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 Dec. 7, the opening day of the U.N. 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, W.Va., 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 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 Dec. 5, and throughout the world on the Dec. 12 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.?

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:

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.

Coal River Mountain is a tipping point in climate change policy: As NASA climatologist James Hansen has pointed out for years, "we must move rapidly to carbon-free energy to avoid handing our children a planet that has passed climate tipping points." Calling mountaintop removal "an undeniably catastrophic way of mining," Hansen issued a personal plea to President Obama this summer to halt the blasting of Coal River Mountain, as part of a larger vision for the rapid phase-out of coal emissions now:

The coal barons at Massey Energy are not only destroying Coal River Mountain, but leading the anti-climate change propaganda campaign: As head of the fourth largest coal producer, and a gleeful mountaintop removal detonator, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship and his company's notorious denial of climate change and bizarre global warming-denying shows are the stuff of bad vaudeville. But Blankenship's wrath in Appalachia, and especially in the Coal River Valley, has not only resulted in record penalties for mining violations, and the devastation of the region, but placed him in the forefront of Big Coal's refusal to accept any compromises in cap 'n trade legislation. In a recent interview on stopping climate change legislation in the Senate, Blankenship referred to "the hoax and the Ponzi scheme of global warming."

Seventy foot coal slurry tidal wave: Blasting at Coal River Mountain risks a climate change catastrophe: Blasting within a football field of the class "C" Brushy Fork impoundment, one of the largest and potentially weakest coal slurry impoundments in the nation, Massey Energy is engaging in a blatant act of aggression against besieged coalfield residents. According to their own evacuation reports, a break in the coal slurry impoundment would result in certain injury or death for the nearly 1,000 residents downslope in the valley. Some area residents would have less than 15 minutes to escape a 72-foot tidal wave of coal slurry.

Coal River Mountain, like Copenhagen, is a battle over a clean energy or a regulated dirty energy future: As a study last year by Downstream Strategies noted, an industrial wind farm on Coal River Mountain would provide more jobs, tax revenues, and electricity over the long-term than the current mountaintop removal operation, which will exhaust the coal seams within 17 years. The study concluded:

The showdown at Copenhagen, U.S.A. is on: Dec. 7, 2 p.m., Charleston, W.Va.

Related Links:

A Global Climate Agreement: China, India, United States Make Commitments to Seal Copenhagen Deal

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Editor's Note: Author Ann Pancake grew up in the heart of West Virginia coal country. Her 2007 novel Strange as this Weather Has Been is the story of one family's struggle against the relentless destruction of its beloved mountains.

I went home to West Virginia a couple weeks ago. October is the most beautiful season in Appalachia. The reds and russets, the yellows and oranges and purplebrowns, put into even more terrible relief the experience of swinging around a bend and seeing the horizon blasted to a dead gray mesa. October also means deer season's coming soon, and in preparation, some people run the night roads with spotlights. It's illegal to hunt by jacklighting, so most of these hunters are just scouting: sweeping the fields with their bright lights, freezing the deer, marking in their minds where the big bucks are so they can return some November dawn when the season is on.

Ann Pancake's novel about mountaintop mining Appalachia lies in the East Coast's shadow, there on the backside of urban centers like Washington, D.C., pushing up against them, but never touching.  Appalachia generally stays dark (to most eyes) until the powers-that-be decide to turn around and throw the lights.  One of these periodic flash-ons has happened just this fall, with the debut of the new film Coal Country and the release of a book of photos on mountaintop removal called Plundering Appalachia. The New York Times has run a series on the region's contaminated water, and many media outlets are reporting on the rising acts of civil disobedience against mountaintop removal. Most significant of all, in September the Obama administration's EPA announced they would actually review mountaintop removal permits to see if they violate the Clean Water Act instead of rubberstamping them as the Bush administration did.

Appalachia has always played the dark Other in the American imagination, and America has historically only looked at it when some perceived quality of the region serves the nation's ideological needs. You can see this pattern at least as far back as the nativist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, when Appalachia was jacklighted as a reservoir of pure Anglo-Saxon blood. You see it in Appalachia as poster child of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. You see it in West Virginian Jessica Lynch cast as small town America Iraq War hero; in hillbilly Lynndie England as scapegoat for Abu Graib. Now, as the American public becomes more environmentally conscious, more aware of global warming and fossil fuel's contribution to it, and as Obama gives some Americans "Hope" that we might actually be able to "Change," America glances at Appalachia again. 

In the meantime, in the hollows and along the creeks in the Appalachian coalfields, people continue to bathe their children in clean water trucked in to their churches because their own wells have been contaminated by coal slurry, to take down their pictures and knick knacks so they won't be shattered by blasts, to power-wash the blasting dirt and coal dust from their houses, to stand vigil by flash-flood prone streams when it rains. Those residents who actually work on a mountaintop removal site-who hold one of the very few decent paying jobs in the region-have been riled to near hysteria by coal company propaganda shrieking about how the EPA is trying to shut down every coal mine -- mountaintop, contour, and underground-in Appalachia. 

Photo: Vivian Stockman Those of us who've actively opposed mountaintop removal for years meet the EPA's announcement with guarded optimism or leavened cynicism. (The most recent headline on the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition's newsletter reads: "Major News!  EPA May Do Its Job.")  Before 2008 when George W. Bush suspended the part of the Clean Water Act that prohibited mining activity within 100 feet of a stream, mountaintop removal was illegal, without question. Even after the Bush change, its legality is a matter of intense debate with some judges ruling that mountaintop mining is legal, others ruling that it isn't.  Yet for years, we watched the permits approved anyway. We're still bracing from just this past spring when the EPA also announced they'd review permits, then went ahead and okayed 42 out of 48 anyway, a bit of news that didn't get much media light.

Early in October, I received a letter from a friend in the coalfields, Pauline Canterberry, a 79-year-old retired Dollar General Store manager who became an activist after a coal processing plant began choking her small town with coal dust. I think Pauline's words are representative of how many residents feel:

It looks like Obama is making a half-hearted attempt at checking out Mountain Top Removal Mining and its devastation while the evidence of it gets broader and broader, you can drive these highways now and look up and see more and more bare tops on these mountains, and for the life of me I can't understand our leaders who can't see the future devastation this is going to have ... Rick drove me over by a place between Orgas and Cabin Creek where an entire valley was dammed up with toxic waste for a mine, old thick green yellow and white gook you knew was draining down into someone's water.  I haven't been able to get it out of my mind, it's no wonder the Cancer is ravaging our people here, yet they just allow more and more of it to accumulate.

If Americans are serious about "Change," it might serve them well to train the light on Appalachia long enough to really understand the past and present there. Because Appalachia, especially coal country Appalachia, is not really America's dark Other. Appalachia is America under an X-Ray. In Appalachia's ineradicable poverty after 150 years of exploitation by natural resource companies and in the accompanying environmental catastrophe, one can see, completely naked, how the American "system" is flawed and unsustainable. And if Appalachia is America under an X-Ray, then mountaintop removal is the centerpiece of that X-Ray. A distillation. A bald apocalyptic vision of what has gone horribly wrong in our culture, but that is in most other contexts more hidden, more subtle. In the obliteration of the Appalachians, the oldest mountain range in the world, we see, concretely, unambiguously, the exposure of profit-making without accountability. Of corporate control over democracy. Of the energy war right here on our own soil, the fallout of our careless overconsumption.

When I think about this fall's spotlight on Appalachia, I slide between that guarded optimism and leavened cynicism. What I do know, after fighting against and writing about mountaintop removal for a decade now, is that public awareness of the issue-and by proxy, Americans' awareness of the true cost of their electricity -- has been raised a hundred-fold. I see myriad national movements shouting against mountaintop removal and for renewable energies, when back in 2003 I sat in an anti-mountaintop removal organizing meeting in Charleston, W. Va., and was told that one of the most prominent environmental organizations in the nation had written off our fight as "unwinnable."  I see the coal industry's propaganda campaign as proof that Big Coal is finally genuinely threatened by our opposition to it. And as I travel around the country and read from my novel and speak about mountaintop removal, what gives me the most optimism is not the intermittent media attention or the recent civil disobedience, brave as those acts are, or even the EPA's announcement that it might enforce the law-it's the vast number of people I meet in their late teens and twenties, both inside Appalachia and outside it, who are enthusiastically and wholeheartedly and doggedly committed to fighting for sustainable ways of living. To remaking this mess.

Photo: Vivian Stockman

It was in the late 1990's and the first years of this decade that mountaintop removal became entrenched, that companies and workers became addicted to it, under the deliberate neglect of the Clinton administration and the active collaboration of Bush. During those years, the media's darkness was broken only by an occasional glimmer. Maybe things would have been different if Appalachia'd been jacklighted more consistently then. By conservative estimates, we've now lost 470 mountains and 1200 miles of streams. We'll get none of those back.

