Raised on the banks of the Tennessee River, JW's work to create progress in his home state and throughout Appalachia has been featured on the Rachel Maddow Show, The Daily Kos and Grist. He served first as Appalachian Voices’ Legislative Associate and then Tennessee director until leaving to pursue a career in medicine in 2012.
We wanted to let you know that Coal River Mountain has survived another day! Due to the fact that Massey coal company had not obtained the required permits, they were prevented from starting the blasting yesterday from a legal standpoint. However, it was your calls and emails to Governor Manchin that pressured him into sending his own team of inspectors down to the mine site to make sure they didn’t blast. So for the residents of the Coal River Valley, and for the future of West Virginia, we wanted to say THANK YOU!!
Since Tuesday morning, nearly 2,500 of you have emailed the Governor, and the emails are still going through at a steady pace. From what we can tell, the Governor also received hundreds of calls, and about 600 of you signed our petition (if you didn’t do so, please sign the petition, https://www.coalriverwind.org/?page_id=28). This was a great push, and the pressure on the governor is vital to winning this campaign and bringing wind power to southern West Virginia. He now knows that people all over West Virginia and all over the nation are watching to see if he’ll let Coal River Mountain – and the potential for clean energy development in an economically depressed, coal-dependent area – be destroyed for only 14 years of coal mining, or if he’ll do the right thing and rescind the permits altogether. He may have helped stop the blasting, but he only did so for legal reasons, and you can bet that Massey is pushing hard to get the required blasting and mining permits, so We Still Need Your Help!!
Can you forward this email to at least 5 friends, asking them to help save Coal River Mountain for wind power? We need to ramp up the pressure, and keep the calls and emails coming in, for once Massey gets those permits, only Governor Manchin can take them away. Have them visit: https://www.coalriverwind.org/?page_id=119 to send Gov. Manchin an email, and to find info on how to call his office.
Also, if you are in the area, come join us on September 16th as we celebrate the opportunity that exists here on Coal River Mountain, as well as all over West Virginia, to transition away from a heavy dependence on coal and toward a cleaner, greener energy and economic future. We’ll be holding a “Rally for Green Jobs and Healthy Mountains” on the steps of the State Capitol building in Charleston, WV from 5:00-6:30pm, and we would love to have all of you there if you can make it (for info, https://www.coalriverwind.org/?page_id=117). Pass the word around, because the more people that attend, the louder our message will be, and Governor Manchin will hear it ringing through the halls of the Capitol.
Thank you for all of your support, and for helping save Coal River Mountain for a little while longer.
Massey wants to start blowing the mountain up as early as today, but according to state Department of Environmental Protection secretary Randy Huffman, “If they blast, they do so illegally in our opinion.” Seems they lack the requisite permits.
Despite the impending lawbreaking, WV governor Joe Manchin has refused to intercede, rejecting a request letter sent yesterday from citizen groups. Manchin, apparently not in touch with his own DEP, says Massey has the permits they need.
As Massey well knows, it’s easier to break laws today and pay small fines tomorrow than it is to wait for permits. All about creating “facts on the ground,” you know
For years, local activists from Coal River Watch have been fighting against MTR and other harmful coal industry practices. But in 2006 WindLogics and advocates from the group Appalachian Voices conducted a study and found that a wind farm on the mountain could provide enough energy to power 150,000 homes. They’ve now formed a new group, Coal River Wind, and outlined a proposal to build 220 292-feet-tall wind turbines on the mountain, which would provide a sustained tax income for Raleigh County and at least 250 local jobs. There are three wind companies interested in the proposal.
“This is the first alternative ever proposed that has a strong economic component, that has real benefits to it that could be brought to local communities,” said Rory McIlmoil, campaign coordinator for Coal River Wind. “The wind potential would be destroyed if they continue with the strip mining.”
