One of the most heartening moments of solidarity in the Tar Sands Action movement took place last summer: A contingent of Appalachian coalfield residents, whose homes are literally under siege from daily blasting and stripmining fallout, took their place at a White House sit-in and went to jail in an appeal to President Obama to deny the TransCanada Keystone pipeline permit.
For the Appalachian residents, like many citizens on the dirty energy frontlines, the pipeline decision served as a litmus test for the Obama administration's commitment to dealing with climate change and a clean energy future.
Eastern Kentucky activist Teri Blanton, who lost her brother to a coal mining accident and has witnessed the destruction of her native Harlan County from stripmining over the past decades, invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
We need that same sense of urgency and solidarity in the central Appalachian coalfields now -- from non-coalfield residents, Big Green environmental organizations, citizens and civil rights groups, students and senior citizens.
We need to call on President Obama to commit to an immediate moratorium on all mountaintop removal mining operations until the federal government can effectively mitigate a spiraling humanitarian crisis.
To be sure, central Appalachia has not cornered the market on dirty energy destruction. Coal-fired plants and coal ash piles take their daily toll on millions of American lives across the nation; natural gas fracking has spiraled out of control; uranium mining has left behind a deadly legacy. Devastating stripmining and longwall mining operations for coal take place in 24 states -- including my own homeland in the heartland, where a new coal rush threatens our forests and farms and communities again.
In fact, mountaintop removal has received far more attention and media coverage -- and generated major foundation support and large donations to numerous nonprofit groups outside of the coalfields -- than many other forms of dirty energy mayhem.
But the unfathomable level of destruction of our historic central Appalachian mountain communities and forests -- the carbon sink of the nation -- the mounting death toll, the unconscionable forced removals of American citizens, and the reams of studies on the indisputable health care and humanitarian crises from mountaintop removal coal mining should place it at the forefront of any litmus on President Obama's commitment to health care, clean energy and dealing with climate change.
Last summer, Dr. Michael Hendryx of West Virginia University released a study that should have headlined every newspaper in the country -- and launched an all-out national campaign on the level of the anti-tobacco campaigns of the past. Hendryx concluded: "Living in a mountaintop mining area was a bigger risk for birth defects than smoking."
This is truth: If we don't have the will to place a moratorium on mountaintop removal mining operations in four central Appalachian states, which provide less than five to seven percent of all coal production in the United States, it's game over for any effective mitigation of climate destabilization or the pursuit of a clean energy transition.
As a presidential candidate in 2008, President Obama told the nation that we needed to find a way to generate energy without "blowing off the tops of mountains."
Four years later, we are still blowing off the tops of mountains -- and needlessly so, as a clear environmental and human rights violations, following a 40-year policy of "regulating" mountaintop removal violations, not abolishing them. In truth, mountaintop removal operations have been plundering central Appalachian since 1970 -- more than four decades of regulated criminal violations, civil rights abuse, and death.
In 1971, Rep. Ken Hechler testified in front of Congress:
Representing the largest coal-producing state in the nation, I can testify that strip-mining has ripped the guts out of our mountains, polluted our streams with acid and silt, uprooted trees and forests, devastated the land, seriously destroyed wildlife habitat, left miles of ugly highwalls, ruined the water supply in many areas, and left a trail of utter despair for many honest and hard-working people.
Four decades after Hechler introduced a bill to abolish mountaintop removal and reckless strip mining, the U.S. Congress has completely abandoned central Appalachia to the whims of Big Coal lobbyists and their sycophant Big Coal-bankrolled supporters in the House, who have effectively derailed any legislation.
We can no longer wish for any congressional intervention. And while individual state efforts -- in Tennessee, for example -- are important, the buck on mountaintop removal stops with President Obama.
This is where the urgency and solidarity and audacious determination of national organizations -- and residents across the country -- are desperately needed, on a par with the tar sands movement. If we can stop the proposed Keystone pipeline, we can stop mountaintop removal.
If President Obama -- and Lisa Jackson's EPA, Eric Holder's DOJ, along with national civil rights and environmental groups in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere -- truly believed in a clean energy future and environmental justice, they would invite 97-year-old Ken Hechler to a special meeting at the White House this spring and announce a moratorium on mountaintop removal operations until the federal government can effectively mitigate a spiraling humanitarian crisis.
As one of our nation's greatest heroes of democracy, Ken Hechler deserves a Medal of Freedom.