I try to go home every October, and last year, I stayed with some friends in the coalfields. We were finishing lunch when one asked, "How long has it been since you've been up Seng Creek?" Though my friends didn't know it, interviews I'd done with two families from that hollow in the summer of 2000 became the kernel of my novel. Yet I'd never visited the real Seng Creek again. "Well, we got to get you up there," my friend said.

We got up there. At least as far as we could go. Because in the years I'd not seen Seng Creek, the upper part of the hollow had been washed out by a flash flood off a mountaintop removal mine, just as our interviewees had sworn was coming. After that, the company had swept in and torn down all the homes. The topography was now altered beyond recognition with fill dirt and giant culverts and nonnative grass, a sediment pond where the church had been. Bulldozers worked the steep slopes above our car. I asked where the people we'd interviewed had gone. My friend said the elderly woman had moved into Charleston with her daughter. The other family? Nobody knew.

"We better get on out of here." My friend cocked her head towards the bulldozers. "You don't know when that rock might come on down." 

As we backed out, I thought about where that place still was. In the memories of the people who'd lived there and in their photographs, in their blood and in their souls. And in my sadness, I also felt gratitude, that on that July day, those people and that land had shared with me enough of their light that a trace of the place survived in me, too.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Why won’t Lisa Jackson/Nancy Sutley visit a mountaintop removal site?

Big Coal and child victims

We learned with sadness this week that blasting has begun on Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, site of a long battle between Massey Energy and local residents who want the mountain to be a site for 200 wind turbines instead of mountaintop removal coal mining.

Massey has ignored these pleas, despite research showing that a wind farm would bring more jobs and economic stability to the area – and certainly less environmental destruction.

And while we frequently talk about the impact of mountaintop removal coal mining, a Sierra Club Beyond Coal activity from our northwest region last week brings to the forefront the reality of coal mining in the western U.S. as well. The northwest “Dirty Little Secret” regional tour showed residents in Washington and Oregon the tour’s namesake: that the region is hooked on coal power, and its use and mining devastate many communities.

Part of the tour included speeches from Wyoming rancher LJ Turner and Northern Cheyenne Tribe members Otto and Barbara Braided Hair from southeast Montana. All three have seen the impacts of coal mining in the Powder River Basin up close, and they shared their experiences with the crowds along the tour’s stops.

America gets 40% of its coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. In order to meet America's massive energy needs, each day over 80 coal trains leave the Powder River Basin bound for power plants across the nation.

For LJ Turner in Wyoming, coal mining is slowly taking away the vast acreage of his ranch.

“They’ve taken away our land, they’re taking away our water, they’re destroying our air – this is affecting us,” said Turner. “We’ve been ranching on government leases since the 1930s, and (mining) has taken 6,000 acres from us so far.” Campbell County, Wyoming, where Turner resides, produces a whopping 35% of the nation’s coal from a series of mining complexes that lay waste to miles of pristine prairie.

Turner said thankfully his family has 10,000 deeded acres that they cannot take away, but that land is still affected because the Powder River Basin mining operations are affecting the water.

The Powder River Basin includes the nation's largest surface mine, the Black Thunder Mine. Aquifers and rivers that once irrigated crops and watered cattle are now being used for power plants and dust suppression. Across the prairies and mountains of the Basin, communities have been divided. The region, once home to numerous Native tribes and then family ranches, is now a patchwork of coal mines, power lines, rail lines, and oil and gas wells.

For Otto Braided Hair, it was very important to share the realities of mining to folks who may not think about where their electricity comes from.

Otto said he wants to encourage people everywhere to think about more than just themselves.

He added that his Northern Cheyenne heritage implores him to speak out on this issue.

“The Cheyenne have a deep regard and respectful connection to the elements in the environment - the water, plants, animals, and air,” he explained. “Our highest, most important ceremonies are renewal of life and environment, or protection of life and environment.”

For those who hear about these damaging coal mining practices in the western U.S. or in Appalachia, LJ and Otto have advice on taking action.

Otto stressed the importance of thinking about more than the present.

“We must continue to challenge our people in authority to think way ahead in the future. When we’re long gone, there will be people living here. What is it going to be like three, four, five generations from now? That’s where the challenge has to be.

Stay tuned to this blog for updates (subscribe to our RSS feed here) on how you can take action to help save Coal River Mountain.

Related Links:

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Mountaintop removal funeral procession at EPA in D.C.Photo courtesy Chris Eichler of RAN Field Photography via Flickr The Coalfield Uprising is spreading across the nation.

As millions of pounds of explosions rip across their mountain communities, including the clean energy landmark of Coal River Mountain, scores of residents from the Appalachian coalfields have joined with supporters from across the country in a series of sit-ins, die-ins, protests, and a haunting "Day of the Dead" funeral procession and sit-in in the courtyard of the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Clean energy and clean water supporters across the country are also sending emails to the EPA and President Obama to stop the tragic blasting of Coal River Mountain.

"Inaction on the part of the EPA will affect the future of Appalachians, and generations to come," says Bob Kincaid, with the Coal River Mountain Watch organization in West Virginia. "If Coal River Mountain is blown up, the green energy future of Appalachia, and the entire nation, will be imperiled."

UPDATE: 3:3pm EST: The EPA Desk released this statement:

"EPA respects the concerns around the issue of mountaintop mining and
understands the high emotions felt by many Americans. Under the
leadership of Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, the Agency has taken a
number of unprecedented actions within the scope of the law, and in
partnership with other federal agencies to ensure the safety and health
of mining communities. We welcome and seek the voices of all Americans,
and look to them to guide our efforts to protect health and the
environment. We will continue to solicit the input of affected
communities, and engage with the public on this important issue."

Coal River Mountain has been recognized by the Obama administration's Council on Environmental Quality, and energy experts around the nation, as one of the most important sites for wind energy in the region, and a model for clean energy transition in the nation.

Instead of being destroyed for a limited dirty coal operation, the Coal River Wind project [PDF] slated for the historic mountain range would provide enough clean energy for 150,000 homes, hundreds of long-term jobs, and millions of dollars in tax revenues and local commerce.

Protester outside of EPA in D.C.Photo courtesy Chris Eichler of RAN Field Photography via Flickr As part of a nationwide "End Mountaintop Removal Day of Action" organized by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and coalfield activists and clean energy advocates across the nation, sit-ins and "die-in" and protests are taking place in over twenties cities at EPA regional offices from Kansas City to Denver to San Francisco, and at JP Morgan Chase offices from New York City to Chicago to Kentucky.

Today's sit-in at the EPA in D.C. is directed at Lisa Jackson, who recently invoked the agency's veto power to stop the massive Spruce Mine mountaintop removal operation in West Virginia. Declaring a state of emergency that threatens the lives of thousands of coalfield residents, the protesters (who include former coal miners) are calling on Jackson and the Obama administration to intervene in the new mountaintop removal operation on Coal River Mountain in a similar fashion, where the initial blasting took place last week. Operated by Massey Energy, the Coal River Mountain mine is setting off explosives that potentially jeopardize the 8-billion-gallon Brushy Fork coal sludge held back by a precarious earthen dam.

According to the mining company's own evacuation plan, if the Brusky Fork dam broke, local residents and children would have only a few minutes to escape a 70-foot high tidal wave of coal sludge.

"Every day, more than 3 million pounds of explosives are detonated in our state to remove our mountains and expose the thin seams of coal beneath," says Bo Webb, a resident of Coal River Valley, W.Va. and a participant in today's rally. "President Obama, I beg you to re-light our flame of hope and honor and immediately stop the coal companies from blasting so near our homes and endangering our lives. As you have said, we must find another way than blowing off the tops of our mountains. We must end mountaintop removal."

Protests are also underway at JP Morgan Chase offices in New York City, Chicago and elsewhere. As one of the biggest financiers of dirty coal endeavors, JP Morgan Chase has bankrolled Massey Energy's mountaintop removal operations. Coalfield and clean energy advocates are calling on JP Morgan Chase to follow the example of the Bank of America [PDF], which announced their refusal to bankroll mountaintop removal operations last December.

Here's a clip on JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's doublespeak on clean energy investment:

For more information on the local of the protests, see the RAN's End of Mountaintop Removal Day of Action page.

For more photos and videos, check out RAN's Flickr page.

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What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Capturing the massive social benefits of fuel efficiency requires regulation

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

The Battle at Coal River Mountain has officially begun.

At the same time President Obama invoked the "legacy of daring men and women" in our nation's quest for renewable energy initiatives, and as millions of concerned citizens rallied in support of 350.org climate change events around the world this weekend, Big Coal bulldozers reportedly clear cut a swath of lush deciduous forests in the carbon sink of Appalachia and fired the opening salvos in the mountaintop removal mining process to destroy the historic range slated for the Coal River Mountain Wind Project -- the most symbolic clean energy project in the nation.

But not without a fight.

Just as Appalachian mountaineers single-handedly turned the tide of the American Revolution, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, in defeating the British loyalists who threatened to lay waste to mountain communities at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780; just as mountaineers and union coal miners marched to liberate mountain communities at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 against Big Coal and its armed thugs, an extremely organized and growing coalfield uprising movement against mountaintop removal has marked a line in the sand on Coal River Mountain as the ultimate battleground to stop mountaintop removal and launch President Obama's clean energy jobs program.

