Don't Get Duped Like Obama: Here're the Top 5 Myths About Coal

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted February 14, 2009.

There are also slurry impoundments, or massive dams that are created to hold the toxic waste after coal is cleaned, which leak into groundwater and pose enormous hazards when they fail. Right now, one West Virginia community is pleading for the removal of a sludge dam that sits just hundreds of yards from an elementary school.

Of course, as TVA now knows, the cost of cleaning up a toxic coal spill will not be cheap. As the Nashville Scene reported, the Harriman spill in December, "will cost untold millions -- one expert put it at no less than $100 million -- to clean this mess up, to take care of displaced families, not to mention the lawsuits already in the clerk's office and the many that are sure to follow."

While the costs of one spill can be potentially calculated, there's no way to figure out the untold billions of dollars worth of damage that burning coal has caused to our air and water.

A report by Greenpeace and the Dutch institute CE Delft found that when it comes to coal:

The true costs that have been left out of the cheap prices. It estimates -- conservatively -- that the damage caused by coal's mining accidents, its global carbon dioxide emissions, and the illnesses it causes adds $451 billion in annual costs to the simple buying price.

That's not all. Not included in that dollar amount are damage estimates for acid mine drainage, mercury pollution or ground water contamination, because reliable global estimates for the cost of these occurrences do not currently exist.

Clearly it's time we began switching to clean energy or foot the bill for the true cost of dirty power.

4. It's Good for the Economy

It used to be that industry could win big by using the "jobs" card, and it could pit environmentalists and human health advocates against rural workers and unions. But those days seem to have passed, especially when it comes to the coal industry, where jobs in the sector are dwindling, thanks to the industry itself.

Appalachian Voices reports:

Mountaintop removal is a mining technique designed, from the very start, to take the labor force out of the mining operation. What used to take hundreds of miners employed for decades, now takes a half-dozen heavy-equipment operators and blasting technicians a couple of years. According to the bureau of labor statistics, in the early 1950s there were between 125,000 and 145,000 miners employed in West Virginia; in 2004 there were just over 16,000. During that time, coal production has increased.

These days, it seems better for communities to go with renewables. The U.S. just became the world's leading producer of wind energy and may be a leader in solar soon. The Earth Policy Institute found that, "An investment in wind power produces almost three times as many jobs as the same investment in coal power. And an investment in solar power produces almost four times as many jobs and energy efficiency, almost 30 times as many jobs as coal power."

Activists in the Coal River area of West Virginia have taken those numbers to heart and found that wind is a better investment than coal, even in their necks of the woods. Unfortunately, time is running out there.

Just this week, activists were arrested trying to persuade coal company Massey Energy not to blast Coal River Mountain, but instead to consider a more profitable wind-power development. Their research has shown that, "The wind farm would provide over a million dollars more in tax revenue per year than the mountaintop removal site, and would provide jobs and clean energy forever."

The truth is, in order to make the switch to renewable energy, we may need the big powerhouses like Massey to get in the game. Right now, in West Virginia they've got that shot.

Even NASA's James Hansen, one of the leading global-warming scientists, is helping them sound the alarm:

It has been shown that more energy can be obtained from a proposed wind farm, if Coal River Mountain continues to stand. More jobs would be created. More tax revenue would flow, locally and to the state, and the revenue flow would continue indefinitely. Clean water and the environment would be preserved. But if planned mountaintop removal proceeds, the mountain loses its potential to be a useful wind source.

Of course jobs in the region don't just have to come from energy. Appalachian Voice reports:

The biggest coal-producing state in Appalachia, West Virginia, tourism already contributes more to the economy, and creates far more jobs, than the coal industry and has for more than a decade. It doesn't take an economist to tell you that mountaintop removal is permanently destroying the best economic assets that mountain counties have: the beautiful and ancient Appalachian Mountains themselves.

See more stories tagged with: obama, coal, mtr, clean coal, mining, appalachia, stimulus, moutaintop removal

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

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