TAYLORSTOWN, Pennsylvania - A small Pennsylvania town is trying to ban coal mining in a battle being played out across the state as rural communities try to assert control over mining, gas drilling and other businesses.
Blaine Township, a community of 600 about 40 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, hopes to trigger a legal battle that could determine the rights of municipalities throughout the United States to control corporate activity.
On
the heels of a major Wall Street Journal report that we are reaching
"peak coal," and revelations that the Bush administration buried a 2002
report on the cancer risks associated with coal ash, Secretary of
Energy Steven Chu made a $1.073 billion down payment today on the
construction of FutureGen, "the first commercial scale, fully
integrated, carbon capture and sequestration project in the country in
Mattoon, Illinois."
"Mountaintop removal is a crime--and ought to be treated as a crime." --Al Gore, April 28, 2008
"Mountaintop removal is a crime against local people, nature, our children, and our planet." --Dr. James Hansen, NASA
The Washington Post headline this morning cut to this chase: "Obama is Right to Allow Mountaintop Removal Mining."
While coal may now be the official
rock of West Virginia, it might soon become the official school
vegetable, too. Call it organic clean coal.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963
Last month, as protestors from around the country converged in the
Coal River Valley in West Virginia to protest Massey Energy's reckless
mountaintop removal blasting operations within a short distance of a
7-billion gallon coal sludge impoundment, their ranks included
94-year-old former US Representative Ken Hechler.
The celebration was short for the Obama administration's expected crackdown on devastating coal-mining practices in Kentucky and West Virginia.
Back in March, the applause and good press rolled in.
A retooled Environmental Protection Agency, under administrator Lisa Jackson, announced that it was formally questioning a couple of mountaintop-removal permit applications and would scrutinize others for compliance with the Clean Water Act and other federal laws.
Take a revitalizing breath of those clean coal emissions from the average coal plant, filled with carbon monoxide, mercury, arsenic and lead - all deadly toxic to humans in high amounts. Breathe deeply the pestilence that is clean coal.
If coal's impact on climate change weren't so serious, the public relations campaign that asks us to choke down "clean coal" would be farcical. "Clean coal" is a dirty joke that won't wash.
Obama spaketh, and it was good: "We have to find more
environmentally sound ways of mining coal than simply blowing the tops
off mountains," he proclaimed.
And, yea, in the mountains and down through all the valleys of the
ancient land of Appalachia, hearts were filled with joy, for here was a
prophet of hope who was signaling that a change was coming - at last,
the endtime was at hand for the brutish coal-mining method called
"mountaintop removal," which is an abomination.
When the marquee signs on Broadway light up, a signal will
most likely be sent from the New York Independent System Operator grid
to the Lovett coal-fired plant, where the facility service will shovel
in coal strip-mined from West Virginia mountains that have been clear
cut, detonated with tons of explosives and toppled into the valleys.