How can you join the battle at Coal River Mountain?

First, donate generously to the nonprofit Coal River Mountain Watch advocates on the frontlines; support the coalfield organizations in the Alliance for Appalachia; put your body on the line with direct action organizations like Climate Ground Zero, Mountain Justice and Rainforest Action Network; contact national environmental organizations like the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign and Natural Resources Defense Council.

RAN, in fact, has called for a national "End Mountaintop Removal Day of Action" for next Friday, October 30.

And take action at the I Love Mountains website.

Coalfield residents and the national allies are calling on all concerned citizens to contact President Obama, CEQ chief Nancy Sutley, EPA chief Lisa Jackson, and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) to halt this unfolding tragedy.

In a blatant act of aggression against besieged coalfield residents, blasting dangerously close to one of the largest coal slurry impoundments in the nation, and immediately eliminating 24 megawatts of wind power development for the internationally acclaimed Coal River Wind Project, a subsidiary of Big Coal behemoth Massey Energy recently lay waste to the first acres of the 1,100-acre Bee Tree Branch section of a proposed 6,000-acre mountaintop removal operation designed to destroy the last in tact mountain on the historic Coal River Mountain range.

This blasting in the Bee Tree Branch area of Coal River Mountain effectively derails the Coal River Wind Project. Unlike the limited 14-year supply of coal on the site, the Coal River Wind project could provide long-term energy for 70,000 households, an estimated 200 jobs and $1.7 million in annual county taxes. In spite of the blasting, the upcoming UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen will also be reviewing the Coal River Wind proposal as a model for sustainable green economic development in the United States.

Last week, area residents also appealed to West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D) to halt the blasting and order a state of emergency, in order to thoroughly investigate the catastrophic potential of the jeopardized Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment, which holds back billions of gallons of toxic coal sludge. Blasting is taking place within a dangerously close distance of honey-combed underground mines by the impoundment dam.

Residents noted that another Massey subsidiary in eastern Kentucky was responsible for the largest coal slurry spill in 2000, where 300 million gallons of toxic sludge into the area's waterways and aquifers. If the earthen Brushy Fork dam breaks, nearly 1,000 area residents will have less than five minutes to save their lives.

In effect, Coal River Mountain should be ground zero in the climate change and renewable energy movements.

The blasting of Bee Tree Branch will not only strip the great range of its resources, its tributaries and lush forests, its history and its meaning; it will rob Americans of the possibility of creating long-lasting green jobs and energy. It will resound as the death knell of an American and Appalachian way of life, and a rejection of any opportunities for a sustainable future for the embattled coalfields.

The blasting has been launched.

Will the nation--and the Obama administration -- defend Coal River Mountain from this reckless assault on American citizens, our American mountains and waterways, and a clean energy future?

Related Links:

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Big News: In a historic move, Lisa Jackson's EPA threw down the gauntlet on mountaintop removal mining last Friday -- after they had just compromised on another massively destructive mountaintop removal operation. Is this the beginning of the end of the plunder of Appalachia -- or is the EPA moving sideways to regulate what its own science has called an irreversible violation of the Clean Water Act?

Within the backdrop of the EPA's extraordinary announcement to employ its veto authority at the largest mountaintop removal mine site in West Virginia, the coalfield uprising is moving on several fronts this week. Today, besieged coalfield residents in the Coal River Valley are delivering an urgent letter to West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin to stop an impending mountaintop removal operation near a dangerous coal slurry impoundment in their communities that will destroy jobs and their homeland and an internationally acclaimed wind farm. Updates of the action at the governor's mansion will be posted at Climate Ground Zero.

Meanwhile, the Alliance for Appalachia and and other coalfield groups are also continuing to collect statements against the Army Corps' NWP 21 permit process and their chaotic hearings last week.

Charleston Gazette/Coal Tattoo journalist Ken Ward broke the news on the EPA on Friday: The EPA announced its historic intentions to "issue a public notice of a proposed determination to restrict or prohibit the discharge of dredged and/or fill material at the Spruce No. 1 Mine project site consistent with our authority under Section 404 (c) of the Clean Water Act and regulations 40 C.F.R. Part 231." In a line: For the first time in decades, the EPA is moving to invoke its veto power to stop a St. Louis, Mo.-owned Arch Coal mountaintop removal mining operation from unacceptable adverse impacts on the environment and water quality.

The EPA has concluded that the Army Corps of Engineers' plan to adjust the permit would still result in the destruction of seven miles of streams. So, why did the EPA accept a compromise at the St. Louis, Mo.-owned Patriot Coal's massive Hobet mountaintop removal mine, which would reportedly still allow half of the affected streams to be destroyed? In truth, Lisa Jackson and the EPA have recognized that thousands of miles of streams have been sullied and jammed with mining waste from mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia over the past three decades -- and the impacts are "immense and irreversible, and there are no scientifically credible plans for mitigating these impacts," according to Margaret Palmer's U.S. Senate hearing testimony last June.

West Virginia state environmental biologist Doug Wood has noted:

We now have clear evidence that in some streams that drain mountaintop coal quarry valley fills, the entire order Ephemeroptera (mayflies) has been extirpated, not just certain genera of this order ... The loss of an order of insects from a stream is taxonomically equivalent to the loss of all primates (including humans) from a given area. The loss of two insect orders is taxonomically equivalent to killing all primates and all rodents through toxic chemicals.

Spruce No. 1 Mine in Logan County, W. Va. is not only the largest mountaintop removal site in West Virginia -- it has been the quintessential battleground for science and law-based mining policies over 10 years. So, is this the beginning of the end of the plunder of Appalachia ... or just more of regulating an abomination? A searing new collection of photos and essays -- Plundering Appalachia -- asks this question in one of the most gripping and informed books in years. Examining the cradle to the grave impacts of mountaintop removal mining, and coal in general, Plundering Appalachia shows the indisputable destruction of reckless mining on the local communities, the mountains and valleys, the watersheds, and the nation at large. Here's a video clip from the book:

Related Links:

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Capturing the massive social benefits of fuel efficiency requires regulation

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Lorelei Scarbro speaking with Gov. Joe ManchinPhoto: Chris EichlerAs a supportive crowd sang, "This land is your land, this land is my land," seven peaceful sit-in activists were arrested in Governor Joe Manchin's office at the West Virginia state capitol at 5 p.m. this afternoon, as part of the growing national coalfield uprising to stop mountaintop-removal mining. Today's protest called on the governor to intervene in his state's spiraling emergency over mountaintop removal mining and blasting.

Among the arrested was Miranda Miller, a student born and raised in West Virginia, who declared: "We're here on behalf of the people of the Coal River Mountain Community and we're here to draw attention to the dangers presented to them by the impending mountaintop removal coal mining. "

The world is watching this coalfield uprising: This was the 16th action of civil disobedience by nonviolent coalfield residents and protests this year. Over 100 people have been arrested.

Here's a clip from the protest:

With clear cut forests paving the way for a mountaintop removal permit in process in the historic Coal River Mountain range, the coalfield residents and nonviolent protesters today coaxed Manchin out of his office for a short meeting. Faced with massive mountaintop removal blasts within a dangerously short range of the earthen Brushy Fork impoundment dam, which holds back billions of gallons of toxic sludge, the residents are concerned for their safety -- absentee Massey Energy's own evacuation plan noted 998 potential deaths as the minimum number in the case of a catastrophic breach of the earthen dam. Meanwhile, coalfield residents and protestors also noted the mountaintop removal mine would destroy a widely acclaimed proposal for a Coal River Mountain industrial wind farm that would bring millions of dollars in revenues and hundreds of jobs to the community.

Miranda Miller, arrested at W.Va. CapitolPhoto: Chris EichlerThe governor's response? He told the coalfield residents: "What we're trying to do is find a balance and that's tough to do in an extractive state."

Extractive state? Is that who Gov. Manchin represents? Extraction companies like Richmond, Va.-based Massey? St. Louis, Mo.-based Arch Coal?

For coalfield residents and other West Virginians, West Virginia is the mountain state. In their letter presented to the governor, the residents declared:

As residents of West Virginia's Coal River Valley we write you to declare a state of emergency. Coal River Mountain is our last mountain untouched by mountaintop removal and it is in imminent danger of blasting. This would not only threaten our communities, it would also destroy our chance to have permanent jobs and renewable energy through ridge-top wind power. You have the power to rescind these permits.

At any moment, Massey Energy could blast part of the Bee Tree site, on the containing ridge of the Brushy Fork sludge impoundment. Brushy Fork impoundment, permitted to hold 9.8 billion gallons of toxic sludge, is the tallest dam in the hemisphere, and it sits on top of a network of abandoned underground mines.

