Colbert Report Takes Down Big Coal: Save the Endangered Hillbilly (VIDEO)

Goodbye purple mountain's majesty--here comes Patriot Coal!

Last night on the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert hosted scientist Margaret Palmer in a brilliant takedown of the Obama administration's recent decision to green light more mountaintop removal permits, in light of a blockbuster new scientific study that concluded that "mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses."

Those losses include American citizens, namely residents living in some of the most historic areas of Appalachia--the "hillbilly" region that gave our nation our first Declaration of Independence in 1772, our first abolitionist newspaper and the backbone of the anti-slavery movement, the vanguard of the labor movement, trained the shock troops of the Civil Rights movements, and gave birth to muckraking journalism in the 1830s, the first social realism literature and the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature....among other achievements.

Colbert captured the Coal River Mountain motto: Save the endangered hillbilly.

Dr. Palmer pointed out the poisonous environmental consequences of mountaintop removal mining on the region's watersheds and streams, as well the devastating impact of stripmining on eliminating jobs in the local economy.

Here's the clip:

Meanwhile, an extraordinary new study was released today by Downstream Strategies that sounds the alarm on Appalachia's declining coal industry and the economic imperative to launch a clean energy alternative: