streams and contaminated downstream waters that now support healthy streamlife and are used by local residents for fishing and swimming.

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Coal miners exit the elevator leaving the North River No. 1 Mine some 700 feet underground after finishing their shift, Jan. 5, 2006 in Berry, Ala. Photo by AP.

A new report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics paints a grim picture for the mining industry.

The report lists “Support activities for mining” among the 10 industries expected to have the largest employment declines over the next decade.  Employment in that sector (see here for definition, as it’s not just coal mining support activities) is projected to decline by nearly a quarter, from 328,000 to 252,000, by 2018.

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