Cross-posted from iLoveMountains.org

A month ago, before the nation’s attention was drawn to the tragedies at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia and the oil rig off the Louisiana coast, the EPA issued a blockbuster announcement about a strict new guidance for the permitting of mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia. The announcement left many people — reporters, politicians, and the general public alike — confused whether or not the EPA had just put an end to mountaintop removal. The announcement generated headlines ranging from a fairly modest “E.P.A. to Limit Water Pollution From Mining” in the New York Times to “New regulations will put an end to mountaintop mining?” in the Guardian.

Certainly at the press conference EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used some strong language:

Coal communities should not have to sacrifice their environment or their health or their economic future to mountaintop mining. They deserve the full protection of our clean water laws.

Mountaintop removal mine site above route 23 in Pike County, KentuckyPhoto courtesy iLoveMountains.orgOn a recent trip through eastern Kentucky, set up by our good friends at Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, the answer to whether mountaintop removal in Appalachia has come to an end was abundantly obvious.

The photo of a new active mountaintop removal mine looming above Route 23 in Pike County, Kentucky, at right, tells the story.

(All photos in this post were taken on April 18th in Kentucky: Here’s a link a to flickr photo set from that trip)

To the extent that some in the media overstated the impact of the EPA’s new guidance, they can be forgiven. During the press conference, Jackson herself said, “You’re talking about no or very few valley fills that are going to meet standards like this.” 

Valley fills are the typical disposal sites for the waste that is generated when coal companies blow the tops off mountains to access thin seams of coal. As community activist Judy Bonds of the organization Coal River Mountain Watch describes it, “A valley fill is an upside down mountain turned inside out.” Most — but not all — mountaintop removal mines require valley fills.

But Jackson was also very clear that this was not a blanket ban on mountaintop removal permitting and that the guidance would not apply to permits that had already been granted. The standards Jackson said would lead to “no or very few valley fills” establish limits on the permissible level of stream water conductivity. Conductivity is a measure of salt — and an indicator of metals including toxic and heavy metals — in water. Remember the experiment where you put salt in a glass of water to make it conduct electricity and light a bulb?

Toxic runoff from a valley fill in eastern KentuckyPhoto courtesy iLoveMountains.orgA plethora of recent scientific research has shown that conductivity higher than about five times the normal level downstream from valley fills is associated with severe impairment of the ecological communities in Appalachian headwater streams. The photo to the right that I took below a valley fill in Magoffin County, Kentucky, illustrates the trouble these standards create for coal companies. According to a huge compilation of scientific studies that the EPA simultaneously released with their guidance, conductivity levels below Appalachian valley fills average around 10 times normal levels. The bright orange water coming out of this valley fill indicates enormously high levels of iron, which in turn suggests both high conductivity levels and high levels of toxic and heavy metals regulated under the Clean Water Act.

To be sure, the EPA’s move is a big first step that provides immediate protection to Appalachian families threatened with new mountaintop removal permits above their homes. It’s a tourniquet that will stop the hemorrhaging, but here are five reasons why this guidance doesn’t immediately or permanently put an end to mountaintop removal:

1. The EPA’s action will not affect permits that have already been issued. Moreover, an excellent piece of reporting by Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward revealed that those existing permits will allow some companies to continue mountaintop removal operations without a hitch for the next couple of years.
2. Not all mountaintop removal mines require valley fills and coal companies are already using loopholes by which they can obliterate miles of streams without the need to obtain a valley fill permit. The million or so acres of wholesale destruction that coal companies drove through a narrow loophole in the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act since 1977 is testament to their skill and creativity at exploiting loopholes.
3. Some valley fills will still be allowed under this guidance and the EPA even provided a set of “best practices” by which companies can do mountaintop removal in a manner consistent with it. Moreover, there are a number of recent cases where coal companies went ahead and constructed valley fills without even bothering to obtain a permit.
4. While the guidance takes effect immediately, it is a preliminary document released in response to calls from coal state legislators and coal companies for greater clarity on how the EPA was basing its decision whether to grant a valley fill permit for an Appalachian surface mine. The EPA plans to initiate an extended public comment period before the guidelines will be finalized.
5. An agency guidance document is different from a formal rule and can be easily overturned by a new administration. Even if this guidance proves to be effective in curtailing mountaintop removal, environmental and community advocates still need to ask what happens when a hypothetical President Palin enters the White House in January of 2013 or 2017.