Today brings news of two acts of criminality on either side of the Atlantic Ocean involving coal, the fossil fuel with the highest global warming pollution intensity. In the United Kingdom, activists who shut down a coal plant have been acquitted by a jury of all charges of property damage. In the United States, right-wing coal company Massey Energy is planning to start illegally destroying a mountain to extract its coal. Our two nations are evidently separated by more than an ocean — one is breaking from the destructive dependency on fossil fuels, while the other is digging in deeper.
In the United Kingdom, a jury decided the threat of burning coal was much greater to the planet than the damage caused by six Greenpeace activists who painted a coal chimney with UK prime minister Gordon Brown’s first name
Could you call Governor Manchin, today, and ask him to issue a “stay of execution” for Coal River Mountain? He already knows that there is a real alternative to Mountaintop Removal here, and he knows it is the better option, now he needs to hear it from you! He needs to know that the state and the nation are watching him, and that you know that the decision is HIS to make. The Coal River Mountain Wind Project is such a great alternative that it was awarded Co-Op America’s “Building Economic Alternatives” Award, and is also being highlighted for the national Green Jobs Now! Day of Action on September 27th. But without your help, all of this will be lost for short-term, destructive coal mining.
Please pass this around to your friends, family, colleagues and email lists. The louder the voice, the better the chance of stopping the blasting. YOU can help by:
We’ve reached a cross-roads in Appalachia. We can choose between the economically and environmentally destructive resource of coal, or clean, green, economically invigorating industrial wind power. Right now there is a battle going on at Coal River Mountain to decide whether to turn the mountain into a mountaintop removal site or an industrial wind farm (learn more), and in order to save this mountain and the surrounding communities, we need your help.
Isn’t it wonderful how, when debating mountaintop removal or new coal-fired power plants in southwestern Virginia, the argument that seems to trump all others is the “economic benefit” all this coal digging and burning will bring to SWVA communities? Well, so much for that theory:
The coal-fired power plant under construction outside St. Paul, Va., was not the first to promise jobs, economic development and prosperity for Southwest Virginia. The same promises were made here 50 years ago when the Clinch River Plant was built.
“The coming of the plant into Southwest Virginia will stimulate other plants to locate in the area and to utilize the vast natural resources. It will mark the beginning of a new era,” said American Electric Power President Philip Sporn at the plant’s groundbreaking on May 16, 1956.
[…]
In half a century, the jobs have not materialized, and there is a sharp difference in opinion on whether the company has kept its promises.
The people who live here in the shadow of the smokestacks say the plant’s negative effects go beyond dust and noise. They say it has destroyed their community’s spirit and reduced its numbers, and many claim that there are high numbers of cancer cases among Carbo residents.
Einstein famously said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
More investment in coal means more mountaintop removal.
More mountaintop removal in Appalachia means more poverty.
More mountaintop removal in Appalachia means fewer mining jobs.
More mountaintop removal in Appalachia means more toxic waste our drinking water.
More mountaintop removal in Appalachia probably means more toxic waste in your drinking water if you live in the eastern US.
More mountaintop removal in Appalachia means fewer mountains.
More mountaintop removal in Appalachia means more global climate change.
Its established that there are NO good consequences for this pillaging of our homeland.
So why in the world, in the face of skyrocketing coal prices and decreasing production, should we blow up Coal River Mountain? Especially when we have a chance to create more energy and more jobs with industrial wind at the same site. Please join the fight and help us change Appalachia and move our country away from mountaintop removal coal.
Thats it for this morning. If you care to add a link to, or video of your favorite Appalachian music in the comments, I’m sure we’d enjoy hearing it. 🙂
$427 million. That’s what the oil and coal industries spent during the first half of 2008 on lobbying and advertising. They’re protecting their interests – and hurting ours.
This ad is running on TV right now, but we need millions more to see it. The special interests will outspend us, but we can compete head-to-head with them when we find ways to share these messages for free.
We want 50,000 people to watch this ad in the next 72 hours. Will you help?
