Copenhagen, U.S.A.: Don't Miss the Dec. 7 Showdown Over Climate Change Here in America

If the Obama administration is unwilling or unable to stop the massive environmental destruction of historic mountain ranges and essential drinking water for a relatively tiny amount of coal, can we honestly believe they will be able to phase out coal emissions at the level necessary to stop climate change? --Dr. James Hansen, June 22, 2009

Welcome to Copenhagen, U.S.A.

On December 7th, the opening day of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Americans from around the country will converge for a historic protest at climate change ground zero for our nation--the Appalachian coalfields.

At the same time 65 heads of state and other world leaders and environmental regulators view a special Google Earth tour of the importance of Coal River Mountain in West Virginia at the Copenhagen conference, leading anti-mountaintop removal activists and citizens groups--with Robert Kennedy, Jr. reportedly in their ranks--will demand an end to mountaintop removal mining on Coal River Mountain and across Appalachia.

Their target: The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, in Charleston, West Virginia, the embarrassingly inept and Big Coal-ridden state agency that has overseen one of the greatest environmental and climate change disasters in American history: Mountaintop removal's destruction of over 1.2 million acres of hardwood forests in our nation's carbon sink of Appalachia.

The American citizens at climate change ground zero will not be alone in the coalfields.

As a wave of climate change protests rock London on December 5th, and throughout the world on the December 12th Global Day of Action, the citizens groups and coal mining communities descending on the Big Coal-strangled halls of governmental incompetence are drawing a line in the sand at Coal River Mountain.

Site of the Coal River Wind Project, the most symbolic clean energy project in the nation, Coal River Mountain is the last intact mountain in the historic range, and an area that has been plundered by mountaintop removal and left in ruins. Despite regulatory violations, Massey Energy began clear cutting the lush hardwood forests and setting off blasts for a massive 6,600 acre mountaintop removal operation on Coal River Mountain last month.

And just why should Coal River Mountain--and the Appalachian coalfields--be considered climate change ground zero for the U.S.A.?

The Carbon Connection: As an advisor on the Presidential Climate Action Project, and a leading environmental scholar and entrepreneur, David Orr has noted, "To permanently destroy millions of acres of Appalachia in order to extract maybe twenty years of coal is not just stupid; it is a derangement at a scale for which we as yet do not have adequate words, let alone the good sense and the laws to stop it."

In a major paper, The Carbon Connection, Orr recounted a trip to a mountaintop removal site in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia and its link to our climate fate:

Nearly a thousand miles separates the coalfields of West Virginia from New Orleans and the Gulf coast, yet they are a lot closer than that. The connection is carbon. Coal is mostly carbon, and for every ton burned, 3.6 tons of CO2 eventually enters the atmosphere, raising global temperatures, warming oceans and thereby creating bigger storms, melting ice, and raising sea levels. For every ton of coal extracted from the mountains, perhaps a 100 tons of what is tellingly called "overburden" is dumped, burying steams and filling the valleys and hollows of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. And between the hills of Appalachia and the sinking land of the Louisiana coast, tens of thousands of people living downwind from coal-fired power plants die prematurely each year from inhalation of small particles of smoke laced with heavy metals that penetrate deeply into lungs.

More complete accounting of the costs of coal would also include the rising tide of damage and insurance claims attributable to climate change. Some say that if we don't burn coal the economy will collapse and we will all have to go back to the caves. But with wind and solar power growing by more than 25 percent per year and the technology of energy efficiency advancing rapidly, we have good options that make burning coal unnecessary. And before long, we will wish that we had not destroyed so much of the capacity of the Appalachian forests and soils to absorb the carbon that makes for bigger storms and more severe heat waves and droughts.