There are any number of laws and regulations that affect surface mining, and so there is no single mechanism to ensure mountaintop removal is stopped permanently. But the first and most important step is for Congress to pass a strong law that prohibits the dumping of mine waste into streams.

In 2002, Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey introduced just such a bill called the Clean Water Protection Act (H.R. 1310). Pallone, together with Republican Cristopher Shays, introduced this bipartisan bill in response to the Bush Administration’s catastrophic “fill rule,” which made it easier to permit mountaintop removal mining and for coal companies anywhere to dump waste into streams. Since then, people and organizations across Appalachia have supported Pallone’s bill by carrying a simple message to universities, church groups, and Rotary Clubs across America: they’re blowing up our mountains and there oughtta be a law!

Over the past eight years, the nationwide organizing efforts led by groups in Appalachia have generated a remarkable 170 co-sponsors of the Clean Water Protection Act — more than almost any other bill before Congress. Unfortunately, the bill continues to be held up in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, with West Virginia Congressman Nick Rahall recently claiming credit in a West Virginia newspaper for bottling it up.

If Rahall’s contention is true, it’s a powerful testament to the level of influence he has accumulated, given that the bill has more cosponsors than any other of the 323 bills currently before the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. More importantly, Rahall does not actually have the power to prevent the bill from being heard except through his influence over Chairman James Oberstar of Minnesota, who is the only one with the actual power to decide whether the bill is brought up in his committee.

It’s particularly unfortunate that House Democratic leaders and committee chairs like Oberstar would give Rahall so much power over national policy, given how poorly his own constituents have fared under his leadership. After 33 years in office, Rahall’s district ranked 434th out of all 435 Congressional districts in Gallup’s recently-released 2009 well-being index rankings (see map below).

The only district that ranked lower was Hal Roger’s neighboring district in eastern Kentucky. Notably, Rogers’ is the only district that has suffered more destruction from mountaintop removal mining than Rahall’s.

A big question in the wake of the tragedy at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine is whether the obescience of coal state legislators toward the coal industry will change after the disaster. Traditionally, the pandering of Congressman Rahall and Senator Rockefeller toward Big Coal has been almost embarrassing to watch — kind of like witnessing an overly-exuberant public display of affection on a park bench. But when it comes to the safety of the guys in the hardhats, these gentlemen strike a very different tune.

Given that the same company, Massey Energy, is by far the largest operator of mountaintop removal mines, was assessed the largest penalty in the history of the Clean Water Act, and has a record of environmental violations to which their horrible safety record pales in comparison, these legislators have a unique opportunity to lead their constituents in a new direction. And Senator Byrd of West Virginia has paved the way.

One of the most under-reported elements of the EPA’s announcement was that Administrator Jackson specifically mentioned the EPA had worked with Senator Byrd to develop their new guidelines. She would not have said that without explicit approval from Senator Byrd. While Byrd has not explicitly called for an end to mountaintop removal or co-sponsored legislation to do that, his leadership in promoting a more thoughtful and reasonable view on climate and the future of coal in his state represents a sea change from the public statements of statewide elected officials over the past few decades. Rahall and Rockefeller would serve their constituents and their country far better if they followed Byrd’s lead.

Is passing a law in this polarized Congress realistic?