Formally called the Virginia northern flying squirrel, but better known as the West Virginia northern flying squirrel, the subspecies is as old as the mastodons. It lives in clusters atop the highest Appalachian peaks of West Virginia and adjacent Highland County, Va. About 10,000 years ago, it became isolated from other northern flying squirrel species when ice sheets covering North America receded.
Why does that matter (besides the known fact that flying squirrels are incredibly cool, and as old as mastodons)? Because the squirrels are now one more thing in Appalachia which coal companies can indiscriminately destroy.
The delisting would remove the general prohibition against killing the squirrels or seriously damaging vital habitat. It would also relieve developers of various projects – from housing developments to wind farms or strip mines – from going through Endangered Species Act reviews or writing habitat conservation plans.
And in another great moment for science under the Bush Administration, the books are cooked. And they don’t even try to hide it.
But Kieran Suckling, policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said that the government’s numbers are bogus.
For one thing, the agency news release does not make clear that many of those 1,200 squirrels were probably “re-captures” of the same animal. Suckling analyzed the Interior data and estimated that there were really only 654 individual squirrels included.
In its Federal Register notice scheduled for publication today, the Interior Department conceded that the 1,200 figure was probably wrong, but said Suckling’s analysis was also off. The real figure is probably about 908, about 20 percent fewer squirrels than cited in the agency news release, according to the Federal Register notice.
From Harold Meyersons otherwise lame column about Obama and America’s anger problems called, Can He Be a Working-Class Hero:
The unions will rely heavily on one-on-one meetings that shop stewards and local leaders hold with their members. “We’ll have to fight with our own members on this,” public employee union President Jerry McEntee, who also chairs the AFL-CIO’s political committee, said at Sunday’s rally. “We’ve got to say to our Appalachian members who say they can’t vote for him, he’s black — we gotta tell them that’s [expletive]!
I appreciate this sentiment from Mr. McEntee that racism is “[expletive]!”. However, this tired narrative that “Appalachia is more racist than the rest of America” was started during the Democratic primaries because Hillary Clinton did much better than Barack Obama in West Virginia and Kentucky, and the Appalachian regions of Virginia, Ohio, and Tennessee. I wrote about and attempted to rebut this narrative often (here, here, here, and here among other places), in an attempt to defend Appalachia from charges that we are some “racist” backwater despite the fact that voters in every state described race as an important factor in their decision.
Appalachia, of course, has a long, mixed, and often progressive history on racial issues. [i.e.: the founding of West Virginia] The primaries in Appalachia played out precisely as you would have expected if you were simply looking demographic performance from other regions of the country, and the demographics of Appalachia. The human make-up of Appalachia was tailor-made for Clinton, and the Clinton brand is very strong in Appalachia. But, thats much too complicated for a complacent media to fit into a soundbyte. So we get the media saying “Clinton voters are racist…in Appalachia…because…umm…Appalachians are stupid hillbillies…and…umm…Clinton is white and Obama is black…and Appalachian voters don’t think about anything but being racist…and…umm…don’t have any issues…except for that they love the economy and eat clean coal for breakfast.”
Here is a list of the total percentage of Dem primary voters per state who said race is “the most important important factor, or one of many important factors”
Mississippi: (30)
Alabama (28)
Louisiana (25)
Illinois (22) West Virginia (22)
Georgia (21)
Tennessee (21) Kentucky (21)
Ohio (20)
Oklahoma (20)
Missouri: (19)
Pennsylvania (19)
Texas (19)
Arkansas (18)
Delaware (18)
New Jersey (18)
New York (18)
North Carolina (18)
Rhode Island (17)
California (17)
Indiana (16)
Massachusetts: (16)
Connecticut (15)
New Mexico (14)
Arizona (14)
Vermont (13)
Utah (8)
Kentucky and WV are not, statistically speaking, significantly more “racist” than Missourri, Pennsylvania, Deleware, Jersey, New York, North Carolina…and on down the line. And we are just as “racist” as Illinois, which elected Barack Obama to the Senate with 70% of the vote. Does Appalachia have issues with race and racism? I would say “Yes, but so does almost everywhere else in America. Racism is a worldwide problem and has been since the beginning of recorded history.” Race is just one of thousands of reasons to vote for or against Barack Obama, and its sad to think that the media (and even progressive media like DailyKos and Jon Stewart) can just call Appalachia “racist” when a lot of our people vote for someone else besides the candidate the media considers “the black guy.”
