Check out the trailer below, then look for the premiere on Planet Green November 15th.
October 15, 2009
Coal Country, a documentary about the battle fought over coal mining in Appalachia, exposes the environmental tragedy and social conflicts that have arisen from mining coal.
The Sierra Club is heavily promoting the film by sending out 45-minute promotional videos, promoting their own agenda to rid the US of its reliance on coal.
--Alison Kelman
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Showing posts with label Coal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coal. Show all posts
Friday, October 16, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Irreparable Damage: Senate Must Block OSM Nominee Pizarchik Today
Jeff Biggers
Posted: October 8, 2009 12:53 AM
As Consol Energy crews clean up another mysterious coal slurry spill in West Virginia today, the nation's largest producer of high-Btu bituminous coal -- and an aggressive operator of devastating mountaintop removal and longwall mines -- will be closely watching the nomination hearing of their southwestern PA hometown mining bureaucrat Joseph Pizarchik to head the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE).
With millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives being detonated nearby and flyrock, coal slurry spills and coal dust threatening their lives, so will everyone else in the coalfields across the nation -- and so should every American who believes we must not appoint reckless public officials whose records fail to uphold science and law in our mining policies.
When the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources meets today, October 8th, the stakes over the crucial directorship of the embattled OSMRE, charged with enforcing the sweeping surface mining reclamation laws, could not be higher.
If the Obama administration truly plans to move toward a "firm departure from the previous administration's approach to mountaintop coal mining, which failed to protect our communities, water and wildlife in Appalachia." according to Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, it must appoint a director who will lead the agency into a new era of regulatory integrity.
Given the irreparable damage of his mining record, Pizarchik's entrenched support of the coal industry suggests that the OSM would continue its decades-old tradition of empty promises, lawlessness, and betrayal of coalfield residents.
This is not only unacceptable: The egregious crimes of mountaintop removal and coal ash dumping alone should compel the Senate to block Pizarchik's nomination.
Widely denounced by virtually every major environmental and citizens group from his native Pennsylvania, and across the nation. the controversial Pizarchik is not only saddled with a growing number of legal prerequisites per SMCRA for his "chronic failures" at the PA Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, and his defiant support of coal ash dumping in the face of growing scientific evidence of mind-boggling toxic ramifications, but his disingenuous attempts to shrug off the crisis of mountaintop removal as an insignificant problem that requires him to "learn more about the facts and details."
"OSM is a demoralized, hollowed-out agency and the prospects are it will stay that way," Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch pointed out last month. "Putting forward a nominee who claims ignorance on a central issue so that his true position cannot be discerned is the sort of cynical politics I thought President Obama vowed to change."
Pizarchik's long-time role in failing to enforce PA mining laws has already drawn numerous complaints.
In filing a new notice of intention to sue the OSMRE this week, the PA-based Citizens Coal Council, a national organization, determined: "In sum, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection ("PA DEP") -- is engaged in a pattern and practice of failing to perform its non-discretionary duty to establish minimally adequate state equivalents to the applicable provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act."
Last month, the Citizens Coal Council filed another prerequisite over PADEP's failure "to implement, administer, enforce and maintain its approved state regulatory mining program in accordance with SMCRA and the federal regulations that implement that important landmark federal environmental law."
CCC Board member, Michael Nixon, pointed out: "This is just one of the many reasons that President Obama's nomination of PA DEP's Joe Pizarchik to be OSMRE Director is unacceptable to so many people, in Pennsylvania and nationwide. It's not too late to find the right person for the job, because that person certainly isn't Joe Pizarchick, the ringleader of DEP's chronic servitude to industry's coal ash disposal and mine dumping schemes."
In their report, Mining the Data:Pizarchik's Decisions Have Been Contrary to Fact, Overturned by Administrative Law Judges, and Detrimental to Pennsylvania, the Environmental Integrity Project concluded that Pizarchik's nomination testimony in August included several inaccuracies. Specifically on Pizarchik's denial of any pollution related to his program of coal ash dumping, the report found:
"The Clean Air Task Force's (CATF) review of the impacts of coal ash minefilling in Pennsylvania found that contamination of groundwater was greater after ash placement at 10 of the 15 minefill sites studied. These conclusions of extensive contamination from coal ash minefilling were corroborated by three Pennsylvania scientists: two hydrogeologists and a professor of chemistry versed in coal chemistry."
