It Takes a Village to Stop Razing Appalachia: Power Past Coal Fights Back

Appalachia needs no defense: It needs more defenders.

Check out the footage of the bright blast that greeted Bo Webb, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and his community last week in Clay's Branch, Peachtree, West Virginia.  A shower of rock dust mixed with a toxic brew of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate explosives swept down their hollow, as the Richmond-based Massey Energy behemoth detonated another round of explosives in their haste to bring down the mountain for a thin seam of coal. Nearby, children attended the Marsh Fork Elementary School, the blasting in the distance like a harbinger of Massey's brutal force--the company is now infamously embroiled in a US Supreme Court case for compromising judicial neutrality in their efforts to contribute their way into the good graces of West Virginia judges--as 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge held back by a 385-foot-high earthen dam hover a few football fields above the school like an accident waiting to happen.

Good morning, Appalachia!

Just another day of mountaintop removal; that process of wiping out America's natural landmarks, dumping the waste into waterways and valleys, and effectively removing historic communities from their homeplaces through a campaign of horrific blasting, dusting, poisoning, and harassment.

We've reached a new landmark in the central Appalachian coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and southwest Virginia: Over 500 mountains in one of the most diverse forests in the Americas--the same kind of mountains that garner protection and preservation status in a blink of an eye in other regions---have now been eliminated from our American maps.

Five hundred mountains are gone. For what? Less than 5 percent of our nation's supply of coal, while 50 million tons of West Virginia coal are annually exported to CO2-spewing plants in countries like China.

As a new report by Quentin Gee, Nicholas Allen and their colleagues at the Associated Students Environmental Affairs Board of UC Santa Barbara recently found, the overlooked external costs of coal further debunk the black diamond's image as a "clean" and "cheap" source of energy. (http://www.as.ucsb.edu/eab/docs/US%20Electricity%20Policy%202009.pdf) .

Gee and Allen write:

"The average U.S. coal plant creates about 13.5 cents of "harm" for every kWh it produces.

This harm comes about by damages to crops and buildings (acid rain), as well as health implications for humans (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter). Given that coal plants produced 1.99 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2006, the mean external harm for that year was $268 billion. Until coal-fired plants clean up or get phased out, we can expect coal to cost the U.S. economy about that much in externalities every year.

The coal sector is also a highly subsidized industry. A 2007 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that the coal industry receives about $8 billion per year in federal subsidies.

In addition to subsidies and general harms from air pollution, the added environmental risks of coal mining and ash waste disposal present another serious problem. The Department of Energy estimated that regulating coal ash as a "toxic waste" would result in $11 billion per year for tighter controls."

But mountaineers, and a growing movement of citizens affected by strip mining, coal mining, coal ash and slurry ponds and leaks, coal-fired plant pollution, black lung, contaminated watersheds, and the silent tsunami of climate change induced by the release of C02 from coal-fired "sorta cleaner coal" plants, are fighting back.

Organized into the Power Past Coal movement---www.powerpastcoal.org--communities have hosted daily events in the first 100 days of the Obama administration to demonstrate the urgent need to recognize the devastating costs of dirty coal, and shift our nation toward an energy policy without dirty fossil fuels.