More important than the enormous number of cosponsors that legislation to stop mountaintop removal enjoys is the fact that the support is bipartisan. Immediately following the EPA’s announcement, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), said in a press release:

The new EPA guidelines are useful in stopping some inappropriate coal mining in Appalachia but Congress still needs to pass the Cardin-Alexander legislation that would effectively end mountaintop removal mining.

Alexander, together with Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, introduced the Appalachia Restoration Act (S. 696) last year, a Senate companion to the Clean Water Protection Act designed to eliminate mountaintop removal (or at least permanently curtail it — we’ll see what the final language says after mark-up). That bill got a boost the same week of the EPA announcement when coal-state Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio announced he would become the 11th co-sponsor of the bill.

Whether the Senate bill can survive the committee mark-up process in a form that Appalachian citizens groups can support remains to be seen, however. The Nashville Tennessean recently published an editorial that gave voice to the concerns many coalfield citizens have about forms of mining that may not be covered by the Senate bill, particularly cross-ridge mining. Cross-ridge is a type of mountaintop removal mining that requires little or no valley fill and is based on the assumption that a mountain can be put back more or less how it was after it’s been blown up — kind of like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

A “reclaimed” stream in KentuckyPhoto courtesy iLoveMountains.orgThe photo to the right illustrates one of many problems with the theory that mountains can be put back together without causing major ecological degradation. While the type of mining shown in the photo would not be classified by state agencies as mountaintop removal (only part of the ridgeline has been removed and there is no valley fill at the headwaters of this stream), the impact of this mining on water quality is indistinguishable from the impact shown in the previous photo below a valley fill.

Some insiders have also expressed concern that the EPA’s strict new guidance will take the wind out the sails of the campaign to pass a law, but from the perspective of Appalachian groups that have been working to ban mountaintop removal for decades, that concern is misplaced. The citizens of Appalachia have led this fight from the beginning, and have a much more vested interest in making these protections permanent than any group in Washington, D.C.

It may be that some big environmental groups that have only recently made mountaintop removal a priority will move on to other priorities once the Administrative decisions are played out — and make no mistake that the contributions of those groups over the past few years in pressuring the Obama Administration to take action were exceedingly welcome and timely. But it was not the Big Greens that made mountaintop removal a national issue or whose organizing in communities across America has generated such broad bipartisan support of the Clean Water Protection Act and Appalachia Restoration Act.

The people of Appalachia aren’t sitting around waiting for beltway insiders to tell them whether or how to pass a law, they’re just doing it. The legislative effort is led by the Alliance for Appalachia, an alliance of thirteen local and regional organizations that formed several years ago with the mission of ending mountaintop removal and bringing a prosperous new economy to the Appalachian coalfields that is based on sustainable industries.

The Alliance for Appalachia represents by far the greatest number of people impacted by mountaintop removal mining, and the alliance is composed of some organizations that have been fighting Appalachian strip mining for decades. The battle to end mountaintop removal will not be over until the Alliance for Appalachia says it is, and I’m confident that won’t happen until, at a minimum, President Obama signs a law banning the practice.

So what’s next?

There is a window of opportunity right now to pass a strong law that will rein in mountaintop removal permanently. Also, with coal demand down dramatically due to the recession, now is the time to begin replacing mountaintop removal coal with aggressive energy efficiency and renewable energy policies in states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia that are most dependent on this source of coal.

From a local perspective, more delays, half-measures and uncertainty about the future of mountaintop removal will only lead to a myopic approach to rebuilding the Appalachian economy and bringing new jobs and new industries to the region.

And from a global perspective, at a time when America is finally getting serious about addressing climate change and moving toward a 21st century energy future built around renewable energy, isn’t it absurd that we’re still fighting to stop the wholesale destruction of the most biologically diverse forests and streams on the continent in order to mine climate-destroying coal? Can we really address climate change if we can’t even stop mountaintop removal?

For people around the country that want to see mountaintop removal end — and that should be anyone concerned about climate change, human rights, clean water, or endangered species — a great place to start is by telling your Senators and Representatives that the time to pass legislation to end mountaintop removal is now. There are plenty of tools on the web to make it easy.