But even among white workers — a group of voters that has been targeted by both parties as a key to victory in November — Obama leads McCain by 10 percentage points, 47 percent to 37 percent, and has the advantage as the more empathetic candidate.
So are white-working class voters not racist yet? Thank goodness Americans have each other, and the internet to communicate and spread information, because our political media is pathetic.
Appalachian coal is a dead end road. With coal production declining across the Appalachian region and prices nearly tripling since 2007, economists and energy analysts are increasingly saying that Appalachian coal is the wrong investment. In Appalachia alone, we’ve seen over 1 million acres of America’s oldest mountains destroyed forever, 1200 miles of headwater streams buried, and some of the highest poverty in the nation due to mountaintop removal mining. But, though we have lost much, the people of Appalachia are fighting back through organizing and advocacy from Charleston to Frankfort to Washington DC.
Coal River Mountain, located in Raleigh County, West Virginia is one of America’s Most Endangered Mountains. The communities surrounding the mountain have a rich and mixed history with America’s most polluting fossil fuel. As the name implies, many of the towns in the Coal River Valley grew up with the expansion of coal-mining. But, 150 years after coal-mining began in Appalachia, much of the central and southern Appalachians stand devastated by mining, and impoverished by coal companies hell-bent on keeping coal “cheap” at the expense of our land and people. The communities of the Coal River Valley are no different. Except for the people of the Coal River Valley – having seen the devastation that coal causes – have seen enough devastation to know that they need to take a new direction.
…
When you’re talking about Appalachia and coal, the word “battle” is not used lightly. From Matewan, to Harlan County, to Blair Mountain, violence and bloodshed are a very real part of our history. Now the inherently American legacy of the miners of Blair Mountain, courageous coalfield labor organizers, and the grassroots movement that led to surface mining laws in the 70s has reached a head. The Appalachian people have drawn our line in the sand. We stand here together to tell companies that would practice mountaintop removal to stop NOW. With popular support for clean energy, a better alternative, and literally everything at stake, the Appalachian people will win this battle of wind vs. fire.
The Battle for Coal River Mountain…
—
There are two potential futures for Coal River Mountain, WV and the people of the Coal River Valley.
Industrial Wind Power (top: wind potential) OR a Mountaintop Removal site (below: permit area in black)
Remember that mountaintop removal does the same thing to our economy that it does to the environment. Industrial wind development will create more jobs in the short AND long-term, as well as more energy in the long-term.
Coal companies have been to the neighborhood before, destroying several nearby mountains and leaving Raleigh County with an 18.5% poverty rate.
Coal River Mountain remains one of the most potentially productive spots in the surrounding coalfields for wind. You’ll notice many areas of class 4, 5, 6, and even class 7 wind potential here. This is a prime spot for wind power, and the future of Appalachia’s clean energy economy.
Coal River Mountain is approximately 20,550 acres in size, and 30 miles of if its ridges receive commercially viable wind speeds. There is room on Coal River Mountain to place 220 2.0MW wind turbines. Such a project would have the potential to produce 1.16 Million Megawatt-hours (MWh), enough to power 150,000 homes.
On Coal River Mountain, three surface-mining permits either approved, pending or in formation, together span 5,782 acres. As currently proposed, these “mines” would reduce wind potential to a point that a Coal River Mountain Wind Farm would become commercially unviable. The ensuing ecological devastation will be immense.
According to Coal River Mountain Watch:
These mines [on Coal River Mountain] will be at the heads of Horse Creek, Dry Creek, and Rock Creek, and will surround nearly the entire length of Sycamore Creek, considered to be the most pristine stream in the area. Communities are situated at the mouth of each of these streams.
