The Myth of Clean Coal & The Reality of Mountain Top Removal: MTR

Exquisite Safaris Philanthropic Travel announces Americans helping Americans Philanthropic Travel: Leaving the Mines Behind Empowering Appalachia: May 31 to June 7, 2009

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Clean Coal: Never was there an oxymoron more insidious, or more dangerous to our public health. Invoked as often by the Democratic presidential candidates as by the Republicans and by liberals and conservatives alike, this slogan has blindsided any meaningful progress toward a sustainable energy policy.

"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 deprivations, 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 mountains 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 communities every year."

-Jeff Biggers Washington Post Jeff Biggers is the author of "The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America."

The Myth of Clean Coal
The coal industry and its allies are spending more than $60 million to promote the notion that coal is clean. But so far, "clean coal" is little more than an advertising slogan. You have to hand it to the folks at R&R Partners. They're the clever advertising agency that made its name luring legions of suckers to Las Vegas with an ad campaign built on the slogan "What happens here, stays here." But R&R has now topped itself with its current ad campaign pairing two of the least compatible words in the English language: "Clean Coal."

"Clean" is not a word that normally leaps to mind for a commodity some spoilsports associate with unsafe mines, mountaintop removal, acid rain, black lung, lung cancer, asthma, mercury contamination, and, of course, global warming. And yet the phrase "clean coal" now routinely turns up in political discourse, almost as if it were a reality.

The ads created by R&R tout coal as "an American resource." In one Vegas-inflected version, Kool and the Gang sing "Ya-HOO!" as an electric wire gets plugged into a lump of coal and the narrator intones: "It's the fuel that powers our way of life." ("Celebrate good times, come on!") A second ad predicts a future in which coal will generate power "with even lower emissions, including the capture and storage of CO2. It's a big challenge, but we've made a commitment, a commitment to clean."

Well, they've made a commitment to advertising, anyway. The campaign has been paid for by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, which bills itself as the voice of "over 150,000 community leaders from all across the country." Among those leaders, according to ABEC's website, are an environmental consultant, an interior designer, and a "complimentary healer." Other, arguably louder, voices in the group include the world's biggest mining company (BHP Billiton), the biggest U.S. coal mining company (Peabody Energy), the biggest publicly owned U.S. electric utility (Duke Energy), and the biggest U.S. railroad (Union Pacific). ABEC - whose domain name is licensed to the Center for Energy and Economic Development, a coal-industry group - merged with CEED on April 17 to form the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE).

They're bankrolling the "Clean Coal" campaign to the tune of $35 million this year alone. That's a little less than the tobacco industry spent on a successful fight against anti-smoking legislation in 1998, and almost triple what health insurers paid for the "Harry and Louise" ads that helped kill health care reform in the early 1990s. In addition to the ads, the "Clean Coal" campaign has so far also sponsored two presidential election debates (where, critics noted, no questions about global warming or MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL got asked.

-Richard Conniff, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, is at work on a book about the discovery of species. He is a National Magazine Award-winning writer, and his articles have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. A frequent commentator on NPR's Marketplace, Conniff is the author of six books, including The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide and Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World.

Clean Coal is Mountain Top Removal, MTR is ECOCIDE.
In a world of rising energy prices, rising global temperatures, and rising sea levels, Americans are calling for clean and affordable energy. Yet under the influence of big energy companies, policy-makers are stubbornly clinging to the old, dirty fossil fuel technologies of the past. Along with global warming, mountaintop removal is an egregious example of the destructive impact of our addiction to coal.

"..the strip miners were not just destroying the environment, they were permanently impoverishing the region; there was no way that Appalachian communities could rebuild an economy from the barren moonscapes the strip industry left behind. "And," he told me, "they are doing it to break the unions."

Back then there were 114,000 unionized mine workers in West Virginia digging coal from tunnels and supporting the families and communities of Appalachia. Today, there are less than 11,000 miners in West Virginia taking the same amount of coal and only a fraction of them are unionized because the strip industry isn't.

Using these giant machines and 3,000 pounds of dynamite that the industry detonates in West Virginia daily -a Hiroshima bomb's worth of explosive power each week -King Coal is dismantling the ancient mountains and pristine streams of Appalachia. Mining companies blow off hundreds of feet from the tops of mountains to reach the thin seams of coal beneath. Colossal machines dump the mountaintops into adjacent valleys, destroying forests and communities and burying free-flowing mountain streams." -John F. Kennedy as told to Robert F. Kennedy

Did you know that they are blowing up our mountains RIGHT NOW? Though too many mountains and communities have been lost, there are many more that can still be saved, and their stories must be told.

Take Action:
Participate with ILoveMountains.org
What's your connection to Mountaintop Removal?
Write to Congress
Donate to IloveMountains.org

Learn More:
Exquisite Safaris Philanthropic Travel announces Americans helping Americans Philanthropic Travel: Leaving the Mines Behind Empowering Appalachia: May 31 to June 7, 2009

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posted by: David, Exquisite Safaris