Let’s keep up the momentum, pass a strong law, and relegate mountaintop removal to its rightful place as just another tragic episode in American history books.

Coal River Mountain may be flashing the world topless without your help.

Local residents have rallied around a proposal for a 328 megawatt wind farm and put up a website, coalriverwind.org, to promote their vision. The wind farm would, over the course of a few decades, provide far more jobs in the community than those created during the few years it would take Massey Energy to reduce the mountain to a flat, barren, and toxic wasteland. Just a few days ago, the AP reported that a local organization, Coal River Mountain Watch, has been working with Google Earth to design a presentation that will be shown at the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, contrasting the proposed wind farm with Massey Energy’s plans for more than 6,000 acres of mountaintop removal coal mining on the mountain.

A 328 megawatt wind farm versus a 6,000 acre mountaintop removal coal mine — there could be no better symbol of the crossroads we are at in America’s energy future. Whichever way it goes, the fate of Coal River Mountain is America’s energy future. If the coal companies can mine Coal River Mountain, they can do anything they want. If they can destroy these peaks, we’ll know exactly what the effect that the billions in tax-payer giveaways to the coal industry will have if the climate bill is passed.

What’s at stake

There’s far more than just a wind farm at stake when it comes to the destruction of Coal River Mountain, however, both for residents of the Coal River Valley and for people across the country who believe that a clean energy future is within our grasp.

For local residents, this is the last intact mountain in the vicinity, home to some of the few remaining headwater streams that have not been polluted with heavy metal-laden mine waste. If Massey Energy’s plans aren’t stopped, they know exactly what’s in store — just a few weeks ago, a local Eyewitness News story about 200 families in the town of Prenter who are suing 9 coal companies for contaminating their well water with coal waste began as follows:

“Twenty-two year old Josh McCormick is dying of kidney cancer. Twenty-six year old Tanya Trale has had a tumor removed from her breast; her husband has had two tumors removed from his side and both have had their gallbladders taken out.

Rita Lambert has had her gallbladder removed; so has her husband and both parents.

Jennifer Massey has a mouthful of crowns and so does her son after their enamel was eaten away, and six of her neighbors — all unrelated — have had brain tumors, including her 29-year old brother, who died.

Bill Arden is one of those neighbors. He survived his brain tumor, but Arden’s eight-year old boxer named Sampson did not.

What do all of these people have in common? They all live within a 3-mile radius of Prenter Hollow in Boone County, West Virginia. And all have well water.”

As usual, despite overwhelming evidence that it’s the sludge they have been pumping into underground mine shafts that contaminated the groundwater, the coal companies deny any connection to the problem.

On Coal River Mountain, less than 100 yards from where the mining has begun, lies the Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment, a massive earthen dam holding back 8.2 billion gallons of toxic coal sludge. Were that dam to fail, as several have done in the recent past, hundreds of lives could be lost in a matter of minutes and thousands would be put in jeopardy. Even short of complete dam failure, the risks to local communities are great. The ground beneath the impoundment is riddled with abandoned underground mine shafts, leaving many local residents with little doubt that some of that toxic slurry will end up in their groundwater as the foundation-shaking blasts of ammonium-nitrate explosives begin cracking rock strata and exposing aquifers to the contaminated water.

Outside the Coal River Valley and across the nation there is also a lot at stake — especially for the millions of young people who turned out en masse during last November’s election, believing they could take their country back from the powerful special interests that pulled the strings of government over the preceding eight years. Just this weekend, thousands of students are attending regional “Powershift” conferences, learning what they can do to bring about their vision of a new future and a new energy policy build around efficient use of clean and renewable energy technologies.