"At the PADEP, Pizarchik has dismissed evidence verifying contamination from minefilling as "outlier data," yet his refusal to objectively review undesirable facts does not eliminate the overwhelming evidence of contamination. PADEP simply dismissed high data values in the CATF Pennsylvania minefill report as "outliers" without following procedures outlined in Pennsylvania guidance as well as federal guidance for assessing and verifying outliers or extending the "outlier" label to any data values that were low."
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/irreparable-damage-senate_b_313450.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/irreparable-damage-senate_b_313450.html
Posted: October 8, 2009 12:53 AM
As Consol Energy crews clean up another mysterious coal slurry spill in West Virginia today, the nation's largest producer of high-Btu bituminous coal -- and an aggressive operator of devastating mountaintop removal and longwall mines -- will be closely watching the nomination hearing of their southwestern PA hometown mining bureaucrat Joseph Pizarchik to head the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE).
With millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives being detonated nearby and flyrock, coal slurry spills and coal dust threatening their lives, so will everyone else in the coalfields across the nation -- and so should every American who believes we must not appoint reckless public officials whose records fail to uphold science and law in our mining policies.
When the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources meets today, October 8th, the stakes over the crucial directorship of the embattled OSMRE, charged with enforcing the sweeping surface mining reclamation laws, could not be higher.
If the Obama administration truly plans to move toward a "firm departure from the previous administration's approach to mountaintop coal mining, which failed to protect our communities, water and wildlife in Appalachia." according to Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, it must appoint a director who will lead the agency into a new era of regulatory integrity.
Given the irreparable damage of his mining record, Pizarchik's entrenched support of the coal industry suggests that the OSM would continue its decades-old tradition of empty promises, lawlessness, and betrayal of coalfield residents.
This is not only unacceptable: The egregious crimes of mountaintop removal and coal ash dumping alone should compel the Senate to block Pizarchik's nomination.
Widely denounced by virtually every major environmental and citizens group from his native Pennsylvania, and across the nation. the controversial Pizarchik is not only saddled with a growing number of legal prerequisites per SMCRA for his "chronic failures" at the PA Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, and his defiant support of coal ash dumping in the face of growing scientific evidence of mind-boggling toxic ramifications, but his disingenuous attempts to shrug off the crisis of mountaintop removal as an insignificant problem that requires him to "learn more about the facts and details."
"OSM is a demoralized, hollowed-out agency and the prospects are it will stay that way," Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch pointed out last month. "Putting forward a nominee who claims ignorance on a central issue so that his true position cannot be discerned is the sort of cynical politics I thought President Obama vowed to change."
Pizarchik's long-time role in failing to enforce PA mining laws has already drawn numerous complaints.
In filing a new notice of intention to sue the OSMRE this week, the PA-based Citizens Coal Council, a national organization, determined: "In sum, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection ("PA DEP") -- is engaged in a pattern and practice of failing to perform its non-discretionary duty to establish minimally adequate state equivalents to the applicable provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act."
Last month, the Citizens Coal Council filed another prerequisite over PADEP's failure "to implement, administer, enforce and maintain its approved state regulatory mining program in accordance with SMCRA and the federal regulations that implement that important landmark federal environmental law."
CCC Board member, Michael Nixon, pointed out: "This is just one of the many reasons that President Obama's nomination of PA DEP's Joe Pizarchik to be OSMRE Director is unacceptable to so many people, in Pennsylvania and nationwide. It's not too late to find the right person for the job, because that person certainly isn't Joe Pizarchick, the ringleader of DEP's chronic servitude to industry's coal ash disposal and mine dumping schemes."
In their report, Mining the Data:Pizarchik's Decisions Have Been Contrary to Fact, Overturned by Administrative Law Judges, and Detrimental to Pennsylvania, the Environmental Integrity Project concluded that Pizarchik's nomination testimony in August included several inaccuracies. Specifically on Pizarchik's denial of any pollution related to his program of coal ash dumping, the report found:
"The Clean Air Task Force's (CATF) review of the impacts of coal ash minefilling in Pennsylvania found that contamination of groundwater was greater after ash placement at 10 of the 15 minefill sites studied. These conclusions of extensive contamination from coal ash minefilling were corroborated by three Pennsylvania scientists: two hydrogeologists and a professor of chemistry versed in coal chemistry."
