Mountaintop Removal Clearinghouse

Rape, raped, raping. Violent, ugly words, make you squirm and you want to look away when you hear them. Best saved for use in thier literal context, lest you disarm them. Sometimes, though, the word, the picture of it, finds its perfect embodiment elsewhere. Susanna Rodell, outgoing columnist for the Charleston Gazette uses her last editorial column, Farewell to the Mountains, to tell us what she really thinks about mountaintop removal coal mining.

Over the three years I’ve been in this job, the subject that provoked the strongest emotions, the fiercest outrage by far, was mountaintop removal. Some of those who are involved in practicing this method of getting the black stone out of the earth think this newspaper is out to ruin them. Many of those who oppose the practice have pleaded with me to come out fighting against it. I’ve bided my time. But now that my time is up (sooner than I expected), here’s what I think.

I’ve seen what mountaintop removal does and it’s truly appalling. It makes huge swathes of the state’s forested hills — the kind of primeval landscape now so precious and rare in America — look like the surface of the moon.

Yes, the mining companies are supposed to ameliorate the destruction, but don’t kid yourself. The landscape that’s been subjected to this sort of rape will never recover. I’ve seen some of the so-called reclaimed sites. A flat-topped mound covered with grass does not replace virgin forest.

But during Correll’s years at the agency, MSHA withdrew or delayed final action on eighteen mine-safety rules, including the establishment of on-site mine-rescue teams, caches of oxygen and breathing devices for trapped miners and flame-resistant conveyor belts. Price speculated that had these rules been instated, the lives of the fourteen miners killed in the recent Alma Mine and West Virginia Sago accidents may have been saved.

John Correll is Bush’s pick to direct the US Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM). I’m continually astonished at how this administration picks the candidate most likely to fail in doing the job set before him. Read the rest at the New Standard.

In his recent piece in Common Dreams (originally published in Rolling Stone), “Crimes Against Nature,” Kennedy horsewhips Bush’s anti-environment record. He devotes several paragraphs to mountaintop removal. I’m glad its on the radar for him. Here are the salient, incriminating references to mountaintop removal:

The new administration also trumped court decisions that would have enforced greater degrees of wetlands protection and forbidden coal moguls from blasting off whole mountaintops to get at the coal beneath.

She [Gale Norton] suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would cause “tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial habitat”

During the first Reagan administration, Griles worked directly under James Watt at Interior, where he helped the coal industry evade prohibitions against mountaintop-removal strip mining. In 1989, Griles left government to work as a mining executive and then as a lobbyist with National Environmental Strategies, a Washington, D.C., firm that represented the National Mining Association and Dominion Resources, one of the nation’s largest power producers. When Griles got his new job at Interior, the National Mining Association hailed him as “an ally of the industry.” It’s bad enough that a former mining lobbyist was put in charge of regulating mining on public land. But it turns out that Griles is still on the industry’s payroll. In 2001, he sold his client base to his partner Marc Himmelstein for four annual payments of $284,000, making Griles, in effect, a continuing partner in the firm.

Because Griles was an oil and mining lobbyist, the Senate made him agree in writing that he would avoid contact with his former clients as a condition of his confirmation. Griles has nevertheless repeatedly met with former coal clients to discuss new rules allowing mountaintop mining in Appalachia and destructive coal-bed methane drilling in Wyoming. He also met with his former oil clients about offshore leases. These meetings prompted Sen. Joseph Lieberman to ask the Interior Department to investigate Griles. With Republicans in control of congressional committees, no subpoenas have interrupted the Griles scandals.

At the Senate’s request, Griles had signed a “statement of disqualification” on August 1st, 2001, committing himself to avoiding issues affecting his former clients. Three days later, he nevertheless appeared before the West Virginia Coal Association and promised executives that “we will fix the federal rules very soon on water and soil placement.” That was fancy language for pushing whole mountaintops into valleys, a practice worth billions to the industry. As a Reagan official, Griles helped devise the practice, which a federal court declared illegal in 2002, after 1,200 miles of streambeds had been filled and 380,000 acres of Appalachian forestlands had been rendered barren moonscapes.

Now Griles was promising his former coal clients he would fix these rules. In May 2002, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers adopted the language recommended by his former client, the National Mining Association. Had Griles not intervened, the practice of mountaintop-removal mining would have been severely restricted. Griles also pushed EPA deputy administrator Linda Fisher to overrule career personnel in the agency’s Denver office who had given a devastating assessment to a proposal to produce coal-bed methane gas in the Powder River basin in Wyoming. Although Griles had recused himself from any discussion of this subject because it would directly enrich his former clients, he worked aggressively behind the scenes on behalf of a proposal to build 51,000 wells. The project will require 26,000 miles of new roads and 48,000 miles of pipeline, and will foul pristine landscapes with trillions of gallons of toxic wastewater.