Those same young people who came out by the thousands chanting “Yes We Can!” last fall are soon going to learn whether that slogan applies to them, or really just to powerful corporations with a lot of money and political influence. Today, it’s coal companies like Massey Energy that are claiming the “Yes We Can!” slogan:

“Yes we can destroy your mountains, drinking water, and dreams for a better future. Yes we can threaten and intimidate you at public hearings and drown out your voice.Yes We Can!”

Just last week, the same administration that donned the mantle of “Hope” and “Change” held public hearings on the rubber-stamp permitting of mountaintop removal in which the Army Corps of Engineers allowed mobs ginned up by the coal companies to threaten, intimidate and drown out the voices of people brave enough to speak out against the destruction of their homes, communities and mountains.

But it’s too soon for those young people to return to the feelings of disenfranchisement and cynicism that has characterized their age group for the past few decades. The Obama Administration has begun taking small steps to rein in mountaintop removal mining, and recently threatened to veto the largest mountaintop removal permit ever proposed in West Virginia. For even those baby-steps, they are facing a massive push-back from the coal industry. But it’s not nearly enough to make tweaks to the permitting process while letting mountaintop removal continue under the industry-friendly rules rigged by the Bush Administration. The administration needs to hear from us — to hear from you.

What you can do

It’s time we demand the “change” we were promised, and Coal River Mountain, the most powerful symbol of the difference between the destructive and climate change-denying policies of the past and the promise of a new future, is the line in the sand. Coal River Mountain must be saved.

The Administration has been hearing a lot from the coal industry, but have they heard from you? If not, you can start by calling the White House and making your voice heard. Here’s a link for more information: www.ilovemountains.org/coalriver/.

Next, sign up to for the e-mail list to stay informed and engaged in the campaign. It’s not a scam, your e-mail address won’t be traded or sold, so get over it and sign up — you can’t stay engaged and make a difference if you don’t stay informed. Here’s the link.

And finally, tell a friend, recruit a co-worker, or post the news to a list or a blog.

The mission is clear. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The fate of Coal River Mountain and our energy future are up to you. The time to act is now.

Originally posted at iLoveMountains.org.

If you’re a reader of Grist then you are almost certainly aware that the Obama Administration signaled a major shift yesterday in how mountaintop removal coal mining will be regulated. In brief, Obama’s head of the EPA, announced a decision to delay and review permits for two mountaintop removal mining operations, an action that calls into question more than 100 additional valley fill permits now pending that threaten to bury hundreds more miles of headwater streams and destroy dozens more Appalachian Mountains.

In making this decision, President Obama also took another step in fulfilling his campaign promise to bring science back to it’s rightful place in guiding the decisions of federal agencies. Over the course of eight years, the Bush Administration ignored the advice and analysis of the best scientists and systematically re-wrote the rules to allow companies to dump mine waste indiscriminately into streams. They also sought to allow higher levels of arsenic, selenium and other toxic metals from mine runoff in drinking water.

Realizing that Bush’s policies were wrong from the start, the coal industry and supporters in Congress quickly and conveniently rolled over and died.

Not.

Actually, the blow-back was immediate and fierce from the mining industry. Here’s the response of the National Mining Association:

This action, which applies to all mining-related 404 permits in the region, puts thousands of mining jobs and coal production in Appalachia at risk. While on the one hand the administration is spending billions in stimulus jobs, it is taking away the highest paying jobs in the region by delaying needed permit approvals. This is not good for jobs or for energy security.

All of this pressure appeared to elicit an immediate backpedaling by the EPA, which issued a statement last night that seemed to contradict the early media reports. Moreover, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin quickly took to grandstanding and went straight to Washington today to talk with Administration officials about impacts on West Virginia’s economy.

All of these conflicting reports have left opponents of mountaintop removal with a little whiplash, but they should not be distressed. There is no question that the EPA’s move signaled a seismic shift from the Bush Administration’s lax enforcement of environmental laws, and the back-pedaling doesn’t change the fact that EPA is going to bring actual science back into the permitting process.