We live in fear that the blasting could cause the dam to fail and create one of the greatest industrial disasters in our nation's history. The emergency evacuation plan for the Brushy Fork sludge dam states that should it fail, a wall of water 50 feet high would hit Whitesville and result in the deaths of at least 998 people. Given this risk, blasting should not be allowed until your Department of Environmental Protection has conducted a thorough geo-technical examination of the impoundment's stability in regards to the underground mines.

For more information on the Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment, see the great background story and maps at the Journey Up Coal River website. Coal River Valley residents have called on the governor to, with a particular urgency on the Bee Tree Branch mountaintop removal permit that would destroy the area for the widely acclaimed Coal River Wind Project. The Brushy Fork impoundment has also been a focus of several recent protests. Coal River resident Lorelei Scarbro spoke recently about the Coal River Wind project for her community at risk:

For more information on today's protest, visit: www.climategroundzero.org or mountainjustice.org.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

UPDATE: Every American -- including the Army Corps of Engineers -- must watch this powerful new 20-minute film by Chad Stevens on the real costs and consequences of mountaintop removal mining: Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining.

Now, the good news: on behalf of their children's future, coalfield residents and miners calmly came together in the Coal River Valley last night, as the Raleigh County School Board announced its intention to formally request funds for a new Marsh Elementary School, which currently sits near a toxic coal dust silo and downslope of a 2.8 billion gallon coal sludge impoundment and mountaintop removal operation.

"The main agenda item at last night's Raleigh County School Board hearing was one that has been long awaited," said Bo Webb, a local resident and Vietnam veteran. "Five years ago a campaign led by a few local concerned citizens began with the goal of obtaining a new school for the children and staff of Marsh Fork Elementary. Thanks to so many people this campaign grew into a movement that spread across America. Last night was the culmination of thousands of people's support from across our great land as the school board voted to formally request funds to construct a new school."

If only Big Coal and their supporters could have put the future of the region's children first at another meeting last night. Despite recent studies [PDF] that prove that mountaintop removal and coal mining have devastated the Appalachian economies and health, cost the coal states more in services than tax revenues, and holds back [PDF] sustainable development for the future, Big Coal continues to threaten coal mining communities with impending doom if they consider any alternatives.

While their profits continue to soar amid job losses, Big Coal let loose the hounds of chaos and hatred at last night's Army Corps of Engineers public hearing in West Virginia on mountaintop removal permits.

In the process, Big Coal Gone Wild also raised a new question: given their increasingly inflammatory and distorted propaganda, should certain Big Coal instigators be investigated by the Department of Justice and FBI for sowing the seeds of potential hate crimes?

It begs the question: What's it going to take to get the Obama administration and West Virginia state officials to publicly denounced the violent rhetoric by Big Coal hacks and mountaintop removal operators?

Busing in a huge, nearly uncontrollable gathering in West Virginia, (the hearings in Kentucky and Tennessee were raucous, though without problems), Big Coal Gone Wild did its best to turn these important Army Corps of Engineers public hearings on the specifics of following the laws for mountaintop removal permits into a shouting match and general mayhem. On the heels of a violent summer in the coalfields, last night's shouting match capped a week of bizarre but dangerous comments by Big Coal operators.

Consider these nuggets from this week:

Big Coal supporters called the EPA a "modern day Gestapo."

Big Coal supporters referred to nonviolent Gandhian protesters as suicide bombers.

Big Coal is running ads of besieged coalfield residents as masked "bandits."

Big Coal supporters held a sign that declared, "hang a tree hugger, save a miner," in a Wall Street Journal article lsat week.

Here's a report on last night's hearing in Charleston, W. Va., from Chuck Nelson, a retired coal miner in West Virginia:

There were about 10 of us, who were the last group leaving from inside. We were waiting to give our comments, when word was brought back in, what was happening outside. As we talked with each of our groups inside, things just kept getting more crazy. We decided to leave then as a group, to proceed to make our departure. Insults were hurled at us as we were leaving, with a bunch of thugs following. Once in the lobby, I went directly to a Charleston city officer, and requested an escort to our vehicles, with an angry group outside the doors. The officer told me, that we should have known, what was going to happen when we came there. He did escort us to the front doors, and told Ben, as we were leaving, you are on your own. We made our way outside, only to be met with more insults, that followed us practically all the way to our vehicles. We made calls on our phones, and tried to make sure everyone was all right. I think everyone finally did. I too, wondered where the state troopers were, not one was ever visible. I wonder, how in the world can the Army Corp make a decision on an important permit, when they can't even conduct a proper, and peaceful hearing.

Vernon Haltom, from the Coal River Mountain Watch nonprofit, added:

I went to the Charleston, W. Va., hearing hosted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but was unable to get in and give comments because the place was full. This was after enduring a gauntlet of coal cult thugs hurling every insult imaginable at me and the people who came with me to see and listen. Although a few other people and I were in line and had filled out the registration forms to give comments, the Charleston police made us go out of the building where we were surrounded by more thugs pushing against us, threatening our lives, and again hurling insults. Our group included an 80-year-old woman enduring 300-pound thugs screaming obscenities within three feet of her ears. After 15 minutes or so of this shameful display, the Charleston police required us to leave. Because it was easier to control a group of six or seven peaceful people than a mob of hundreds of violence prone thugs, and because the police did not want any of us or the police to get hurt, they escorted us off the premises. Essentially, police inability to control the mob resulted in our inability to give verbal comments. While the building was full, we were prepared to enter once a few people left, but the police removed us from our place in line and removed us from the premises while the insult-hurlers were allowed to stay.

Our friends inside the hearing were able to give comments, but were drowned out by the mob. When they complained to the hearing moderators, they were told the clock was ticking. When they left, the police refused to escort the last small group to their vehicles, forcing them to run the gauntlet without protection. The police said, "You all knew what you were getting into; you're on your own," or a similar reply when asked for escort to cars. The TV news channels didn't show this side of the night, and no one from the pro-mountain side appeared on TV. Instead, the TV news interviewed coal supporters and implied there was no one from our side giving testimony. From one of the hearings, I don't know which one, one of the Corps of Engineers people said, "This is democracy working," or something like that. This was not democracy working. It was a mob intimidating both the Charleston police and the U.S. Army, as well as the peaceful citizens who came to give comments to protect their homes, live, and communities.

At the Pikeville, Ky. meeting, coal miner Carl Shoupe reported:

As a third generation underground coal miner who is totally disabled from a roof fall accident, who has watched his father, grandfather, and father-in-law die from the dreadful disease of Black Lung, the Army Corps meeting was status quo. It is a proven fact the coal industry is historically anti-regulation and against any law that creates safety for coal miners or environmental issues that would cost them in terms of money. No where did the elected politicians or coal owners speak about cleaning up the environmental impact of coal. They only spoke about the economics or frankly, "how much money it would cost to mine the coal correctly."

You're never going to make everyone happy, but if we are going to continue our consumptive practices, we need to make some decisions. Coal has been very much a part of my past, but in the last 10 years (mountain top removal of coal) has done more damage to the environment than deep coal mining did in the previous 100 years. If those young coal miners who climbed on those buses and received their days pay only knew what "participatory democracy" was, they would be calling the United Mine Workers Labor Union, sign a union card, and after signing a union card get rid of every politician that spoke or even was there last night in Pikeville. History remembers people who embrace change, not those who resist it.

Eastern Kentucky coalfield resident Mickey McCoy reported:

"God bless the coal and miners and to Hell with the tree huggers!" shouted an elected official from an Eastern Kentucky coal producing county while addressing an estimated 3,800 people, mostly mine workers, their families and related industry representatives, in attendance at the Army Corps public hearing in Pikeville, Ky. last night. By the time the meeting wound down sometime after midnight earlier cat calls, insults, and bursts of applause had ended and only a couple of hundred folk were in attendance to hear the last of those giving testimony. Scores began to file out once the Corps started to receive thanks at the microphones from members of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and other environmentally minded individuals who praised the possible elimination of the rubber-stamping of mining permits under NWP21.

As McCoy told a congressional briefing in Washington, D.C. last month: It's time to end the bombing of Appalachia and bring peace and justice to the coalfields:

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Via Applachian Voices

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced the preliminary fate of 79 valley fill permit applications associated with mountaintop removal coal mining. In a move that pleased environmentalists and coalfield residents in central and southern Appalachia, the EPA recommended that none of the 79 permits be streamlined for approval. iLoveMountains has an interactive map and action page, as well as a little helpful background on what these permits are and why they are being announced today.

This decision is not final, but is part of a coordination procedure outlined in a June “memorandum of understanding” between the Environmental Protection Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of Interior to deal with a backlog of permits held up by litigation over the past few years. The EPA has promised a more stringent and transparent review of all mountaintop removal valley fill permit applications.

Willa Mays, executive director for Appalachian Voices, a regional environmental group, was delighted about the EPA’s preliminary list. “By recommending these permits not be approved, the EPA and the Army Corps has demonstrated their intention to fulfill a promise to provide science-based oversight which will limit the devastating environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining,” Mays said. “EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Army Corps Assistant Secretary Jo-Ellen Darcy and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Terrence “Rock” Salt have shown exceptional leadership. This is indeed good news especially paired with the fact that 156 members of the House of Representatives are now cosponsors of the Clean Water Protection Act.”

