Bees, Trees, Wind and Dynamite

There's a showdown in West Virginia today pitting old dirty energy against renewables -- and one side is armed with explosives.

Coal giant Massey Energy is planning as early as today to begin blowing up the mountains in the Bee Tree Branch area of Coal River Mountain, West Virginia. More specifically, Massey is planning to blow off the top of a local mountain, push all the debris into the surrounding valleys and repeat until they hit a big fat coal seam.

It's like some kind of sick David Copperfield act, but unfortunately there's no illusion, and the mountain that once stood before you is gone forever.

Here's what's left after such an operation:

This used to be rolling green mountains.

Massey owns the license to do this to 6,000 acres (10 square miles) in the Coal River area.

Mountaintop removal is nothing new, its been going on ever since the coal companies figured out that it was a heck of a lot cheaper to pay a few people with big machines and some dynamite to blow from the top down, instead an entire team of coal miners to burrow from the bottom. What has changed though is the context Massey and other coal companies are working in.

As renewable energy technology, like wind and solar, becomes cheaper and more efficient, coal companies are finding it a lot more difficult to justify such crude and environmentally disastrous techniques for powering America. Case in point is the glitzy $40 million coal industry PR campaign that is trying to brainwash us all into thinking that somehow coal is clean and green. But even the best spin doctor in the country is going to have difficulty explaining why Massey Energy is going to blow the top off mountains in Bee Tree for the short-term gain of a little more coal, when the area has been identified as a great location for a wind energy farm.

According to the local citizen's group, Coal River Mountain Watch, a wind farm could be built on the mountains that Massey plans to blown up and level. Windpower instead of mountaintop removal would:

Create Jobs: 200 local employment opportunities during construction, and 50 permanent jobs during the life of the wind farm.

Create Energy: Provide 440MW of electricity - or enough energy for 150,000 homes - indefinitely, as well as a sustained tax income that could be used for the construction of new schools for the county.

And, of course, save the moutains in the area from being reduced to nothing more than road gravel.

Sounds like a plan to me, but since when do I, or the people living in the Coal River Valley, know more than a coal company or the government? Afterall, they have the power to literally move mountains.

Follow Kevin Grandia on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kgrandia

Comments

[sheila]

not to state the obvious, but won't they be dynamiting the mountain to build the large, flat foundations for giant wind turbines? ALL LARGE SCALE, REMOTE POWER PROJECTS HURT OUR ENVIRONMENT!!!

we need to focus on point of use solutions, not on dynamiting, blasting, scraping, poisoning, draining, and otherwise obliterating our open spaces, just to recentralize Big Energy monopolies.

time to support every house getting solar panels, conservation retrofits and their very own small windmill, and stop suggesting that dynamiting our mountains for wind and bulldozing our deserts for solar are ok. THIS IS WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO SAVE!

[faithfull]

Great post Kevin. Appalachian Voices has a round up from around the blogs here - http://www.appvoices.org/index.php?/frontporch/

Huffington­poster231: If you love the french, you'll be interested in the iLoveMountains resource page on Coal River Mountain showing wind vs. MTR permits, how wind would create more jobs than an MTR mine, how wind will create more energy than an MTR mine, all the MTR sites around Coal River Mountain, the poverty in the area: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmemorialforthemountains/sets/72157601421231899/

CoalRiverWind.org has more on the beneficial economic impacts of industrial wind rather than just blowing up the mountain for a few years of coal.

peace,
faithfull

[Huffingtonposter231]

Your argument sounds a bit weak. Wind farm "could" be built? Really? Kennedy kept one from being built within sight of his house. Environmentalists are out STOPPING them from being built, are you sure they wouldn't stop them here as well?

Do you have any pictures of what the land looks like after they are finished working it and have restored it? Or would those pictures not go with your line of attack?

We have enough coal to last a century or longer. You on the left have kept us from building the carbon free nuclear power plants that would have solved many of our global warming problems....as France did. And you have kept us from reprocessing our nuclear fuel which would have solved many of our storage issues.

Isn't it time we get honest, compromise, support American energy instead of pushing one sided and radical energy agenda's that involve some sort of anti US energy agenda?

[research]

look up "could" versus "may".

Are environmentalist an official party? Group? Company? Who spoke for all of them? Rich folks in Cape Cod blocked one project, get over it.

nukes: We are going to nuke Iran because of their legal repressing and you want MORE nukes? We already import most of our uranium. Had the world gone 100% nukes, uranium would already be scarce. Nukes are a poisonous dead end.

It's time we stopped giving in to big fossil with tax breaks, subsides, discount and grants they obviously don't need.

You republican are bought and payed for. You have no credibility.

[David Sassoon - Huffpost Blogger]

Nuclear energy is a false solution. Run the numbers and you will see. Take the 45 plants McCain wants by 2030. What will it deliver? 1.2% of our energy needs.

Here's the calculation, courtesy of Architecture 2030:

"By 2030, the US is projected to need 84 QBtu of delivered energy. So, how much energy will these 45 plants supply? About 1 QBtu. This is just 1.2% of our energy needs in 2030 - another 'drop in the bucket'. At a total construction cost of $270 billion (not including land, waste storage, etc.)...,"

If you scale nuclear to meet global need, you'd need 12,954 plants to replace fossil energy, and it would cost $77 trillion, more than total gross world product GWP of $66 trillion.

Talk about the End of Times.