One of the most valuable aspects of all of this is that we now have a very complete picture of the coal industry’s justification for why Obama should allow the destruction of the nation’s oldest and most biologically diverse mountains, and the pollution of the headwaters of many eastern rivers to continue under the Bush Administration’s rules. Here’s their reasoning:

Fourteen thousand mining jobs are at risk.

The savvy Grist reader will probably be thinking: “14,000 jobs? Didn’t the auto industry just layoff 100,000 employees? You’re telling me that we are turning the oldest mountains in America into a parking lot for the sake of 14,000 jobs?”

On the surface, this would certainly be a justifiable reaction. The numbers are miniscule compared to the total number of jobs in the region and the numbers we’ve been hearing about mass layoffs across the country over the past 6 months. According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,

Employers took 2,769 mass layoff actions in February that resulted in the separation of 295,477 workers, seasonally adjusted, as measured by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits.

But this misses a number of important points. In defense of the mining industry, 14,000 fairly high paying jobs mean a lot in this region, which is among the poorest in the country and already suffers rampant unemployment.

But the most important point is that no jobs are being lost right away as a result of the EPA’s decision. Anyone who says otherwise is posturing or bluffing.

All the EPA’s announcement means is that they will temporarily maintain the status quo that has been in place since March of 2007 when a federal district court judge suspended the permitting of most valley fills until the lax Bush Administration enforcement and evaluation standards were improved. There is not a single mine that will be shut down as a result of the EPA’s decision.

Presumably, mountaintop removal enthusiasts are really more concerned that new mountaintop removal mines will not come online as older mines reach the limits of their economically productive capacity and shut down. That is certainly what the author of this post would like to see happen, which may or may not make it a legitimate concern from the coal industry perspective, but it certainly changes the discussion dramatically in terms of impacts on the local economy.

To be precise, if the EPA cracks down on mountaintop removal permitting what we’re talking about is phasing out some proportion of 14,000 strip mining jobs in Appalachia over the next decade. But is this a significant number? Significant enough to justify what Vanity Fair has called “the greatest act of physical destruction this country has ever wreaked upon itself?”

As an exercise — the EPA is not clear on how far they will go in reining in mountaintop removal — let’s look at what might happen if the EPA completely eliminated all forms of surface mining, including mountaintop removal, in Appalachia over the next decade. I have created a number of PDF summaries of studies and reports on this subject that can be downloaded individually for those who want more detail, but here’s a quick synopsis.

1. The only study that directly addresses the question of how restricting valley fill permits would affect the economy was conducted by a well-respected coal industry consulting group called Hill & Associates (H&A) in 2001. According to the study, restricting valley fills to watersheds no larger than 35 acres in size would decrease overall coal production by about 15% in Central Appalachia. This reflects a 65% decrease in mountaintop removal with a 10% compensatory increase in underground mining.

The employment impact of this change would be 1,345 jobs. Here’s a graph showing the difference between a baseline projection and a projection based on restricting valley fills to less than 35 acres (again, meaning mountaintop removal coal production would be reduced by about 65%):

Another important point made by the H&A study is that even if no restrictions on permitting were put in place, both production and employment were projected to decline by 20-25% anyway because the most of the high-quality, easy to get coal is already mined out. Here’s a quote from the study:

“… the general downward trend of total tonnage from the study region under all cases is a result we see across many modeling projects.. [it]is exacerbated toward the end of the 10-year study period by the fact that significant blocks of higher-quality Central Appalachian reserves are starting to be exhausted. The better-quality coals in this region are slowly but surely being mined out.”

A final fascinating aspect of this study was that it also looked at how restricting mountaintop removal would affect the electric rates of consumers that rely on this coal for electricity. The impact would be somewhat less than 1% on electric bills.

Let me repeat: reducing mountaintop removal by 65% would lead to a wholesale electric rate increase of less than 1% in states relying on this coal and an increase in residential electric rates even smaller than that.