The reaction from coalfield residents was mostly optimistic. Chuck Nelson, retired union coal miner from Glen Daniel, W.Va., and board member of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition said, “By recommending these permits be further reviewed, the EPA is allowing at least a temporary reprieve for the people of Appalachia. It appears the EPA is starting to take the concerns of coalfield residents into account when considering these permits.”

Vernon Haltom, co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch in Raleigh County, W.Va., was excited about the announcement. “We who live with the nightmare of mountaintop removal are glad that the EPA is beginning to do its job to protect our communities,” he said. “Our life-giving water resources are priceless, and it’s refreshing to see the EPA finally prioritizing them over coal companies’ short-term profits.”

As outlined in the memorandum, EPA regional offices will be given 14 days to review and comment on the EPA headquarters’ recommendations, after which EPA headquarters can finalize the list.

If the EPA regional offices agree with the EPA headquarters’ assessment that these permits have “substantial environmental concerns,” an “enhanced coordination” process will begin, where the EPA and the Army Corps will study each permit on a case-by-case basis. The beginning of each coordination process sets off a 60-day period during which the two agencies must resolve any permit applications. The EPA reserves the right to exercise their veto authority over any of the unresolved permits.

In the past, the EPA was primarily absent from the approval of mountaintop removal permits, allowing the Army Corps to essentially “rubber-stamp” them. “The whole permitting process had become a bit toothless,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted in a recent interview with the Tampa Bay Press. “The Corps of Engineers understands [that] when the EPA has concerns, it’s going to raise them. We’re going to do our jobs.”

In 2002, the Bush Administration expedited the permitting process by classifying mining waste as acceptable “fill material” as defined by the Clean Water Act. Valley fills are created when toxic debris from mountaintop removal mining is dumped into valleys adjacent to the mine sites, burying headwater streams and permanently damaging the hydrology of the watershed system.

“I’m glad the EPA has admitted they have some responsibility for protecting people and nature from mountaintop removal,” said Cathie Bird of Save Our Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee. “But I worry they still don’t get it. This brutal practice kills whole communities and watersheds, and it should be banned, not one permit at a time but once and forever.”

To view the permits in map form, visit the Permit Shortlist Google Map created by Appalachian Voices at http://www.ilovemountains.org/epa-permit-list.

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Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

This post co-written by Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign.

Very big news out of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this morning:  The agency has determined that all 79 mountaintop-removal mining permits submitted to it for review by the Army Corps of Engineers would violate the Clean Water Act. After eight long years of rubber-stamp permits being issued during the Bush administration, this is one of the most dramatic and encouraging actions yet by the Obama administration, and marks a welcome return of the rule of law to the coalfields of Appalachia.

Mountaintop removal -- a devastating form of coal mining that involves blowing up mountains and dumping the former mountaintops into neighboring valleys, burying streams -- is governed by a patchwork of laws and federal agencies. Permits to bury streams with mining waste are initially issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, but EPA has ultimate oversight and may veto Corps-issued permits if they fail to comply with the Clean Water Act. 

During the Bush administration, EPA never opposed or challenged a permit, despite the fact that they clearly violated laws on the books to protect clean water and public health. Apparently, those days are over. This dramatic announcement by EPA that every single one of the 79 pending permits violates the Clean Water Act is a condemnation of the quality of permits being churned out during the Bush administration and is a testament to the Obama administration’s sincere commitment to science, transparency, and enforcing environmental safeguards.

All of these permits had piled up behind a court decision that was issued in February, and so most of them were written during the Bush administration. For those eight years, permits were being issued that violated the Clean Water Act, but EPA was prevented from objecting to the permits. Clearly there is a new sheriff in town.

It is important to note that this is only the first step in this process. These mountains have not been saved. The Army Corps now has 60 days to revise the permits and address EPA’s concerns. In our view, a sound reading of the science would determine that these permits cannot be issued. Some of the problems that are pervasive in all of these permits -- heavy metal pollution downstream, the inability to restore healthy functioning streams to replace what has been lost -- are problems that we just cannot engineer our way out of once a stream has been buried under millions of tons of rubble.

And ultimately, the Obama administration needs to take the step of reversing Bush-era rule changes that remain in place. Until President Obama fixes both the fill rule, under the Clean Water Act, and the buffer zone rule, under the Surface Mining Act, Appalachia will continue to suffer destruction under Bush’s regulatory regime. You can encourage the Obama administration to take those actions here.

Today’s announcement is just the latest stark reminder of the fact that, for too long, the coal industry has benefited from loopholes that no other industry enjoys. They bury streams with mining waste in violation of the Clean Water Act. They still lack any federal regulations for mercury pollution, a potent neurotoxin. They are allowed to dispose of toxic waste from their power plants -- coal ash -- again, with no federal regulations. It is time to close these loopholes, protect public health, and return the rule of law not just to Appalachia, but to all of America.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

A moment of truth has arrived for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and President Barack Obama, who has promised “unprecedented steps” to rein in the devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining that is wrecking havoc across wide swaths of Appalachian mountains, valleys and communities.

Anti-mountaintop removal activists are hoping President Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson are about to make good on past promises to crack down on the destructive practice.Courtesy Jesse Jenkins / Energy CollectiveEPA is expected to announce decisions this week on over 100 pending permits for new or expanded coal mining projects utilizing mountaintop removal (MTR), which uses huge amounts of explosives to decapitate mountains and access the coal beneath, dumping the remains of these once-verdant Appalachian peaks directly on top of neighboring valleys and streams.

Mountaintop removal mining has already buried more than 800 miles of Appalachian streams and destroyed hundreds of square miles of woodlands in one of America's biodiversity hotspots, all while both the U.S. EPA and state environmental agencies have done little to curtail the practice. That's left it to activists to slow these projects down and prevent their irreversible damages.

But if recent news that the EPA is seeking to revoke the permit for the largest mountaintop removal mining project in West Virginia history is any indicator, the agency may finally be earning the "Protection" part of their name.

With a self-imposed, September 8th deadline now expired, the EPA is expected to issue an "initial list" this week identifying pending mountaintop removal projects that pose potential environmental concerns. The projects under EPA review have already been approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps), which has primary responsibility for approving surface mining projects. Any projects that EPA decides will have no "significant" environmental impact will sail forward "without further coordination with EPA," according to agency procedures (kindly explained by Coal Tattoo's Ken Ward Jr. here).

Projects posing an environmental risk - and any sane person is hard pressed to explain how blowing up a mountain has no environmental impact - will instead show up on a list sent to the Corps, triggering a process of further review and ultimately - if EPA does it's job right - the rejection of some if not all of these proposed mountaintop removal projects under the Clean Water Act.

For better or worse, the forthcoming EPA list of environmentally risky projects will mark an important step closer to the establishment of clear, public standards for what level of environmental impact the agency will allow or prohibit at MTR sites proposed throughout Appalachia. The EPA has so far avoided establishing any such clear public standard.

With hundreds of mountaintop removal sites now in the balance, this is the moment of truth for the EPA, Administrator Lisa Jackson, and President Obama to make good on promises to reign in this clearly environmentally devastating practice. As EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson explained on National Public Radio last week:

As we wait for the EPA's decision on the dozens of pending MTR permits, the Agency moved forward on a seperate front to block the largest proposed mountaintop removal site in West Virginia history in letter sent to the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers late last week.

Read the full story at www.WattHead.org, the new home of WattHead - Energy News and Commentary

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For a joyously peaceful week, residents beneath Massey Energy's Edwight mountaintop-removal site in the Pettry Bottom community in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia have received a reprieve from reckless blasting, fly rock, silica-dust showers, and potential flooding--thanks to tree-sitter Nick Stocks, who voluntarily came down at 10:00 a.m. on Monday. The seventh day into the protest, Stocks and fellow tree-sitter Laura Steepleton endured all-night sleep-deprivation tactics from Massey security guards, including the firing up of chainsaws last night. 

UPDATE, September 1, 10am EST:  According to Climate Ground Zero, both protesters "have been charged with trespassing, obstruction and littering, and their bail has been set at $25,000 each.  For the past five days, they endured psychological torture, verbal assault and threats."

A direct report from Rock Creek, West Virginia has been filed by Rainforest Action Network:http://understory.ran.org/2009/09/01/where-in-the-world/

UPDATE, Aug. 31, 5:00 p.m. EST: According to Climate Ground Zero, the State Police have confirmed that Laura Steepleton also descended the tree and has been arrested.

Stocks stated, “To this day the DEP [West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection] has acted as a thin, weak delegate for Big Coal in West Virginia. They have circumvented, sidestepped, dismissed, and lied to communities and individuals who look to them for protections that ought to assure healthy children, safe drinking water, and a continued existence in the valley. To this day, they have not done their job to even the slightest degree. When the government fails in its obligation to protect its people and communities are made unsafe and unlivable, it is the responsibility of all concerned people to turn attention to that failure and do all in their capacity to ensure the safety of the community. If the DEP doesn't do it, we must do it ourselves, and we will go beyond. We will stop the devastation of this mountain and protect the communities below. We will end mountaintop removal.

