Perspectives on the Future of Coal Country
by Jeff Feldman
I sat engrossed in Coal Country during last month’s American Conservation Film Festival in Shepherdstown. The film documents a range of perspectives on the issue of surface mining for coal in Appalachia, what many have come to call mountaintop removal. Interviews and footage depict miners expressing pride in their heritage; locals struggling to navigate a range of assaults upon their quality of life, health, jobs, and sense of community; and coal company representatives, lawyers, citizen activists, and elected officials each interjecting their own sometimes narrow view of the issue. The film stirred something within me.
Buried within the debate over coal — one often brimming with emotion and exaggeration — there are a few solid truths. Coal has been and remains a key driver of America’s economic engine. Coal-fired power plants generate over 50 percent of our electricity: coal “keeps the lights on” as the pro-coal folks are fond of saying. Coal is plentiful. At current rates of consumption, the United States has enough coal to last us the next 200 years.
Coal mining provides jobs, although surface mining employs fewer workers than deep mining operations. We owe a debt of gratitude to coal miners and their families for the toil and sacrifice they face every day in carving our heat, light and power out of the earth.
And it is undeniable that the mining, processing and burning of coal is hazardous to environmental and human health. Coal significantly contributes to the destruction of natural ecosystems, to serious health concerns among those who live proximate to mines and power plants, and to the build-up of harmful chemicals — mercury, carbon dioxide, sulfur and nitrogen oxides — in our atmosphere, soil and water.
Among these truths lies the challenge and complexity of coal. It is historically, economically, culturally and environmentally entwined with who we are. As a nation addicted to cheap energy, as well as one that places a high value on even a tenuous sense of job security, coal seems to offer a fairly straight path into the future. But as a nation at the crossroads environmentally, it is clear that we cannot afford to pay the real costs, rapidly becoming past due, of traveling this path.
How do we honor coal and those who have labored to make it available to us while acknowledging the necessity of transitioning to a different energy future? It was coincidental that in the days following my viewing of Coal Country, I learned of House Concurrent Resolution 208 introduced by West Virginia’s Congressional delegation. This resolution seeks to establish National Miner’s Day to commemorate the work and sacrifice of miners past and present, as well as demonstrate support for the jobs of miners well into the future.
“I contend that we have an obligation to do all we can to ensure that our miners simply have work. We need to pay acute attention to the effects that the decisions we make in Washington will have on the men and women, the families, and the communities back home who have, for generations, provided the natural energy resources that fuel America. These hard-working, selfless, earnest men and women, their livelihoods, their way of life, and the future of their families and their communities are at stake,” proclaimed Representative Nick Rahall (D-WV) who introduced the resolution.
We should absolutely honor and celebrate miners and the coal heritage that has made this country strong. We should consider the livelihoods of mining families and communities as we make decisions for our future. But we don’t owe them a future that mirrors the past. Coal has played a vital role in crafting our American story, but so too has the capacity for adapting to changing times and the drive to leverage new opportunities and possibilities.
No, the future is something we owe to our nation, to our planet, to ourselves. And choosing a new course into that future doesn’t have to diminish the past or disrespect those who helped shape it. In all of this, I’ve been asking what can I, as one individual, do with regard to this issue? Coal Country offered little insight into this for me; perhaps it was trying to provoke this question as opposed to provide its answer.
Clearly we’re talking about a transition away from, as opposed to an abrupt abandonment of, our coal-based energy infrastructure. We each have a role in easing this transition forward. We begin by simply using less electricity, the most common form by which coal touches most of our lives. We each know how to do this, though we sometimes fail to act upon the singular importance of taking the required steps. We then can support new energy opportunities. The technologies exist, they just need more openness of mind and wallet to bring them into the mainstream.
But in taking these steps toward reducing our reliance on coal, let us still consider those whose lives will be most significantly affected by such a shift. We should remember the miners — with a national day in their honor, yes; but also with a commitment to support their transition into new jobs and new opportunities, contributing to a brighter, cleaner, healthier future for us all. That’s the Congressional resolution I’d like to see.
Jeff Feldman runs GreenPath Consulting, a green building consulting firm. Jeff and his wife, Kristin Alexander, live in a strawbale home in Berkeley County. You can reach Jeff at GreenPathConsulting@ gmail.com.
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A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia
The Washington Post
July 3, 2009
Op-Ed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?