But if coal companies have their way, they would blast Coal River Mountain right off the map. In fact, by overlaying permit data onto a topographical map in Google Earth, we can show you what the hypothetical coal company vision of Coal River Mountain would look like. On the left side of the image, you can see what a mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain would look potentially like.
There is so much at stake in Appalachia. Wind power is cheaper to extract. Wind power is cheaper to produce. Wind power has zero emissions. Wind power does not require us to tear down our mountains. Wind power will provide greater economic benefit. Wind power will provide more jobs. Wind power will provide more energy. The benefits are endless. Mountaintop removal has to end and it has to end now.
We all stand to gain by supporting the efforts of CRMW to save Coal River Mountain from mountaintop removal by setting up industrial wind energy.
If you can join the effort, and would rather see a windmill than a toxic mountaintop removal mine, please sign the Coal River Wind Petition and check out CoalRiverWind.org.
“This is the first alternative ever proposed that has a strong economic component, that has real benefits to it that could be brought to local communities,” said Rory McIlmoil, campaign coordinator for Coal River Wind. “The wind potential would be destroyed if they continue with the strip mining.”
The advocates from Coal River Wind are still open to allowing Massey to mine there as long as it’s at least 300 feet below the surface. They argue that the underground mine would actually create more jobs for local residents than an MTR site, which relies mostly on heavy machinery.
2. MTR Fact of the Week
According to Dr. Matthew Wasson of Appalachian Voices, energy produced by the Coal River Mountain Wind farm would be cheaper than energy produced by Duke Energy’s proposed “Cliffside” coal-fired power plant in North Carolina. So much for “cheap” coal.
Cliffside Energy Cost: $0.150 / kWh
Coal River Mountain Wind Energy Cost: $0.094 / kWh
3. Mountain Video
(Congratulations to the production team. This was one of the top 15 non-profit videos on YouTube last week!…)
I also highly recommend watching these:
Rory McIlmoil and Lorelei Scarboro on this weeks’ Decision Makers: Part I Part II Part III
4. Featured Activist
Lorelei Scarboro
Lorelei Scarbro was born and raised in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia. She is the daughter and wife of coal miners, and has been active in the fight to save rural schools in West Virginia. She is now fighting for a clean just energy future for West Virginia and the Nation. Her writing, such as Winning with wind: Hope for Coal River Mountain in the Coal Valley news is spreading hope for people in the valley that they can save their economy and their mountains simultaneously by ending mountaintop removal and supporting industrial wind energy.
“My father was a coal miner. My grandfather was a coal miner. I have two brothers that are coal miners, my son-in-law is a coal miner,” says Scarbro, a life-long West Virginian and probably not someone you’d expect to be an outspoken opponent of coal. But Scarbro says, “I believe that the time for coal has come and gone, and I think we’re destroying our earth with fossil fuels. That’s the reason that we’re in the climate crisis that we’re in. I believe that we need to start transitioning.”
“It’s like living in a war zone when you have to sit in you home, you hear the blasting, and you breathe in the coal dust and you breathe in the rock dust,” says Scarbro. “To live with your house shaking every day, the foundation cracking, the windows rattling, it is really like living in a war zone.”
Learn more about Lorelei by watching this video on CoalRiverWind.org and this video on iLoveMountains.org.
5. Mountain Music
Check out Tim O Brien and Kathy Mattea original of “Walk the Way the Wind Blows” here
We all know that coal poisons our planet, removes our mountains, and pollutes our precious water sources. A connection that we often miss, is how big coal and fossil fuel industries have a significant hand in dirtying up American politics.
Appalachian Voices and Oil Change International are proud to release a new interactive tool providing the first comprehensive look at the cash mined by Members of Congress from America’s coal industry. Check out how much coal money is going to your member of congress at FollowtheCoalMoney.org
By searching for your Congressman, you can see a “relationship map.” Unlike a physical map, where points are positioned at a geographic location, the icons for the companies and legislators are placed so that they are that they are as close as possible to whomever they contribute to or receive contributions from.