The security guards' actions with lights and air horns are making the situation less safe, Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice volunteer Charles Suggs said. “Depriving sleep from people who have to maintain safety systems to prevent a fatal fall endangers their lives."

Filmmaker Jordan Freeman has released an incredible aerial video of the massive Edwight mountaintop-removal site, the nearby coal-sludge impoundment, and the protesters nuzzled into the lush Appalachian forests.

As part of a growing national campaign to stop mountaintop removal, the protesters have drawn attention to the West Virginia DEP's lack of enforcement of mining laws, and the deleterious impact of the mountaintop-removal blasting, silica dust, and fly rock on the health of the local residents, their watersheds, and deciduous forests. Just last Friday, fly rock and boulders from a strip-mine site slammed into a home in eastern Kentucky.

For updates on the action or to support the defense fund, visit Climate Ground Zero or Mountain Justice. Also find out more about the West Virginia DEP's negligence.

Here's more of Jordan's film work on the recently released documentary Coal Country:

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

UPDATE, Sept. 2: The folks over at Credo Action are encouraging Verizon customers to communicate their displeasure with the company's sponsorship -- via Twitter, Facebook and Email.

--

Verizon Wireless needs to reconsider its "Friends and Family" feature--or, more pointedly, withdraw its support for Massey Energy's outrageously bogus "Friends of America" rally on Labor Day weekend.

Do 87 million Verizon Wireless customers, stockholders, and its Public Policy Development and Corporate Responsibility Department know that their company is a cosponsor of next week's climate change–denying, union-busting, pro–mountaintop removal rally organized by Massey Energy in Logan, W.Va.? (And what about Greenebaum Doll and McDonald, "a top 200 trademark law firm"--perhaps the rally's most odd sponsor?)

Does the Environmental Defense Fund, which recognized Verizon's Green Initiatives--to save energy, support solar and other renewable-energy sources, and lower its greenhouse-gas emissions--know that Verizon Wireless is sponsoring an event at which the featured speaker is Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and one of the most infamous global-warming deniers?

On its Green Press Kit site, Verizon claims, "Environmental stewardship is ingrained in Verizon's heritage, and the company prides itself on having a positive influence on the environment in which it operates." The page links to info on solar-energy and energy-efficiency measures undertaken by various offices.

Does Verizon know that 500 mountains have been destroyed, historic communities devastated, and watersheds polluted by mountaintop removal--and that Massey Energy has worked aggressively to not only wipe out our nation's carbon sink of deciduous forests in Appalachia, but also any attempts at renewable energy and development in the region? Read about Massey's role in strip-mining the last ridge on Coal River Mountain and impeding an incredible wind farm.

Do the Communications Workers of America, who represent Verizon technicians, know that the bogus "Friends of America" rally is a blatant anti-union event aimed at taking down the 70th annual United Mine Workers of America picnic, and that Massey Energy is defiantly anti-union?

So why is Verizon sponsoring this pro–mountaintop removal rally on a strip-mine site? Does Verizon support Massey Energy's ruthless mountaintop-removal campaign and its infamous CEO Don Blankenship? Check out this ABC News report on Blankenship's campaign to bankroll the West Virginia courts:

During their 4th quarter 2008 earnings call last spring, Massey Energy executives crowed that "2008 was a very exciting and successful year for Massey, by many measures, the most successful in our history. As you know, we undertook a very aggressive expansion plan in late 2007, and our members executed that plan almost to perfection in 2008." And then, in answering a question about how 2010 guidance could lower production 10 percent and impact the high head count, a Massey executive simply responded with the bottom line of profiteers: "I think the answer would be that we will be able to reduce the workforce with attrition fairly markedly," and "we also will cut back on salaries."

Bottom line: Massey Energy profits up, jobs down. Find out more about Massey.

And here's Lord Monckton:

George Monbiot has thoroughly debunked Monckton's anti–global warming thesis

Verizon should withdraw its sponsorship of this bogus rally immediately -- or explain its support of mountaintop removal, climate-change denial, and union-busting to its 87 million customers.

Call or text or email Verizon Wireless corporate leaders and let them know. CEO Dennis Strigl can be emailed at Dennis.Strigl@verizonwireless.com. Verizon HQ is here:

1 Verizon Way
Basking Ridge, NJ 07920-1097
(908) 559-7000

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Yet another pro-coal group has popped up to rally folks against climate action. The Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security -- or FACES of Coal -- joins a growing list of "grassroots" groups formed to support fossil fuels.

The "faces" shown on the group's website include a smiling flower vender, a child playing golf, a family with a baby, and a grandmother waving an American flag. Shockingly, no coal miners, residents of homes destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining, or asthmatic children are featured.

FACES says it's an "an alliance of people from all walks of life" united by their belief in the importance of coal. "In addition to keeping tens of thousands of people employed in good-paying jobs, coal is the lifeblood of our domestic energy supply, generating half the electricity consumed in the United States today," says its website.

The group intends to "make sure local, state and federal lawmakers and people around the country know the facts about coal and understand how important coal mining is to the region" of Appalachia.

FACES is allied with Friends of Coal, Coal Mining Our Future and the Coalition for Mountaintop Mining .

Grist tried to find out more about FACES, as the website does not list members or funders. The only contact information listed is an email address, and our email inquiry bounced back.

Are there any actual faces behind FACES?

h/t to Ken Ward

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Bill McKibben says time is running out on climate delays

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Want to get really angry about health care and global warming? Not the ginned-up rage of the Obama-was-really-born-in-Kenya crowd, but an anger that fires you up to take action in the name of justice? Anger like the rage felt by so many white Northerners and Southerners in 1963 when they saw Birmingham's fire hoses turned on patriotic African-Americans, a rage so profound that they too joined the civil rights revolution?

Well I invite you, in a brief audio and video tour, to bear witness to what's happening in Wise County, Virginia. This Appalachian region, only a few hundred miles from the policy fog in Washington DC, clarifies what the health care/climate policy fight is all about. And if you're not angry enough to take action after hearing these voices and seeing these images, blame yourself when powerbrokers like Don Blankenship (more on him later) once again have their day.

Let's start with what's good about Wise County: its hard-working families. Taking a look at this community calendar, you'll see all that is right with rural American communities and their urban counterparts. From January to December, the citizens of Wise County celebrate the legacy of Dr. King (January 19), perform plays (March 17), honor our country and its veterans (July 4 and October 8) and get involved in all of those glorious community, spiritual and volunteering activities that capture the essence of the American experience. In Wise County, it's not hard to find the best of ourselves.

But one item on the same calendar reveals what is not right: the July 24-26 "Remote Area Medical Health Fair" at the local fairgrounds. Sound innocuous? Well take ten minutes to listen to this recent report from NPR on the event, hosted in Wise County, which served 2,700 "tired and desperate" people from 17 different states. In the words of NPR, it was "a Third World scene with an American setting." It's heartbreaking: entire families waiting in line overnight to get just some of the basic health care that they cannot afford. Hear about the young boy with a battered nose and an oozing ear; the single mom with a gallbladder so enlarged it's about to kill her; and the many patients gettingall of their teeth pulled. That's right -- for over 20 years, while DC politicians have been promising a better health care system, your fellow Americans in and around Wise County have been suffering. Angry yet?

And take a guess what industry dominates this part of Appalachia. No surprise: it's coal. Like in so many parts of the country, excessive reliance on coal means high levels of poverty -- the kind of poverty that creates the need for this health "fair." A recent study out of West Virginia University puts it clearly: "Coal-mining economies are not strong economies. [Coalfield communities] are weaker than the rest of the state, weaker than the rest of the region, and weaker than the rest of the nation." There's no doubt that the thousands of employees of the (increasingly capital-intensive) coal industry are hard-working, admirable people; the problem is that in the 21st century, coal helps them at the expense of others.

The second part of coal's legacy in this area is mountaintop removal. Take this extraordinary virtual flyover of Wise County to view its devastation:

The human effects of this destruction are captured in the words of Wise County's Kathy Selvage. Listen to her speak about the "terrible injustice' created by coal, literally in her backyard:

And memo to the Birther crowd: if you think the fight against mountaintop removal is some godless liberal conspiracy, see this testimony from Kathy: "It was my Mother's custom to have her early morning Bible reading on her front porch. [Because of mountaintop removal,] she was forced to move inside because she could no longer stand the noise, dust, and smell that was invading her 'Morning with the Lord'."

In Wise County, poverty, environmental destruction and powerlessness come together, and the result -- despite the resilience of hard-working Americans who call it home -- is sick families, destroyed mountains, a dysfunctional economy and at least one good lady who finds it harder to pray.