As one of our greatest resources and historic natural landmarks, Appalachia deserves its freedom, too.
Rocky Kistner: Fracking With a Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On
The environmental movement can't stop coal mining, because they spent their political capital opposing Keystone.
It's called picking your battles. Look into it sometime - it's what happens in reality.
Fetishize a pipeline that's going to get built anyway .... then when something like mountaintop coal mining comes up, the rest of the country rolls there eyes and says "yet another industry to shut down!!??".
Hemp 6X more BTUS than Corn
Hemp uses less water no herbicides and little pesticides and fertilizer.
Subbituminous coal is common in the US. It has an energy content of about 18 million Btu per ton, and is used mostly in coal-fired power plants
Coal generates about half of the electricity used in the United States. ... Each person in the United States uses 3.8 tons of coal each year.
Some 965 million tons of coal were consumed for the generation of electricity. This amounted to 86% of total U.S. coal production
U.S. soybeans 76.6 million acres
U.S. corn 90 million acres
Half of the acres 83.3 million acres
Hemp yields an average of nine dry tons per acre
(more in southern areas)
749 million tons hemp fiber
Bio-diesel Hempoline can be made from leaves and stalks.
You would also have the hemp seeds as a food source too.
U.S. annual anhydrous ammonia 22.90 million tons used.
U.S. ROUND-UP use100 million pounds
Contaminated with 1,4 dioxane
HERO-INSECTIDE SYNGENTA INSECTICIDE Soybeans and corn
http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Revolutionary-New-Process-Turns-Biomass-Waste-into-Fuel-Oil.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkU_OAOZgSI
As the new growth forests
Mark my words.
Others say WE ARE WHO WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR, but reality says we cannot change a nation. Our energy supply and policy is a national problem and deserves a national solution. Are we getting it?
The problem seems to be, the nation isn't yet inspired to stand up for Appalachia. It isn't that they don't care. I believe that they look at the challenge and see it as too big to change.
That's where a leader comes in--Martin Luther King, for example. Given the stage, they inspire you to act, they ignite your passion, they give you hope when faith is gone, they inspire new people, they are the glue that holds people together keeping the common goal, and most people love them, amazingly.
The nation has already been given an end date for coal and we should have divorced it long ago to save the planet and moved toward replacing that soot-ridden, mercury-laced air with wind turbines and solar panels, geo, hydro, etc. and looking at how we can replace base load and reduce base load demand.
Keystone pipeline is not a permanent win but it could be. People said -- you can't send oil through our bread basket. We need a catalyst for change. Could Keystone be it?
“We’ve certainly been getting a lot of national attention we don’t normally get,” said Heineman, a 63-year-old Republican.
In a series of maneuvers, Heineman managed to delay construction of the 1,661-mile (2,673-kilometer) Keystone XL pipeline -- and prompt its owner, Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. (TRP), to reroute the 15 percent that was to cross Nebraska and its environmentally sensitive Sandhills region.
While I am normally argueing for Obama to get credit for the good things he has done, this time he doesn't deserve the credit for blocking the pipeline
Watch
277 days until the reelection of The President of The United States of America Barack Obama
God Bless The President
Gpd Bless the USA
However your basic premise is incorrect.
The Keystone XL application was not approved because the President of the United States said it could not be evaluated in 60 days.
Barack Obama will be reelected on Nov 6, 2012
Keystone XL is delayed....We will see it receives a proper burial.
One of my HP friends has been tirelessly advocating that we use the built environment as clean-energy power plants--solar on every roof, geothermal, co-generation, etc. that provide energy to the individual property owner while being available to sell to an existing grid. No strip-mining. No desecration of wilderness for large grids. Some push-back against the overwhelming monopoly of Big Energy corporations that control politics and therefore the price of their energy. There's more to it than that.
Jeremy Rifkin writes in "The Third Industrial Revolution" that Germany is the poster child for this new, more sophisticated and just way to produce power. You might give the book a glance.
Only if you believe the computer program that they are using.
Which cannot apply and do not explain any other point of paleoclimatology.
They have their filthy, greedy hands in this.
Why use the stuff in the first place. It won't effect prices, it won't effect our reliance on foreign oil, it won't solve any problems, and it WILL create a great many problems down the road.
The fact that it got delayed is a huge first step.
The Koch Boys AND the GOP want it to go, NOW. They are doing all they can to make an end run around the president.
Don't make perfect the enemy of the good.