If ever an issue deserved President Obama’s promise of change, this is it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day — the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly — to blow up Appalachia’s mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains — encompassing about a million acres — buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region’s air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia’s rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not — obliterating the hemisphere’s oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas — while employing fewer workers for far less time than other types of mining. The coal industry’s promise to restore the desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry’s fallback position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains — with their impoverished and alienated population — are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.
Obama promised science-based policies that would save what remains of Appalachia, but last month senior administration officials finally weighed in with a mixture of strong words and weak action that broke hearts across the region. The modest measures federal bureaucrats promised amount to little more than a tepid pledge of better enforcement of existing laws.
And government claims of doing everything possible to halt the holocaust are simply not true. George Bush gutted Clean Water Act protections. Obama must restore them.
First, the White House should fix the “fill” rule the Bush administration adopted in 2002 to allow coal companies to use streams as waste dumps. Under this perverse interpretation of the Clean Water Act, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been interred under mining waste. Obama could reverse the “fill” rule to reflect its original meaning, which forbids waste matter from being dumped into waterways.
Second, the Interior Department should strictly enforce the widely ignored “buffer zone” rule that forbids dumping waste within 100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.
Third, our laws require companies to restore mined areas to their original condition. The administration should end the absurd fiction that extraction pits filled with unconsolidated rocks and rubble where trees will never grow and streams will never flow are “reclaimed.”
Fourth, current law forbids the issuance of “fill” permits that will cause “significant degradation” to waterways. It is absurd for the Army Corps of Engineers to endorse the canard that filling miles of streams is not causing significant degradation. The president should require the Corps to deny and rescind permits where operations will cause downstream damage.
Fifth, the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that they can restore the “function and structure” of affected streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act. Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this requirement.
Sixth, the administration should enforce the law requiring an environmental impact study for each permit when a mine “may have significant environmental impacts,” individually or cumulatively. The Corps of Engineers routinely allows coal operators to escape this mandate — an illegal practice that should stop.
Instead of acting to enforce these laws, administration officials indicated last month that they will allow more than 100 permits to go forward while they carefully review their regulatory options. If they act accordingly, the ruined landscapes of Appalachia will be Obama’s legacy.
President Obama should go to Appalachia and see mountaintop removal. My father visited Appalachia in 1966 and was so horrified by strip mining — then in its infancy — that he made it a key priority of his political agenda. He complained that Appalachia, with our nation’s richest natural resources, was home to America’s poorest populations, its worst education system, and its highest illiteracy and unemployment rates. These statistics are even grimmer today as mining saps state wealth. In 1966, 46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Mechanization has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000. They extract more coal annually, but virtually all the profits leave the state for Wall Street.
The coal industry provides only 2 percent of the jobs in Central Appalachia. Wal-Mart employs more people than the coal companies in West Virginia. Last week a major study documented how coal imposes a net cost to Kentucky of more than $100 million per year. Coal is not an economic engine in the coalfields. It is an extraction engine.
Obama has the authority to end mountaintop removal, without further action from Congress and without formal rulemaking. He just needs to make the coal barons obey the law.
The writer is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Dear Jeff- your piece is really good but there are some errors in it.
First- the coal reserves figure you stated is way off- recent USGS and even Congressman Rahal has stated that thee is about 20 years of good coal left in WV.– we will reach peak in about 60 years. This is without adding in the additional use of coal that is required for energy to pump and capture C02.
The new figure for coal fired electricity is 43.9 % and dropping.
You also failed to mention the violence that the pro- coal people and miners are using to deny us citizens of our first amendment rights- this is violent – unacceptable behavior.
Go to You tube- type in “Mountain madness- Invasion of the coal thugs” see for your self.
Thanks so much, WV hollergirl, for adding your thoughts to the conversation. I appreciate your input.
I have read numerous sources that cite coal as generating somewhere above the 50% mark of our total electric usage in the U.S. The Union of Concerned Scientists cites the figure at 54% (www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c01.html).
As for how much coal we have for future use, my figure was generalized for the U.S. overall, not West Virginia specifically, despite my article’s focus on West Virginia mining. I’ve always heard the “more than a 200-year supply” and used that line out of habit. Further research does indicate that this figure is off. The Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate 411 blog (http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2007/07/10/coal_reserves_low/) and an article in the Wall Street Journal’s online edition (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124414770220386457.html) reveal that our coal reserve estimates have been based on faulty accounting. Both sources put our recoverable coal reserves at no more than 100-120 years.
All the more reason to each do our part to move the transition along toward a different energy future.
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