Now there certainly are winners in all of this: take Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Coal, a modern version of Daniel-Day Lewis's ruthless oilman in There Will Be Blood. It's hard to know where to start with this guy:

So climate warriors, let's get angry: about inexcusable poverty, the destruction wrought by coal, and the lobby-laden system that helps Blankenship thrive while too many of the good people of Wise County suffer.

And if you are angry, what are you going to do about it? Will you be willing to get arrested standing up to Massey Coal, like Jim Hansen? Lead civil disobedience against Dominion Power, right there in Wise County? Or at least, show up to your elected officials' town meetings and speak loudly and clearly in support of health care and climate change legislation? With some hard work, maybe we can reveal Blankenship and his ilk for what they are: the Bull Connors of the dirty-energy age. There's no time to waste.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

This interesting news arrived from Appalachian Voices, the North Carolina-based organization that is one of most creative and effective national leaders in the campaign to get beyond Big Coal:

THE DECLINING POWER OF COAL: DOWN TO 42.6 % ELECTRICAL GENERATION

Here's a nifty graph, though do note that the actual numbers in 2009 reflect electricity generated only from January through May:

According to the EIA Executive Summary Report:

For more information on Appalachian Voices, see here.

To read the Executive Summary of the EIA report, visit here.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

While Big Coal continues to bankroll the largest public relations campaign of "clean coal" denial in recent history, former US Representative and historian Ken Hechler has issued an urgent wake up call to Greens and liberal Democrats: Tragic lessons in history remind us that the coal crisis and its deniers call for more hellraisers, not compromise.

This is the truth: While Democrats in Washington, DC tie themselves into knots over regulatory inaction and Big Coal slogans, it takes a 94-year-old hellraiser to sound the alarm on the most overlooked environmental and human rights violations today. Big Coal must be confronted, not coddled.

As one of our nation's liberal titans, Hechler understands the Democratic Party's vexing relationship with Big Coal and its 150 years of denial of the true cost of coal. While black lung was first diagnosed in 1831, it took Hechler's congressional leadership to pass federal legislation to deal with its ravages in 1969. Though scientists recognized the deleterious impact of sulfur dioxide emissions as early as the 1860s, it took an aggressive grassroots movement to pass the Clean Air Act of 1990 to overcome the denial of acid rain, which had scorched the forests from the Appalachians to Canada.

Hechler is no stranger to history and its crises. As a military officer in World War II, Hechler interrogated Nazi war criminals; as a history professor and author, he assisted Franklin D. Roosevelt with his 13-volume public papers. As a US Representative from West Virginia, Hechler was the only member in Congress to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma, Alabama in 1965.

And this June, the 94-year-old coalfield hero took to the streets to stand up to the bankrolled wrath of union-busting Big Coal thugs and joined a protest at Marsh Fork Elementary in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia, where school children must play amid toxic coal dust and sit under the horrific reality of a 2.8 billion gallon lake of coal sludge as federally sanctioned mountaintop removal blasting takes place nearby.

Ken Hechler deserves a Medal of Freedom.

In truth, he would settle for a new generation of hellraisers to dislodge the Democrats and the nation from its indifference to the devastation of mountaintop removal mining, which has left his state of West Virginia in economic and environmental ruin.

In a commentary last month in the Charleston Gazette, Hechler wrote:

"I used to be an agitator, then an activist. Now I am a hell-raiser. At the age of 94, and 95 in September, there's not enough time left.

It began rather suddenly on Oct. 21, 1966. Far off across the Atlantic in the little country of Wales, something happened which seared my conscience. In the little town of Aberfan, a joyful group of over 100 elementary school students in their morning assembly enthusiastically sang "All Things Bright and Beautiful."

Shortly after 9 a.m. a deafening roar resounded just after the assembly. Some of the teachers thought it sounded like a jet plane about to crash into the school. They hurried the students underneath their desks.

There had been a heavy rain the night before. On the mountain above the school a huge collection of coal refuse or "gob" suddenly broke loose. A 40-foot-deep mass of sludge roared down the mountain and crashed headlong into the school. More than 100 little students were entombed along with most of their teachers. They didn't have a chance.

Including adults in Aberfan, 144 lives were snuffled out that day. Less than a year later, just after the Fourth of July, 1967, I began getting phone calls from my friends along Buffalo Creek and other sections of Logan County which I represented in Congress, urging me to come down and see all the damage being done by mudslides of sludge after downpours over the holiday.

What I saw, particularly along Buffalo Creek, horrified me. I telephoned Gov. Hulett Smith and urged him to assemble a team of officials to see for themselves the danger confronting the residents, and to figure out what remedial measures were necessary to save people's lives. I had the disaster at Aberfan very much on my mind.

Gov. Smith said he would ask Finance Commissioner Truman Gore and officials of the State Road Commission and Department of Natural Resources to be ready for a call from me. I also asked two representatives on the Army Corps of Engineers to join the group of state officials to drive down to Buffalo Creek and other threatened areas of Logan County the following morning.

It was raining the next morning, but the officials all showed up. I also asked the local head of Island Creek Coal Co., Richard Herron, to come along, since one of the trouble spots was at Proctor Hollow near Amherstdale on Buffalo Creek.

News reporters from the Logan Banner, The Charleston Gazette and The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington ran accounts of our 1967 warning. But nothing was done - and five years later, 125 people were killed in the historic Buffalo Creek gob pile dam collapse.

That's why 30 of us were arrested on June 23 this year for protesting the sludge pond that hangs like a Sword of Damocles a few hundred yards up the mountain above Marsh Fork Elementary School in Raleigh County. With 2.8 billion gallons of sludge close to the blasting of mountaintop removal nearby, is it any wonder that I think about Aberfan?"

Here's an interview from the protest:

It took a disaster in 1968 to finally convince President Richard Nixon and the US Congress to act on black lung disease--which still kills three coal miners daily. Here's a clip on Hechler's heroic role in that crisis:

Earlier this summer, Hechler, as the most knowledgeable person on the complexities of the coalfields, issued a call to President Obama for a "Harry S. Truman moment".

What is it going to take to get President Barack Obama and the US Congress to stop mountaintop removal?

Answer: More hellraisers.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Spoleto, Umbria -- When President Barack Obama trundled into the bel paese of Italy for the G8 gathering last month, some of my neighbors in the verdant hills of Umbria were surprised to learn about their country's small (12 percent roughly) but lingering dependence on coal-fired plants. Draping banners down four coal-fired towers of carbon emissions that week, Greenpeace reminded the European gathering -- and President Obama -- of the inconvenient reality of coal. Coal mining in Italy is considered a relic of yesteryear. Only a few miles from this Umbrian hilltown, the last smoldering lignite mine closed a couple of decades ago after a series of fatal accidents, and with it went the haze of sulfuric acid, mercury, lead and fly ash that cloaked much of Europe.

But, the greatest surprise -- sheer disbelief -- for my neighbors in Italy's protected Umbrian range was reserved for our own American style of Big Coal-gone-wild -- that federally sanctioned process of mountaintop removal mining that has laid waste to over a million acres of our nation's most diverse and ancient mountains in Appalachia, in order to produce less than 5-7 percent of national coal production.

Blowing up your mountains? The Italians asked again. How is that possible under President Obama?

It's hard for any foreigner to believe that President Obama has quietly acquiesced to the marketing and machinations of Big Coal, and allows millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives to rip across our nation's first frontier, topple hundreds of mountains, and ruin and displace historic mountain communities -- that would have easily been granted regional protection by the United Nations or the European Community.

In fact, when I describe the process of mountaintop removal, and its 38-year reign of terror in Appalachia, no one believes me, so I am compelled to pull out my laptop and show them pictures and videos, including the creative work from Chicago's environmental-artist collective called Topless America.

:

Here's an incredible list of the scores of films on mountaintop removal documented by film critic and historian Steve Fesenmaier.

And here's a trailer for the forthcoming film documentary, On Coal River, that expertly details the human costs of "minimizing adverse environmental impacts," as the Obama administration likes to say, of mountaintop removal.

Last month in the west country of Ireland, I chatted in a pub with a shopkeeper from County Roscommon. We shared stories of our grandfathers, both of whom were coal miners. After telling me about Ireland's plans for off-shore wind turbines and other renewable energy projects outside Galway, the shopkeeper urged me to go and visit the Arigna Coal Mine in Derreenavoggy, County Roscommon. His grandfather had worked in the underground mine there; my grandfather worked in various underground mines in southern Illinois.

The Arigna mine is part of the Miners Way Historical Trail, which treks along the gorgeous hills and valleys of Arigna. Closed in 1990, after being mined underground for 400 years, the Arigna mine--the last working coal mine in Ireland -- has been turned into a heritage site. The shopkeeper raved about the natural beauty of the area -- his own "little Appalachia," he claimed. He told me to take a hike after I visited the museum. As the coal mine brochure hailed, "Arigna is situated in a picturesque valley with breathtaking scenery and unspoiled landscape." Unspoiled landscape.

My grandparent's 150-year-old ancestral homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois was strip mined 10 years ago this month and has been turned into a leveled graveyard of foreign grasslands.

