Coal's True Cost

Last evening's GOP CNN/YouTube debate and the Democratic presidential debate on November 15 were jointly sponsored by a coal industry coalition comprised of mining, railroad and utility interests.

Their high profile civic involvement is designed to further confuse American voters about coal's true cost to our society. Many of the Republican candidates have endorsed massive new subsidies for King Coal and dutifully parrot industry talking points including earnest promises of cheap "clean coal." Given that climate change is the most urgent threat to our collective survival, it is shocking that no debate moderator has pressed the candidates to clearly state their positions on "clean coal."

In fact, there is no such thing as "clean coal." And coal is only "cheap" if one ignores its calamitous externalized costs. In addition to global warming, these include dead forests and sterilized lakes from acid rain, poisoned fisheries in 49 states and children with damaged brains and crippled health from mercury emissions, millions of asthma attacks and lost work days and thousands dead annually from ozone and particulates. Coal's most catastrophic and permanent impacts are from mountaintop removal mining. If the American people could see what I have seen from the air and ground during my many trips to the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia: leveled mountains, devastated communities, wrecked economies and ruined lives, there would be a revolution in this country.

Well now you can visit coal country without ever having to leave your home. Every presidential candidate and every American ought to take a few seconds to visit an ingenious new website created by Appalachian Voices, that allows one to tour the obliterated landscapes of Appalachia. And it's not just Arch Coal, Massey Coal and their corporate toadies in electoral politics who are culpable for the disaster. The amazing new website allows you to enter your zip code to learn how you're personally connected to the great crime of mountaintop removal. Using this website Americans from Maine to California can see these mountains and the communities that were sacrificed to power their home. The tool uses Google Maps and Google Earth as interfaces to a large database of power plants and mountaintop removal coal mines. A November 15, 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted the site as one of the most innovative, cutting-edge uses of these powerful tools. The site puts a human face on the issue by highlighting the stories of families living in the shadows of these mines.

Each day the coal barons from companies like Massey and Arch detonate 2500 tons of explosives-the power of a Hiroshima bomb every week-to blow away Appalachian mountain tops to reach the coal seams beneath. Colossal machines then plow the rock and debris into the adjacent river valleys and hollows, destroying forests and burying free-flowing mountain streams, flattening North America's most ancient mountain range. According to EPA 1,200 miles of American rivers and streams have already been permanently interred and 470 of Appalachia's largest mountains have simply disappeared, leaving behind giant pits and barren moonscapes, some as large as Manhattan Island. I recently flew over one 18 square-mile pit - Hobet 21 - which you can now tour on Google Earth!

We are literally cutting down the historic landscapes where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed and that are so much the source of American's values, character and culture.

Mountaintop mining poisons water supplies, pollutes the air and destroys hundreds of miles of North America's most ancient and biologically diverse hardwood forests and permanently impoverishes local communities. Millions of dollars earned from this criminal enterprise land in the coffers of the politicians now jockeying to lead our country to a "new energy future." Mountaintop removal is one of the biggest environmental holocausts in human history. Wherever you live, you have a connection-and a responsibility.

The effort to end mountaintop removal has been gaining steam over the past year. As of today, the leading Congressional plan to ban the practice has 118 co-sponsors-dozens more than last year, with over a year to go in the 110th Congress.

From Appalachia to the Western states of Wyoming and Utah, the strip miners have permanently destroyed some of the most beautiful country on Earth, leaving behind a legacy of misery and poverty. For too long Arch, Massey and their tame politicians have hidden their crimes in the remote poverty-stricken communities of Appalachia. This new website finally exposes this national disgrace for every American to witness. Our aspiring presidential leaders at the very least should be asked to explain their position on this shameful and corrupt enterprise.

Comments

[studana51]

Why can't we have a Democratic Party where he is our leader? Yes he mentioned if we saw and knew,,we would have a revolution. Let's have one of our minds and hearts first..and take it from there.

[MRb1000]

THIS IS SOMEONE WHO WAS SOLD A SEAT IN THE WHITE HOUSE IF HILLARY WINS. HE IS GOING NO WARE FAST. BETTER LOCK NEXT TIME!!!!

