Cheers.

Since the Powder River coal in Montana is plentiful and cheap, let’s look at it. We can’t jump off coal overnight. The inhuman mountaintop exploding, village destroying West Virginia coal is the cleanest for electricity generation, but the Montana coal isn’t that much dirtier and it’s six times cheaper. Because getting out the Montana coal, for the time being, is cheap and safe, let’s use it even though it’s a bit dirtier. I’m making this suggestion becaise we’re going to need an immediate transition fuel, not long-term. It’ll almost regulate itself because even though it’s dirt cheap now, it’ll get more expensive as the “low-hanging fruit” is used up and the coal companies have to begin digging sideways to get it. Right now, the mining is easy in huge open-pit mines, in a low-population region. That’s why it’s safe. It’s also not destroying villages and towns and poisoning children, as is resulting in West Virginia from the raping of the land.

Where I live, in California, most of our electricity comes from burning natural gas, and most of this is from Canada. This isn’t good. It’s expensive and the price of cooking and heating our homes will rise as a result. A little of our power comes from windmills, a little from a geyser. A little comes from the Four Corners area via a wide-flung grid. This is from near-mine coal. Gas is quite clean, but we still pay via global warming and combustion products. Obviously, there’s not enough gas to run the whole country; if we try this, it’ll vanish in a flash.

Right now, I don’t see any solution in our diving into electric cars. Not yet: guess where the fuel to power them will come from.

In the meantime, we should work like hell to do two things:
1. Reduce electricity consumption
2. Develop alternative energy technology and implementation as if it were a war to be won, an enemy to be overcome.

We should be talking about this issue now (hint, Chris).

We can do this, and it will be exciting and fulfilling as all hell.

OK; we’re going to need to burn coal for a while longer, certainly while we transition to the wonderful green world of the future, whatever that’s made of. And alternative energy, clean and green, will come with or without Bush and his cronies.

But, for god’s sake, there’s no reason why blowing up mountains must be the way to get it out!
No way is exploding mountains and The American Apalachian Outback the only way to pull out that coal: ever hear of traditional mining?

This is just the most profitable way for Massey Energy and other sleazoids can create maxi-profit for their Wall Street investors. Strip mining wasn’t rapacious enough for these guys. And they own West Virginia’s politicians. It’s a cabal like Cheney’s secret energy meeting participants. And like Cheney, it festers in the dark.

There’s “cowboy coal” from Montana and other parts of the West, too — easy-access open pit mining. But considering that there are over 80 types of coal, with different kinds of pollution from burning each of them, there are some kinds of coal that you’d rather not have burned in your nearby power plant just on the other side of town. So, perhaps paying real live human miners to go deep into the earth, although dangerous, will still be the kindest way, even though it won’t be as profitable for anti-union Massey.

Mountain-Top Removal is a sanitized spin term: let’s call it what it is: exploding mountiains and wrecking communities. It does not keep our lights on at all: there are other ways to mine the coal.

http://www.theecologist.org/newsletter_view.asp
Everyone knows that coal mining is an ugly business, but seeing its full effects is not something many people get to do.

Now, in an extraordinary new series of independent documentary shorts, web-based VBS TV investigate the staggering environmental and human health cost of coal mining in West Virginia, USA. Ever seen an entire mountaintop removed so that contractors can get at coal underneath? You can here…

They link to a handful of videos …
http://www.theecologist.org/newsletter_view.asp

and Matthew C … I don’t doubt that we think we need this coal, but is “at what cost?” not a fair question to ask? The coal companies hardly do a great job of being clear about the costs of mountain top removal. They just deny that it happens, deny that it is destructive. We need to use less energy, all of us, and we need to get the energy we do use from less damaging sources, but we also need to know that coal mining is destroying Appalachia.

Mountaintop rescue

Published: March 29, 2007

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Mountaintop mining is a cheap and ruthlessly efficient way to mine coal: soil and rock are scraped away by enormous machines to expose the buried coal seam, then dumped down the mountainside into the valleys and streams below.

Mountaintop mining has also caused appalling environmental damage in America in violation of the Clean Water Act. According to a federal study, mountaintop removal has buried or choked 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams and damaged hundreds of square miles of forests.

No recent administration, Democrat or Republican, has made a serious effort to end the dumping, largely in deference to the financial influence of the coal industry and the influence of Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. But the Bush administration has gone out of its way to shield the practice.

Now a federal judge has inspired hopes that this destruction can be halted. In a case argued by Earthjustice and the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, Judge Robert Chambers of Federal District Court halted four mountaintop removal projects on the grounds that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had failed to demonstrate that the damage would not be irreversible.

Local residents who have watched the destruction of their landscape hope the ruling will lead to tighter regulation of other mountaintop mining proposals. The greater hope is that the government can be persuaded to stop the practice altogether.

But meanwhile, Bob Kincaid (whose comment appears above) has a dilemma on his hands. You see, one or two mountains, almost in his own back yard, are going to be exploded; his community will never be the same again — hundreds of years of rich personal, family, and their small commons of history: BOOM forever! New pollution will fill the streams, an ugly lunar landscape will replace life-giving trees; the birds will be scattered. All for a few hours worth of electricity.

And the story of mountaintop removal returns, once again, to the obscurity — the deep sleep — where it has resided while the land/society rapists explode a community’s legacy, only to move on, destroy another, and line their pockets again. What evils lurk in the dark shadows of killed stories.

Listen to Bob Kincaid’s show on The Head On Radio Network. It’s only on the Web. Go here for live streaming as well as downloads http://www.whiterosesociety.org/Kincaid.html. It’s real alternative radio from the hills and hollers of coal country. It’s good, too. Real good. I promise.

