Could Mountaintop Removal Be Ending?

There's been very little good news on the environmental front, but one of the real positives is the decline of mountaintop removal. It has come under attack from several fronts due its massive environmental damage to one of America's most biological diverse regions and to the residents who live there.

Just today, the EPA denied a permit for the largest single mountaintop removal permit in West Virginia history.

EPA officials this morning were alerting West Virginia’s congressional delegation to their action, and undoubtedly preparing for a huge backlash from the mining industry and its friends among coalfield political leaders.

In making its decision to veto the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ approval of the 2,300-acre mine proposed for the Blair area of Logan County, EPA noted that it reviewed more than 50,000 public comments and held a major public hearing in West Virginia. EPA officials said their agency is “acting under the law and using the best science available to protect water quality, wildlife and Appalachian communities who rely on clean waters for drinking, fishing and swimming.”

That backlash will no doubt come fast and hard.  I noted yesterday that the EPA is under attack from not only Republicans but many Democrats as well. We'll see a bipartisan attack here too. And maybe, under the next Republican president, we see a return to an EPA serving as a rubber stamp for the coal industry in the same way that Democratic West Virginia senators do today. But maybe government regulations isn't the most important factor here.

Regardless of the government, mountaintop removal operations cost a lot of money to finance. Coal companies need to get bank loans for those operations. Increasingly, banks are pulling out of financing those operations. It's rare that capitalist institutions can engineer positive social change. But with significant international pressure against mountaintop removal (much more so than domestic pressure), banks are deciding they don't want to be associated with such a destructive remaking of the planet. PNC Bank's November 2010 decision to pull out of financing mountaintop removal is especially important it is such a prominent institution in Appalachia.

Combined with international discomfort at investing into climate change exacerbating energy sources such as a coal, it may well be that we are in the last years of mountaintop removal. We can only hope that's true.

The Second Battle of Blair Mountain

In August 1921, during southern West Virginia's coal wars, a pitched battle took place at Blair Mountain. Probably 100 people died, mostly on the miner's side, during the next week. This important event in American labor history has been almost totally forgotten about.

That is, until the West Virginia Division of Culture and History decided to name the site to the National Register of Historic Places. Governor Joe Manchin, while trying to ride the fence, clearly supports this action. Why are they doing it? A couple of reasons. First, there is the potential for mountaintop removal coal mining in the area. Placing the site on the National Register would make stripping that land more difficult. Second, I think there is still significant resistance within the coal companies and their lackeys that rule West Virginia to remembering this important event that is only the largest armed uprising in American history since the Civil War.

I've talked many times before of the hell of mountaintop removal. That the UMWA supports it is a travesty--it is a job destroying, community destroying, environment destroying way of mining coal. But with relatively weak leadership by UMWA president Cecil Roberts, it's hardly surprising that the coal miners are caving on this issue. Maybe it'll take destroying a historically important area to get a little public attention to the issue. That it's the site of a labor struggle makes me skeptical, but Huffington Post is now on the story, so that's a good start. And as with all things coal, Ken Ward is all over it.

License Plates I Will Not Be Getting

Would you like this image on your license plate? If you live in West Virginia, you soon may be able to fulfill your dreams. This is such a great idea. I am thinking of some other great license plates.

Oregonians for Deforestation
Buddies with Nuclear Waste (this would obviously include a cuddly figure snuggling with a piece of plutonium)
Mississippi Thanks Segregationists
Americans for AIG

Really, the possibilities are endless. And if you are going to express your love for destroying mountains, dumping their remains in valleys where people live, and creating climate change, you might as well go all the way.

Via Coal Tattoo.

More on Mountaintop Removal

Just want to recommend Sarah Kuck's piece on the evils of mountaintop removal coal mining.

I've stressed this before, but mountaintop removal might be the single most evil thing in this country right now. I know there's a lot of evil out there. But we are creating geological change, environmental suicide, and social destruction through this hideous, reprehensible practice.

Good for Bank of America

The Natural Resources Defense Council may have struck upon one of the best ways to fight mountaintop removal coal mining: make it socially unacceptable.

After taking Bank of American executives on a helicopter tour of mountaintop removal sites, the NRDC convinced the bank to stop funding such projects. In an atmosphere where Bush is implementing all sorts of new rules allowing for mountaintop removal to expand and dump its soils into rivers and creeks around southern Appalachia, new, aggressive strategies are necessary. This is such a reprehensible practice and the only way it survives is because nobody sees the incredible damage to the landscape it causes. If you can take away the funding for these projects by exposing people in power to these hellish operations, you can go a long ways toward putting a stop to it.

Kudos to both the NRDC and Bank of America on this one.

Also, the coal company response is classic:

[A]s all the activists who so eloquently and passionately speak of the ills of coal and mountaintop mining get up in the morning, drink their hot coffee, eat some toast, blow dry their hair while watching the morning news, attend their meetings in a room with lights and warm heat and write to their representatives on laptops and computers while calling others on their charged cellphones, please remember who provides the electricity. It is provided by coal.

You could have used the exact same arguments to defend slavery. The clothes you wear, the jobs you have--all happen because of slavery. Yes, energy is needed, just as people to pick cotton was needed. But that doesn't mean you have to use inhuman or apocalyptic environmental methods to make it happen.

The Pathetic Local Justifications of Mountaintop Removal

Mountaintop removal is one of the greatest environmental travesties in the world today. It is almost without question the most severe environmental degradation issue the United States faces today. I have argued before that nobody cares much because it takes place in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, a land filled with conservative poor white people that environmentalists neither know nor trust.

But in any case, the coal industry and their local stooges consistently pull out this refrain for justifying why mountaintop removal is good for the local community:

"A lot of people look at mountain top removal [mining] as a negative, but I see it as a positive. We need to stop apologizing for coal ... I want us to promote mountain top removal, because we need flat land. We can not have economic expansion without places to do things and part of mountain top removal is for places like hospitals, airports and different type of merchants."

Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo, Kentucky. Via Grist.

I have seen this exact same refrain before in other places, particularly local West Virginia and Kentucky newspapers. It is utterly absurd to anyone who knows the area. Flattening mountains will never bring economic prosperity to southern Appalachia. Big business is simply not going to move there. Unless they flatten the whole region, the roads are too narrow and the area is too far away from major cities to make sense as an industrial hub. The citizens, in no small part because of the rapacious coal companies, are among the poorest and least well-educated in the country. The jobs they want to compete for are already in the developing world, because no matter how much the coal industry tears apart Appalachia and no matter how desperate the citizens are for decent work, they are not going to be able to compete with the cheap labor of Mexico, Guatemala, Bangladesh, and 50 other nations across the world.

I also don't think that the coal companies and local elites who make these arguments really believe other businesses will move into the region either. They claim these benefits to justify the incredible environmental and economic damage they are doing to Appalachia. By giving people false hope for a better future, they undermine the legitimate criticism they get from local citizens groups and those few people in other parts of the country who care about what is happening there.

Coal companies are the single most evil entity in the United States. I firmly believe this.