[guajiro]

Well Robert, good day to you!! Thanks for your leadership. Every day, I talk to new immigrants from south of the border and explain how the oligarchies control everything and how the Kennedys and others helped and are helping to turn things around in favor of the people of this country, not just the elite, wealthy few. I have yet to meet people who don't understand what is at stake. Although many cannot vote, they are telling their children what devstation uncontrolled corporate power can do and let me tell you, there are hundreds of kids I personally have advised what to do. Rest assured, the wave of informed voters has just now begun to crest. Thanks for all you and your wonderful family have done for the world!!!!!!!

[dryfactoidobotanoid]

I can't believe you endorsed Hillary, sir.

"Now I don't believe in nothing no more. I'm going to law school." -Jimbo Jones, The Simpsons

[NoFactsJustTruth]

It's likely, Robert, the candidates have no fortitude, at this time at least, for taking on the corporate control of many areas of OUR Government. It merits a teensy bit of understanding, I suppose, in that they ARE running for the office in OUR country that MOST scares those corporations.

Strip mining, EVEN in the middle of nowhere, scars the earth for MANY generations. And, just a fraction of the BILLIONS in profit$ that each major energy company makes each year, REALLY reinvested in developing alternative non-carbon sources, COULD possibly help prevent some further damage to the earth and perhaps even prevent some 'future' wars for oil.

When, eventually, a majority of citizens want to finally vote for FREEDOM from the corporate masters - that have 'bought' OUR Government, let's HOPE it's NOT too late to set things straight and to restore the Rule of Law based upon OUR Constitution.

Thanks, Robert, sir.

[tgood]

I was reared in an Eastern Kentucky coal mining town, McRoberts, Kentucky. My parents and my ancestors are all buried there. Mountaintop removal took place the past few years and now the mountains are gone, houses shoved off their foundations, constant flooding in what's left of the town due to the boulders daming up the creeks and the water and air polluted to the point of making people extremely ill.

These people had no where to go and nothing to go on after the deep mines closed. Little did they realize that even their beloved mountains would be taken.

I honestly believe if a complete tour was made by an honest news agency, up close and the devastation exposed in its entirety, America would be horrified what has gone on under their very noses.

I'm an old woman now and lived long enough to see even the very mountains taken so that people far removed from the Appalachians can live in luxury with their profits while actually laughing at the people who held a prayer service for God to spare the mountains.

As one mine owner spat when he learned about the prayer service , "Don't involve God in this ". Of course, when a boulder crashed down in the middle of the night and crushed a child as it lay sleeping in its bed, the same owner remarked, "Well, don't blame us. It was an act of God".

I guess even God doesn't care about the mountain people anymore.

[hozer]

...someday I might be dressed in a sackcloth robe walking barefoot down a trail in a quiet corner of nature, when I see a fellow traveler dressed like me... he's carrying an injured little bird. He thinks the birdie has been poisoned by pollution.
.....I put down my 2 jugs of water and my friend asks me if I can help. I fetch 2 small saucers from my sack and dispense water from each of the jugs into each saucer, one alkaline, one acid.. and I suggest he put the little bird on the ground between the two saucers... instinctively little birdie tastes each and shakes it's beak.. then it jumps into the acid water and bathes while drinking from the alkaline.. after a while it begins running around in circles and then takes flight in a big circle, finally making a landing on my friends head... we both have a big laugh about that.

Yes, mountaintop removal is stupid and unnecessar­y.. but Coal can be used in a clean and prudent way..
Carbon from coal can be used to make amorphous diamond semiconductors for Super Solar Photovoltaics.

Coal can be used as a catalyst to burn water as fuel with much less carbon footprint than petroleum.­.
http://www.silveradogreenfuel.com/ourfuel/process/
http://waterpoweredcar.com/hydrobooster.html

We never will have an energy crisis...
When the Bu$hLeague runs the show we have a crisis of Stupidity.

