Coal mines will kill Appalachia

People from 158 countries united in demand for action to address the global crisis of climate change on the International Day for Climate Action Oct. 24. In Charlottesville an interfaith vigil was held to launch a local movement to end mountaintop removal and decrease U.S. reliance on coal power.

James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, writes in a February op-ed to the Guardian and Observer newspapers (Feb. 15): “Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” Coal accounts for 39 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, the major cause of global warming, according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy.

We live on the edge of Appalachia, where nearly 500 of the oldest mountains in the world that shelter one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth have been literally decapitated by coal mining. Together, these mountaintop removal sites comprise an area the size of Delaware.
MTR coal mining replaces forests and peaks with wastelands and sludge ponds, pollutes thousands of miles of streams and brings massive environmental damage to mountain communities. Pollution from coal plants produces dirty air, acid rain, contaminated land and water, childhood asthma, birth defects and respiratory diseases that take nearly 25,000 lives each year, according to “Dirty Air, Dirty Power,” a study for the group Clean the Air.

Charlottesville’s electricity comes from five mountaintop removal sites in West Virginia and Kentucky. We Virginians sit at the epicenter of the greatest source of U.S. pollution — coal and coal-fired power plants. The Southeastern states emit twice the pollution from power production as the Northeast, equal to the CO2 emissions of the third largest polluter in the world, Russia and its former satellites, according to treepower.org.
Yet MTR-mined coal provides less than 7 percent of our nation’s electricity, according to calculations from Appalachian Voices, presented Oct. 17 at “A New Energy Future” conference. We could conserve this amount nearly overnight through behavior change, education, responsible legislation and investment in renewable energy.

Urge Congress to enact Senate Bill 696, the Appalachia Restoration Act, and House Bill 1310, the Clean Water Protection Act. Press the Environmental Protection Agency to withhold permits for the 79 mountaintop removal sites now under review. Mountaintop removal is a deep, personal assault on those who love the Blue Ridge. It is ruthless desecration, and it must stop.