Over 1.5 million acres of hardwood deciduous forests, and over 500 mountains that would have been celebrated as a national park in any other region in the world, have been wiped out in Appalachia from mountaintop removal, the devastated ruins flatted into monuments of destruction. I told the Irish shopkeeper he needed to visit Appalachia to believe it.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

There will be no more excursions to Dollywood for Roger Horton, a coal miner who lives in West Virginia -- at least not until U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) drops legislation he's sponsoring that would limit mountaintop removal mining.

Horton is the mastermind behind a tourism boycott involving miners in neighboring West Virginia and Kentucky, who say they refuse to spend any money in Tennessee as long as its Senator is threatening their jobs.

The Washington Post reports that Horton came up with the idea for the boycott while riding the bus home from a June 25 Senate committee hearing on the Appalachian Restoration Act, sponsored by Alexander and Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.). The law would prevent the dumping of toxic mining waste from mountaintop removal mining into headwater streams.

"It's not necessary to destroy our mountaintops in order to have enough coal," Alexander said in his opening statement at that hearing. "Saving our mountaintops is important to me."

That didn't sit well with the miners, who fear their jobs are on the line. Horton is a truck driver who works at Guyan Mine, a mountaintop removal operation in Logan County, W.V. owned by Apogee Coal Co., a subsidiary of Missouri-based Patriot Coal. A member of the UMWA Local 5958, Horton also directs a lobby group called Citizens for Coal, which counts among its funders the Logan County Commission.

"I understand their feelings," Alexander told the Associated Press. "But I have feelings, too. And my feelings are that millions of people come to Tennessee to see the beauty of the mountaintops and not to see mountains whose tops have been blown off with the waste dumped in our streams -- which is all I am trying to stop."

Members of Coal River Mountain Watch, a grassroots citizens' group working to stop mountaintop removal, say they intend to visit Tennessee to counter the miners' boycott.

The boycott comes amid heightening tensions in Appalachia's mining communities. The West Virginia Council of Churches recently released a statement calling for peaceful dialogue in the coal fields and urging civic leaders, the coal industry and environmental groups to "desist in using inflammatory rhetoric, and to encourage an attitude of understanding toward those with whom one disagrees."

Earlier this month, the premiere of a documentary film about mountaintop removal was canceled at a one West Virginia venue because of unspecified security concerns. In other recent incidents involving violence or the threat of it, a proponent of mountaintop removal was charged with assaulting an nonviolent protester, while supporters of a mountaintop removal mining company crashed a music festival and threatened mountaintop removal opponents.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Learning how to count to 350

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

When you hear the phrase "alternative energy," what comes to mind?

Solar power? Wind? Hydroelectric?

Not for West Virginia's political leaders. They think a little differently.

In the recent legislative session, Gov. Joe Manchin (D) championed and state lawmakers approved an energy portfolio standard bill requiring 25% of generation to come from "alternative and renewable" sources by 2025. But the new standard, which goes into effect this month, has defined "alternative" to include natural gas, old tires, coal gas and even waste coal -- energy sources that emit significant quantities of climate-warming greenhouse gases as well as toxic, health-damaging pollutants.

"It's Governor Humpty Dumpty occupying that nice mansion beside the Kanawha River (where he can admire the endless coal barges)," West Virginia Sierra Club Chair Jim Sconyers wrote about the new law. "After all, it was Humpty Dumpty who said, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'"

SB 297 sets up a system of tradable credits for electricity produced by alternative and renewable sources. While it offers credits for traditional renewable sources including solar, wind, hydropower and geothermal, it also gives credits for what it calls "alternative" sources -- defining those as:

* advanced coal technology, a method of capturing emissions from burning coal that's still unproven on a large scale;

* coal bed methane, or natural gas extracted from coal beds, an energy source that has a serious impact on groundwater supplies;

* fuel produced by coal gasification or liquefaction, which emits toxic pollutants as well as greenhouse gases;

* synthetic gas made from coal, another hydrocarbon-intensive and polluting fuel;

* integrated gasification combined cycle technologies, which reduce but do not eliminate the emissions typically associated with coal plants;

* waste coal, the burning of which produces large amounts of greenhouse gases as well as toxic emissions;

* tire-derived fuel, another polluting, toxic fuel source;

* pumped storage hydroelectric projects, which are actually net consumers of energy;

* natural gas, the burning of which produces greenhouse gases and other pollution; and

* nuclear power, which releases radioactive pollution to the environment and also produces dangerous waste products.

The West Virginia Environmental Council head lobbyist Donald S. Garvin Jr. blasted the new standard in an op-ed:

No other state includes natural gas as a source of "alternative" energy. Nuclear energy is included by only a few, and they specify "advanced generation" nuclear facilities.  Most states that include "clean coal" specifically limit it to facilities that include carbon capture and sequestration, or require that they lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Some jurisdictions specifically exclude "pump-storage" hydropower facilities.

By listing all of these heavily polluting sources as "alternative," Garvin said, the standard undermines the original goal of reducing carbon emissions while creating a system that puts West Virginia "completely out of step" with the rest of the nation.

He also pointed out that by including natural gas and nuclear, the new law may enable West Virginia's utilities to meet the standard without building any renewable energy facilities at all. That because there's no requirement that the electricity provided actually be produced in West Virginia. And American Electric Power -- the Ohio-based utility that serves the state through its Appalachian Power unit -- already has enough nuclear and natural gas generation to meet the requirement through 2025.

A toxic standard for environmental health

The new law gives West Virginia the dubious distinction of being the first state to include tire burning in its alternative/renewable portfolio, observes Mike Ewall of the Energy Justice Network. While that helps dispose of the 290 million or so tires discarded in the U.S. every year, burning tires also release toxic chemicals including cancer-causing lead, benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and dioxin.

The new standard also makes West Virginia the only other state besides Pennsylvania to include in its energy portfolio standard waste coal  -- mining refuse originally cast aside during processing as too low-quality but which can now be burned thanks to the development of fluidized bed combustion technology.

As with burning tires, this provision helps disappear a big waste problem -- but the experience of the Pennsylvania communities with the nation's heaviest concentration of FBC waste coal burning power plants raises serious questions about waste coal's potential environmental health impact.

Last week, representatives of the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry held a public meeting in eastern Pennsylvania to discuss a planned $5.5 million research project into what may be causing a confirmed cluster of the rare blood cancer polycythemia vera in the coal mining communities of Schuylkill, Luzerne and Carbon counties. The area where the cancer was found to be occurring at an unusually high rate is home to toxic hotspots including numerous waste-coal burning plants, with five such facilities in Schuylkill County alone and three others just across its border in Northumberland, Carbon and Luzerne counties.

Plants using FBC technology operate at lower temperatures and oxygen levels than conventional coal-fired power plants and inject limestone during combustion to reduce sulfur oxide pollution. But lower temperatures and oxygen levels, low-quality fuels and limestone injection have all been found to contribute to increased emissions of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) -- toxic compounds known to cause genetic mutations and cancer. In fact, the specific genetic mutation involved in polycythemia vera has been linked to PAH exposure. And because radioactive elements are found in waste coal, FBC plants emit radioactive pollution, which has also been linked to an excess risk of polycythemia vera.

Today there are 18 FBC plants nationwide using waste coal as a primary fuel, according to the Energy Justice Network -- 14 in Pennsylvania, three in West Virginia and one in Utah. There are another 13 plants using waste coal as a secondary fuel -- four in Virginia, three each in Alabama and South Carolina, two in Pennsylvania and one in Mississippi.

The three existing waste coal burners in West Virginia include Dominion's North Branch plant in Grant County; the company's Morgantown Energy Facility in Monongalia County, which provides power to West Virginia University as well as other customers; and Edison International's Grant Town plant in Marion County, which also burns tires.

Looking at these three plants' emissions, it is clear that "alternative" does not mean non-polluting. Together these facilities released more than 89,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into the air alone in 2007, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory. That includes more than 38,000 pounds of hydrochloric acid, 11,000 pounds of sulfuric acid, more than 9,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride, 183 pounds of mercury and 57 pounds of lead. The TRI does not include PAHs or radioactive emissions.

Three new waste coal burning plants have been proposed for West Virginia, according to the Energy Justice Network, and a big waste coal plant -- the nation's largest, in fact -- is slated for Wise County in southwestern Virginia, just three counties south of the West Virginia line. A coalition of environmental groups represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center is challenging the Wise County plant's air permits in court, with the trial scheduled to start July 31.

At the same time West Virginia is promoting dirty power through its energy standard, new evidence is emerging about the serious environmental health problems already afflicting residents of Appalachia's coalfields. A study released last month by West Virginia University Professor Michael Hendryx documented higher mortality rates in Appalachian coal counties, which it blamed in part on environmental pollution.

Unfortunately, rather than easing the problems associated with environmental pollution and poor environmental health, West Virginia's new energy standard ensure they will continue -- a big missed opportunity for the state to build a greener, cleaner future.

(A version of this story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7