Energy is always abundant everywhere­..
http://www.blacklightpower.com/

http://www.peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

~~~~~~~~~~­~~~~~~~~~~­~~~~~~~~~~­~~~~~~

[radmul]

The saddest part of this story is that if we had taken the trillion dollars we have already wasted killing people in Iraq and built windmills we could all have free electricity without any co2 or mercury poisoning.

[jdm58]

Whereas I feel somewhat encouraged that you and a few others in Congress are finally looking into the travesty and tragedy of mountaintop coal mining, it remains baffling that not more has been done to put an end to it. Environmental Defense, NRDC, and others have been lobbying tirelessly to what has heretofore appeared to be deaf ears. Not one of my Congressmen has responded to a single call or email I have made on this issue. When pray tell, might we see some action?

[Davian]

Endorsing Hillary ?
Thanks for showing your true colors sir. Whatever you stood for on the frontlines of environmental consciousness has been exposed as a facade for something far darker than I wanted to imagine.
Hope and naivete, so close, now so far away.

[bluegrasstafarian]

Thank you Mr. Kennedy,
As an Appalachian resident, it hurts to see my heritage strip mined, developed, and polluted so that a corporation might turn over a profit. I commend you on your dilligent work on changing minds about mountain-top removal, and for your support of Appalachian Voices ( www.ilovemountains.org ) here in the Blue Ridge. To see the homeland of your parents and grandparents reduced to a pockmarked boneyard goes beyond words - the pictures in the link will hopefully convey the destruction and finality of mountaintop removal coal mining.

Unfortunately, this epidemic will most likely increase in coming years because of the pending crux of peak oil. In order to satiate our high-consumption lifestyles, national coal reserves will be liquidated into crude oil in order to extend an addiction a few more years. Its a tragedy analagous to any junkie's self-debasement or criminal action in seeking another fix.
"Daddy, won't you take me back to Bulinburgh County, down by the Green River where Paradise lay,
I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in askin',
Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away." - John Prine

[godlessclif]

Big Coal sponsored the debates and is lobbying like crazy. Alternative energy could make coal worthless. Even steel is made from natural gas
using the Nucor process. Natural gas has lots of carbon.

Coal needs subsidies to it is doomed. Keep burning coal and we are doomed.

[FogBelter]

Mr. Kennedy, it is really pathetic that the environmental state of our nation is held hostage by Energy Robber Barons.

If the goal over the last few decades hadn't been to maintain the fortunes of the few at the expense of the many, I'm certain we would be speaking in terms of Fossil Fuels as the foundation of America's Energy Strategy in the past tense.

It's tragic that we can look at all the tremendous advances in technology in so many areas of our lives and then marvel at energy still being dominated by 18th and 19th Century Technology. Come on, something is wrong here.

We need an Energy Manhattan Project or Apollo Program to move American and, by extension, the World's Energy Technology into the 21st Century and allow the Earth some time to heal, for its benefit and our own.

[maddogbitesback]

The disgrace of coal is mirrored by the American public which refuses to embrace renewable energy. Although renewables seem expensive they are actually cheap.

Coal is the black soul of the USA. By refusing to make renewable energy a top priority in this election, America has shown the face of the population which cares nothing about the destruction of its own country while running the drier and every other labor saving tool in the house including electric exercise machines. Because renewables are more expensive Americans refuse to buy into new technology. And they would rather pay trillions on a war for oil than on than give up their inalienable right to SuV's. Coal and gas are far to expensive for Anyone to buy. Using coal for electricity is truly evil. Not having LED's is beyond my comprehension. America could be free of imported oil in five years if the government and the people wanted this. It could be off coal in five years. The crime is the indifference of the public to the horror of Appalachia. Sadly, the horror of Appalachia is the horror of America and the world.

[Manx]

Thank you for a great post on an issue that needs more exposure in the media. I admire the work you are doing.

As an aside, I would like to see a section on Huffington Post dedicated to the ENVIRONMENT.
If we don't preserve a healthy environment, all the other issues on Huffington Post will become irrelevant. Please talk to Arianna.