"At the PADEP, Pizarchik has dismissed evidence verifying contamination from minefilling as "outlier data," yet his refusal to objectively review undesirable facts does not eliminate the overwhelming evidence of contamination. PADEP simply dismissed high data values in the CATF Pennsylvania minefill report as "outliers" without following procedures outlined in Pennsylvania guidance as well as federal guidance for assessing and verifying outliers or extending the "outlier" label to any data values that were low."
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/irreparable-damage-senate_b_313450.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/irreparable-damage-senate_b_313450.html
Monday, September 21, 2009
EPA to Rewrite Rules for Watery Discharges from Coal Plants
WASHINGTON, DC, September 17, 2009 (ENS) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to revise the existing standards for water discharges from coal-fired power plants to reduce pollution and better protect America's surface water, the agency said Tuesday.
Wastewater discharged from coal ash ponds, air pollution control equipment, and other equipment at power plants can contaminate drinking water sources, cause fish and other wildlife to die and create other detrimental environmental effects, the EPA says.
Earlier this year, EPA completed a multi-year study of power plant wastewater discharges.
As part of the study, EPA personnel conducted a sampling program to characterize raw wastewaters generated by coal-fired power plants, as well as evaluate treatment technologies and best management practices used to reduce pollutant discharges.
The Engineering and Analysis Division of the EPA Office of Water, which conducted the study, concluded that current regulations, which were issued in 1982, have not kept pace with changes that have occurred in the electric power industry over the last three decades.
Based on information in the report, the agency determined that revising the current effluent guidelines for the industry is warranted.
EPA's decision to revise the current effluent guidelines is "driven by the high level of toxic-weighted pollutant discharges from coal fired power plants and the expectation that these discharges will increase significantly in the next few years as new air pollution controls are installed," the agency said in a statement.
Air pollution controls installed to remove pollution from smokestacks have made great strides in cleaning the air people breathe, saving lives and reducing respiratory and other illnesses.
But some of the equipment used to clean air emissions does so by "scrubbing" the boiler exhaust with water, and when the water is not properly managed it sends the pollution to rivers and other waterbodies.
Treatment technologies are available to remove these pollutants before they are discharged to waterways, but these systems have been installed at few of the power plants.
As part of the multi-year study, EPA measured the pollutants present in the wastewater and reviewed treatment technologies, focusing mostly on coal-fired power plants.
Many of the toxic pollutants discharged from these power plants come from coal ash ponds and the flue gas desulfurization systems used to scrub sulfur dioxide from air emissions.
Other sources of polluted discharge are coal pile runoff, metal and chemical cleaning wastes, and coal washing, the study shows.
"The rainfall generating the coal pile runoff can dissolve inorganic salts or cause chemical reactions in the coal piles, which will be carried away in the runoff. Coal pile runoff may contain high concentrations of copper, iron, aluminum, nickel, and other constituents present in coal," the study states.
Plants typically direct coal pile runoff wastewaters to a holding pond along with stormwater runoff from other areas near the coal pile.
During EPA's site visits and sampling program, personnel determined that many of the plants operating segregated coal pile runoff ponds collect and store the runoff in ponds until the pond is at a level that could overflow. At that point, the plant either discharges the coal pile runoff to surface waters or commingles the coal pile runoff with other wastewater prior to discharge.
These are some of the discharges that the agency intends to cover with new regulations. Once the new rule for electric power plants is finalized, EPA and states would incorporate the new standards into wastewater discharge permits.
EPA's Office of Water is coordinating its efforts for the study with ongoing research and activities being undertaken by other EPA offices, including the Office of Research and Development, the Office of Solid Waste, and the Office of Air and Radiation's Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards and the Office of Atmospheric Programs.
EPA is also coordinating some of its activities with the Utility Water Act Group, an industry trade association, and has held technical information discussions with the Electric Power Research Institute and treatment equipment vendors.