Appalachian Voices Director Mary Anne Hitt says:
When it comes time to cash checks, coal is still king. If the American people want real action on energy, they need to know whether their Member of Congress is working for them or their coal cash contributors. We have better ways of producing energy than blowing the tops off mountains and destroying the climate and communities
Over the last year, we’ve seen the price of Appalachian coal nearly triple. In 2007, Appalachian coal prices hit a low of around $40/ton on the spot market. But last month, at the end of July 2008, we saw Appalachian coal hit $150/ton.
With regional coal production in a long-term decline, we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the upcoming months and years.
AEP needs to hike Ohio rates 45% over 3 years
COLUMBUS, Ohio – American Electric Power said Thursday it must raise electricity rates 45 percent for its nearly 1.5 million customers in Ohio over the next three years, to cover soaring coal prices and the cost of modernizing its systems to keep them reliable.
TheGreenMiles over at RaisingKaine, a progressive Virginia blog, says:
That 18 percent rate hike Dominion just got approved? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
From EnergyCentral in Kentucky, we hear similar news:
On Wednesday, TVA Chief Executive Officer and President Tom Kilgore said that rising production costs will drive up the price it charges local distributors for that power. TVA is allowed to make such fuel cost adjustments quarterly, and this one could increase individual bills by 10 percent to 20 percent, Kilgore said. A 15 percent boost would be TVA’s biggest rate jump since 1977.
That means an extra $12 to $25 charge per month for the average household, he said. Local utilities expect to pass that increase directly on to their customers.
And with production declining, and renewable energy becoming more cost competitive, we may soon see states who hope to protect their consumers begin to invest in conservation, efficiency, and real renewable energy in a serious way.
1. This weeks featured blogs…
David Roberts expands on the topic of coal prices over at Grist
fter gas prices, electricity bills are probably the most salient energy price indicator for average folk (albeit a distant second), so the current gas price hullabaloo offers a decent preview of what we can expect.
There will be outrage. There will be demands for increased mining. (Mine here! Mine now!) There will be Republican demagoguery on behalf of coal companies (and as a bonus, coal-state Democratic demagoguery too). There will be promises that coal mining and burning aren’t like they used to be, because these days super shiny technology makes them clean. There will be expert testimony saying that coal prices are rising because of structural economic forces that won’t be affected by an uptick in mining; that testimony will be disregarded by the demagogues. Greens and their legislative friends will push back with a scattered, incoherent message that involves half capitulation to mining and half boosterism of alternatives.
How will it all shake out?
Well, let’s wait and see how the gas-price thing goes. That will tell us a lot.
:
Climate Progress points out some of the dangersof continuing our current polices by looking at McCain’s pros and cons (their take is mostly cons on energy.
For those who enjoy the work of the farmer-poet, Wendell Berry, and/or agree that we are steadily losing a part of what makes us human in our rush to embrace technology and uber-industrialism. For those that retain agrarian values in the face of mass development and rampant consumerism.
By mimicking plants’ energy storage systems, MIT scientists have created solar energy storage for when the sun don’t shine. Coupled with the skyrocketing cost of coal and the onset of massive rate hikes for electricity, this development only further increases both the utility and cost competitiveness of renewable energy. Go MIT!
Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.
An every day fossil fuel…
An influential lobby on Capitol Hill…
Dwindling supply…
Spiking prices, effecting nearly every facet of the American economy…
Big industries exploiting high prices as an excuse for unnecessarily increasing extraction at any environmental cost…
…while stuffing their pockets with record profits.
Sound Familiar?
One of the most dramatic and pivotal price shifts in the weakening economy over the last 7 years has been the price of a gallon of gasoline. As we turned over the millenium in 2000, gas was at a balmy $1.26 according to the Energy Information Administration. Since then, the price has more than tripled, breaking $4.00 nationally for the first time just last month. The increase in fuel costs is already having dramatic impacts on our food and supply costs, making it more expensive to buy anything across all markets.