The Courier-Journal, out of Louisville Kentucky has an op-ed in today’s paper entitled “Battered, but not defeated: ‘Do Kentuckians care about the loss of mountains, forests, streams?’” Coincidently, it is written by Bob Edwards, the veteran radio reporter who is also airing the documentary “Exploding Heritage” that I wrote about yesterday.

He asks some biting questions:

Do Americans know this is happening? Why isn’t it getting more attention? If the Adirondacks or the Catskills were being blown up, wouldn’t New York camera crews be in helicopters shooting video of the devastation? Why is there so much outrage over plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and so little notice paid to the destruction of our oldest mountains? Why was there so much news coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill when a coal waste spill 30 times bigger in Martin County got hardly any national press? Do Kentuckians care about the loss of mountains, forests and streams? Is there concern about silt and mining chemicals spoiling the drinking water? How can a state with so many hunters and fishermen tolerate the loss of habitat for fish and wildlife?

and hits us where it hurts:

Finding villains in Washington and Frankfort is the easiest thing for a reporter to do. I might also look in the mirror. I’m writing this on a computer kept running by electricity supplied by a power plant that may be burning coal. I like my electric lights and my air conditioning. Would I pay a higher utility bill if it meant preserving a few more mountains in my native state? I would, but perhaps others can’t afford to do that. We’ll never know because our leaders aren’t asking us to sacrifice our lifestyle or to invest our tax dollars in developing other sources of energy. In the name of “freeing our country from dependence on foreign sources of energy,” we are blowing up our natural heritage. We are not asked to sacrifice, so nature must sacrifice. Nature doesn’t vote.

If I had not already believed that King Coal was certifiable maniacal and demonic, I am now convinced. I was alerted to this sordid debacle by the following post on a myspace blog:

Hays Woods is scheduled for development which will begin with logging and
MTR (mountain top removal coal mining).The forest has many unique
ecological features and provides important habit. But,the developer wants
to fill 5 of the 6 streams and all of the 3 wetlands and needs a surface
mining and stream obstruction permit from Pa.’s DEP, Secretary McGinty to
proceed.Due to public and legal challenges, the project has been stalled at
this permit for 3 years.

Well, this seems like business as usual, except that Hays Woods is a 635+ acre urban woodland within 3 miles of downtown Pittsburgh. I admit I thought the blog post was a hoax. This can’t possibly be true. But sure enough. Learn more from Save Hays Woods.

Quote of the day:

“We hope the promotion will stay on that course and avoid the topics such as mountaintop removal that can divide supporters.” An opinion piece in the Herald-Dispatch.

Friends of Coal is an organization sponsored by the West Virginia Coal Association. They are the official sponsor of a much anticipated, unprecendented seven-year series of games between rival neighbors Marshall University and West Virginia University. The series will be known as the Friends of Coal Bowl. In a no-bid coup, Friends of Coal were given the sponsorship with a stated purpose to “inform and educate citizens about the coal industry and its vital role in the state’s future and the nation’s future.”

Appalachian Voices’ Front Porch Blog has a long, informative post on the history of the rivalry between the schools and a culmination of events leading to the sponsorship.

A “posse of environmentalists” from Rainforest Action Network (RAN) ran herd on the corporate headquarters of Wells Fargo in San Francisco. RAN, through its Global Finance Campaign, is recognized for relentlessly (for years) and successfully nagging, wrangling, vexing, and hectoring multinational investment and banking companies like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase to stop funding projects that endanger old growth forests, climate change, and indigenous peoples.

Ran links Wells Fargo to funding Massey Energy’s mountain-top removal coal mining operation in Western Virginia. Here is more on that:

Recent coal investments made by Wells Fargo include:

$175 million loan to Massey Energy, a brutally anti-union mining giant engaged in moutaintop removal in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia. Massey has been the target of community protests throughout the region as a result of its destructive practices.

$175 million loan for Alpha Natural Resources, a company operating 22 “surface mines” (read mountaintop removal and strip mines) across several states in the Appalachian Mountains.

$50 million loan to the James River Coal Company, one of the largest coal producers in the central Appalachian region of Eastern Kentucky.

Banker for the Westmoreland Coal Company, one of the top 10 coal producers in the country, with operations in 7 states and 8 wholly-owned coal-fired power plants.

The Lexington-Herald Leader carried a piece on July 10 from writer and poet Richard Taylor who joined a group of 26 authors on an excursion through Kentucky’s devasted mountains. He pleads “All of us must work to bring this issue to the desks of our elected representatives. If they do not act in the public interest, we should elect representatives who will.“