Mar 23, 9:38 PM EDT
Judge: Corps Coal Permits Illegal

By PAM RAMSEY
Associated Press Writer

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A federal judge ruled Friday that the Army Corps of Engineers illegally issued permits for four mountaintop removal mines without adequately determining whether the environment would be harmed.

U.S. District Judge Chuck Chambers rescinded the permits, which allow four mines operated by Massey Energy Co. to fill nearby valleys with dirt, rocks and other material removed to expose coal seams…

The corps had maintained that more extensive reviews weren’t necessary for the permits.
Chambers remanded the permits to the corps for further consideration…

Environmentalists call the technique destructive and point to a 2005 study that said mountaintop removal and valley fills had buried 1,200 miles of headwater streams in Appalachia…

Maybe this will, at least, slow down the industrial terraforming (in the name of “cheaper extraction” & bigger profits”)- for awhile… ^..^

i was surprized to discover a real wasteland in EASTERN pennsylvania that popped my eyes out. normally..on our return to new england from charlottesville virginia we’ll follow us 81 to 78. traffic diverted us at that split one trip. if one stays on 81 one will find what looks like a warzone. miles and miles of wasteland. the reason is eventually clear..a distant coal burning power plant..and monster surface stripper..a real shock to see such scale to the stripping. annie dillard wrote in “an american childhood” (highly recomended) that the appalachian seam goes all the way to europe.

The official Google blog just came out with a post on the topic:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/birds-eye-view-of-mountaintop.html

( an addition to heartbreak…)

More power to you!

http://wvgazette.com/section/News/Other+News/200701302

^..^

You made some good points. What came to my mind is that we have many industrial processes that depend upon great amounts of heat, and that heat is mostly obtained from fossil fuels. The heat, of course, fuels global warming. We benefit from plastics, glass, metals, and chemicals. How can we re-form our civilization without creating such temperatures. Or, can we retain and recycle industrial heat?

I am observing some very crafty planning when I look at China — solid positioning for the future. Right now, it’s got the guise of capitalism and especially rampant manufacturing. In fact, China is now our own manufacturing base. All that I know of that’s made here are the military-industrial products, so this business looms huge in comparison to whatever manufacturing is left. China is benefitting, and burning every BTU thay can find. When they have burned enough, and have enough of our cash, they’ll probably turn back to creating a better world: In China.

But there’s a lot of work for us to do to get off the fossil standard, in our homes, in our travel, and in whatever factories we’ve got left. I don’t hear the Republicans clamoring to take up the challenge, do you?

What I have been struggling with is how the fossil fuels fit into classic economic theory, and having returned to college after almost four decades, I was hoping that the gened courses in micro and macro would explain it. Nope! So, I have been searching for a number of years for the economists explanation and the best I can come up with is Hotelling’s Rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling’s_rule and an expansion on it by Solow in response to Hotelling’s death.

What I finally understood a few days ago is that the economist describes the future in terms of ever increasing prices to succeeding generations. The current generation seeks to deplete the cheapest of the finite resources, and as they reach exhaustion, the price rises to equal the cost of the next cheapest to deplete finite resource.

Of course, economic theory doesn’t make dollar cost the only consideration, with human preferences being something that is quantifiable. The question I ask is, what is the dollar value future generations would place on having mountains to climb – I’m a midwest transplant to New England and I found it initally odd that my coworkers would think it fun to get up hours earlier than we normally did to go climb a mountain, which really was hard work compared to walking on flat land – clearly they found great value in the NH mountains relative to the flatter MA trails.

Economists tell us that we should trade with distant lands because removing the barriers of space (place) to trade benefits everyone.

Ok, I want the technology that the future will be forced to develop to compensate for the depletion of our finite resources and to deal with the scars on the land we leave behind, and in exchange I offer them some of out cheap energy.

Why aren’t the economists explaining to us how to trade with future generations?

Why aren’t the economists explaining how to use the market to create greater equity across generations? Why are the economist happy to conclude that future generations will pay increasing costs for energy and the current generation will always have the luxury of consuming the cheap energy and condemning the future generations to the expensive energy.

Of course, the mountain top removal programs basically give us the opportunity to have both the cheap energy that the future will not have, PLUS WE HAVE THE BEAUTY AND JOY OF THE MOUNTAINS AND THEY WON’T.

When the economists bring the issue of ever increasing real costs and prices to future generations to the discussion, then I will be satisfied. I would be happy to have people say: “I’m alive today and I will take the easy route, and my unborn grandchildren be damned.”

I have no children nor will I ever have unborn or born children, and I think that what we are doing is morally wrong because we are placing burdens on future generations without giving them any say in it.

Chris, Mary, Brendon: please contact Bob Kincaid at Headonradio.com, to get some great on-the-ground guests for this show that’s so central to our America.

It is impossible for me to believe that if most Americans were aware of Mountaintop Removal, and the related impacts of an irresponsible industry beyond government reproach, that we as a collective citizen population would allow this destructive, and sometimes irreversible, cycle to continue.

I truly believe that coal mining as it is happening in Appalachia today will go down in history as an embarrassment to our nation, a black mark as dark and dirty as the history of slavery in this nation or the genocide of the first nations who related to this land as their home long before the arrival of the first ships from Europe.

Always remember the motto of the “Friends of Coal:” “Coal: It Keeps the Lights On.” I would add, “Especially in Funeral Parlors.”

At the end of the day, if Saddam had done to Iraq what Don Blankenship and Massey Energy does to West Virginia, what happened to him might’ve been justified.

Hats off to George Miller — way out here in the West, this is not an issue that’s stage front for his constituents.