Here is my summary of the H&A study, and here is the original study.

2. According to several coal industry insider publications, the decline in coal demand resulting from the recession is likely to lead to many more underground mines being idled. According to the February 16th edition of the Coal & Energy Price Report:

Given the weak economy and downward pressure on coal prices, in general, the table suddenly has tilted in such a way that more underground mines will be in danger of falling off the cliff. Deep mine operators who have been reluctant to idle mines in the face of a potential forced shut- down of surface jobs might re-think their hesitation.

Given that underground mines employ 1.5 times as many miners per ton produced as surface mines do, this almost certainly means that EPA’s action will actually protect jobs in the short term. But other industry reports show why relying on more mining jobs is a poor response to the economic crisis anyway. Here’s a quote from the March 23rd edition of the U.S. Coal Review:

Most large producers have already announced sizeable trimming efforts, and reductions by smaller operators, while more difficult to estimate, are no doubt taking place. But in the current market environment in which demand is seriously slumping, the cutbacks are expected to continue in fairly big numbers.

Here is a link to some more excerpts of recent coal industry news(PDF).

3. According to a 2005 report from the Appalachian Regional Commission, employment in the mining industry is one of the best predictors of poverty and other elements of “economic distress” in Central Appalachia. Here’s an excerpt from the study:

Of all the regions in this analysis, Central Appalachia has been one of the poorest performers in relation to the ARC’s economic distress measure over time. Furthermore, and unlike all other regions in the U.S., current and persistent economic distress within the Central Appalachian Region has been associated with employment in the mining industry, particularly coal mining.

But people in Appalachia have long known that it’s more than just “coal mining” that’s the problem and that mountaintop removal specifically destroys far more jobs than it creates. If mountaintop removal created prosperity it should have done so decades ago. Instead, the counties where mountaintop removal occurs are among the poorest in the nation, with high unemployment rates and rapidly dwindling populations. The stark reality is that few industries want to follow mountaintop removal. After all, what entrepreneur wants to open a new business in a community where massive blasts are cracking the foundations of people’s homes, where hundred-year floods are an annual affair, and where the tap water looks like tomato soup and smells like rotten eggs?

This map, produced by Appalachian Voices, shows the dramatic correlation between mountaintop removal and poverty rates in Central Appalachia:

This ARC study also offered an excellent roadmap for Central Appalachian coal counties looking to improve their economic conditions:

“The counties that have emerged from distress in the region have consistently had fewer jobs in mining and a greater number of jobs in manufacturing when compared to the counties that have remained persistently distressed.”

The study also said:

“…regional economic development is most likely to take place when national policies create the conditions to support it. As such, addressing persistent distress would seem to require a renewed national commitment, similar to the one that inspired the establishment of the ARC and the regional development policies of the 1960s.”

Sounds like President Obama is already on the right track with his green jobs and economic stimulus plans (unlike the coal state politicians that have a remarkably single-minded focus on an industry that supplies less than 2% of the jobs, but a much higher proportion of campaign contributions).

Here is a link to some more excerpts from the 2005 ARC report (PDF).

That sums up the first part of the argument why President Obama should ignore the sky-is-falling predictions, disingenuous arguments and plain, old-fashioned rigged numbers that the coal industry and their supporters are throwing at him. The subject of a later post will be all of the opportunities there are and initiatives already underway in Central Appalachia to create new green jobs and diversify the economy beyond such a heavy reliance on coal.

As a preview, here’s a link to another recent study by the Appalachian Regional Commission that came out just a few weeks ago. According to the story by Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette:

An estimated 15,000 jobs per year for the next five years could be created, for a total of 60,000 new jobs, the study said. Annual energy bill savings would be almost $800 million, with that amount rising to more than $27 billion per year by 2030, the study concluded.

Now there’s some job numbers that might really start getting out of the economic doldrums.

More tomorrow…