242 The Environmental Debate
How can anyone call this clean?
When the Bush administration announced a
plan last year to do away with a poorly enforced
1983 regulation that protected streams from
being buried by strip-mining waste — one of the
last ramparts protecting some of the nation’s
oldest forests and communities — tens of thou-
sands of people wrote to the Office of Surface
Mining in outrage. Citizens’ groups also effec-
tively halted the proposed construction of 59
coal-fired plants in the past year. Yet at last week-
end’s meeting of the National Governors Asso-
ciation, Democratic and Republican governors
once again joined forces, ignored the disastrous
reality of mining and championed the chimera
of clean coal. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell even
declared that coal states will be “back in busi-
ness big time.”
How much more death and destruction
will it take to strip coal of this bright, shining
“clean” lie?
As Burl might have said, if our country
can rally to save Arctic polar bears from global
warming, perhaps Congress can pass the Endan-
gered Appalachians Act to save American min-
ers, their children and their communities from
ruin by a reckless industry.
Or at least stop talking about “clean
coal.”Source: Jeff Biggers, “Clean Coal? Don’t Try to Shovel
That,” Washington Post, March 2, 2008, p. B2.Coal ain’t clean. Coal is deadly.
More than 104,000 miners in America have
died in coal mines since 1900. Twice as many
have died from black lung disease. Dangerous
pollutants, including mercury, filter into our air
and water. The injuries and deaths caused by
overburdened coal trucks are innumerable. Yet
even on the heels of a recent report revealing that
in the last six years the Mine Safety and Health
Administration decided not to assess fines for
more than 4,000 violations, Bush administration
officials have called for cutting mine-safety funds
by 6.5 percent. Have they already forgotten the
coal miners who were entombed underground in
Utah last summer?
Above ground, millions of acres across 36
states have been dynamited, torn and churned
into bits by strip mining in the last 150 years. More
than 60 percent of all coal mined in the United
States today, in fact, comes from strip mines.
In the “United States of Coal,” Appalachia
has become the poster child for strip mining’s
worst depravations, which come in the form of
mountaintop removal. An estimated 750,000 to
1 million acres of hardwood forests, a thousand
miles of waterways and more than 470 moun-
tains and their surrounding communities — an
area the size of Delaware — have been erased
from the southeastern mountain range in the last
two decades. Thousands of tons of explosives
— the equivalent of several Hiroshima atomic
bombs — are set off in Appalachian communi-
ties every year.