Are we on the verge of seeing electricity rates pull a “gas-prices?”…
A little less conspicuous than the price of fuel for our automobiles has been the insane upward spike in price of America’s “most abundant fuel” for electricity – COAL.
From a low of roughly $30 in 2000, the cost of a ton of Appalachian coal has increased 5 fold from 2000-2008, now fetching roughly $150/ton. Roughly half of America’s electricity is produced by coal, and a Appalachia produces a large percentage of our fuel for electricity. Most of this production in central Appalachia is from “mountaintop removal coal-mining” . This is a barbaric process by which entire mountains are blasted apart for coal. Their toxic corpses are then dumped into adjacent river valleys, poisoning the fountainhead streams for many of the major rivers in the east. Over 1 million acres of Appalachia, and over 1200 miles of streams have been destroyed by mountaintop removal and the dumping of mountaintop removal waste according to government statistics.
We will continue to cover this emerging story in the coming weeks.
See if you are connected to mountaintop removal at the My Connection page at iLoveMountains.org, and check to see if your Congressman is a co-sponsor of the Clean Water Protection Act (HR 2169) here.
We also need you to join the iLoveMountains.org Bloggers Challenge. Over 470 bloggers have participated, but we need to spread the word until every American and every politician is hearing about mountaintop removal on a daily basis.
They’ve told us time and again that we’ve got an almost limitless supply of coal in this country and that if only we’d let them destroy our mountains and valleys, and suck it up when it comes to mercury, a happy future of “clean” coal would await us! With what seems to be wee bit of a supply problem on our hands, do you believe the coal industry when they say they’re going to make all those investments to make coal clean?
Your power comes from this coal. So, your comfort is based in this destruction. Also remember that the mountains of Appalachia are also the “mother of waters” and many of you are downstream. In the big picture, we are all downstream.
2) Mountaintop Removal Fact of the Week
Appalachian coal cost $40 in 2007 (low).
Appalachian coal costs $150 in 2008 (high).
3) Mountain Movie/Image of the Week:
Buffalo from the Sky
Logan County, WV
4) Featured Activist:
Larry Bush, from Wise County Virginia: Himself a former miner and American veteran, Larry Bush traveled with other Appalachian residents to Washington DC last month to lobby Congressional Representatives to co-sponsor the Clean Water Protection Act (HR 2169)” which now has 146 co-sponsors thanks to the efforts of Larry and others. Larry has also been an outstanding organizer in SW Virginia and a leading voice against the dangerous new coal-fired power plant proposed by Dominion in his home of Wise County. In Wise County, 25% of all the land has been strip-mined, and there is already another coal-fired power plant 4 miles away from where the proposed coal plant would go. Despite all of this, Wise County suffers from 20% poverty, and according to the County profile:
The population of Wise County is considerably less prosperous than the population of Virginia. Wise County’s poverty rate is 108% higher than the Virginia poverty rate. The per capita income for Wise Countians is only 59% of the per capita income for Virginians.
Thanks to the efforts of Larry and others, the people of Wise County and SW Virginia may yet be able to stop the efforts of Dominion and Governor Kaine to build another deadly, GHG emitting, mountaintop removal using coal-fired power plant in their backyard.
5) Mountain Music of the Week:
Indulge in watching a few of the best musicians in the world – Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas , Sam Bush , Mark o’Connor, and Béla Fleck rip through Rice’s classic version of “Freeborn Man.”
Lowell at 
President Bush, against the advice of most experts, 
Lorelei Scarbro was born and raised in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia. She is the daughter and wife of coal miners, and has been active in the fight to save rural schools in West Virginia. She is now fighting for a clean just energy future for West Virginia and the Nation. Her writing, such as 
Himself a former miner and American veteran, Larry Bush traveled with other Appalachian residents to Washington DC last month to lobby Congressional Representatives to co-sponsor the 
