Mountaintop
Removal in Kentucky
One of the world's oldest and most diverse forests is
being turned
into a wasteland and we are
simply watching it happen.
Most
people never have the opportunity to visit remote mountaintop-removal
coal mines, or view them from the air. However, satellite
photographs of such mine sites are readily available.
These photographs from space clearly show the extent of devastation from
mountaintop removal mining. The photograph below shows the region (about
20 x 30 miles) east
of Prestonsburg, Kentucky, Jenny Wiley State Park and Dewey Lake. Here
and toward Hazard to the southwest, or on to the northeast into West
Virginia you
can see mountaintop- removal sites too numerous to count, adding up to
many, many thousands of acres.
Half the electricity in the United States is produced from the burning
of coal, as is about 97% of Kentucky's electricity. About 80% of Kentucky's
coal is exported to other states. In spite of these statistics
Kentucky's coal-producing counties are among the most poverty-
stricken in the nation. Because mountaintop removal requires only a
few men with bulldozers about two- thirds of the mining jobs in
Kentucky have been eliminated during the last 25 years, and much of
the profit from this mining goes to out-of-state corporations.
Due to the inaccessibility of mountaintop-removal operations, few
persons have the opportunity to observe them first-hand, and fewer
have stood on a "reclaimed" mine site. Few know the
devastation such mining causes to the land, the wildlife, the streams,
and the people—the real cost of cheap coal to the people of
Appalachia. As Bobbie Ann Mason said, "It could break your heart
to know."
Forty years ago Eastern Kentucky resident Dan Gibson said, "The
strip miners are killing these old hills. When they finish, there
won't be anything left . . . my land is dying." Take
a trip through eastern Kentucky and you'll see that little has
changed, except there is less time remaining to do something about it.
Typical Valley
Fill
Politics
and The Definition of "Fill"
In 2001, King Coal found itself faced with a federal district court
ruling that would have shut down mountaintop mining operations all
across West Virginia due to violations of the Clean Water Act. King
Coal’s response was to immediately cash in some of its political
markers and get its cronies in the Bush Administration to change how
EPA and Army Corps of Engineers define a single word in the Act, the
word “fill.” Changing the definition of fill effectively insulated
the industry from any further Clean Water Act attacks and negated the
court’s decision, allowing the coal industry to continue burying
Appalachian streams and valleys with mine waste and rubble without
interruption.
Now, Washington’s [George Bush's] eagerness to kowtow to the coal
industry is having far-reaching implications
in other areas of the country where industry wants to use our
waterways as unpermitted waste disposal sites. In Alaska, gold mining
companies are taking advantage of this bureaucratic, regulatory change
to dump waste from gold mines into nearby lakes. Only time will tell
how many other industries will jump on the regulatory bandwagon and
fill our nation ’s waterways with their toxic mess.
---
www.waterkeeper.org/mainarticledetails.aspx?articleid=211
France's nuclear push transforms energy equation
With oil dependence and global warming at the top of the international
energy agenda, France's experience with nuclear energy is drawing
interest from the U.S. to China. Today, France produces 78 percent of
its electricity from nuclear power -- more than four times both the
U.S. share and the world average. The policy has slashed France's
dependence on foreign energy and given it one of the lowest rates of
greenhouse-gas emissions in the industrialized world.
--- Jeffery
Ball, Wall Street Journal, Mar 28, 2006