More information about EPA's study is provided in an interim report published in August 2008. Click here to view the interim report. A final study will be published later this year.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2009/2009-09-17-091.asp
Wastewater discharged from coal ash ponds, air pollution control equipment, and other equipment at power plants can contaminate drinking water sources, cause fish and other wildlife to die and create other detrimental environmental effects, the EPA says.
Earlier this year, EPA completed a multi-year study of power plant wastewater discharges.
As part of the study, EPA personnel conducted a sampling program to characterize raw wastewaters generated by coal-fired power plants, as well as evaluate treatment technologies and best management practices used to reduce pollutant discharges.
The Engineering and Analysis Division of the EPA Office of Water, which conducted the study, concluded that current regulations, which were issued in 1982, have not kept pace with changes that have occurred in the electric power industry over the last three decades.
Based on information in the report, the agency determined that revising the current effluent guidelines for the industry is warranted.
EPA's decision to revise the current effluent guidelines is "driven by the high level of toxic-weighted pollutant discharges from coal fired power plants and the expectation that these discharges will increase significantly in the next few years as new air pollution controls are installed," the agency said in a statement.
Air pollution controls installed to remove pollution from smokestacks have made great strides in cleaning the air people breathe, saving lives and reducing respiratory and other illnesses.
But some of the equipment used to clean air emissions does so by "scrubbing" the boiler exhaust with water, and when the water is not properly managed it sends the pollution to rivers and other waterbodies.
Treatment technologies are available to remove these pollutants before they are discharged to waterways, but these systems have been installed at few of the power plants.
As part of the multi-year study, EPA measured the pollutants present in the wastewater and reviewed treatment technologies, focusing mostly on coal-fired power plants.
Many of the toxic pollutants discharged from these power plants come from coal ash ponds and the flue gas desulfurization systems used to scrub sulfur dioxide from air emissions.
Other sources of polluted discharge are coal pile runoff, metal and chemical cleaning wastes, and coal washing, the study shows.
"The rainfall generating the coal pile runoff can dissolve inorganic salts or cause chemical reactions in the coal piles, which will be carried away in the runoff. Coal pile runoff may contain high concentrations of copper, iron, aluminum, nickel, and other constituents present in coal," the study states.
Plants typically direct coal pile runoff wastewaters to a holding pond along with stormwater runoff from other areas near the coal pile.
During EPA's site visits and sampling program, personnel determined that many of the plants operating segregated coal pile runoff ponds collect and store the runoff in ponds until the pond is at a level that could overflow. At that point, the plant either discharges the coal pile runoff to surface waters or commingles the coal pile runoff with other wastewater prior to discharge.
These are some of the discharges that the agency intends to cover with new regulations. Once the new rule for electric power plants is finalized, EPA and states would incorporate the new standards into wastewater discharge permits.
EPA's Office of Water is coordinating its efforts for the study with ongoing research and activities being undertaken by other EPA offices, including the Office of Research and Development, the Office of Solid Waste, and the Office of Air and Radiation's Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards and the Office of Atmospheric Programs.
EPA is also coordinating some of its activities with the Utility Water Act Group, an industry trade association, and has held technical information discussions with the Electric Power Research Institute and treatment equipment vendors.
More information about EPA's study is provided in an interim report published in August 2008. Click here to view the interim report. A final study will be published later this year.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2009/2009-09-17-091.asp
Saturday, September 5, 2009
North American Gem Inc. Announces Private Placement
Comment: So Canada is looking for more Coal in American! Canada is looking for more uranium in Canada, well maybe?
VANCOUVER, BC -- (Marketwire) -- 09/04/09 -- North American Gem Inc. (TSX-V: NAG) (the "Company") would like to announce that it has arranged a non-brokered private placement, subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange, of up to 5,000,000 units at a price of $0.06 per unit for total proceeds of up to $300,000. Each non-flow through unit will consist of one common share and one full warrant. Each full warrant will entitle the holder to purchase one additional common share of the Company at a price of $0.09 per share for the first year, $0.12 per share in the second year, and $0.15 per share in the third year.
The proceeds of the private placement will be used for exploration work on the Company's coal properties in Kentucky and general working capital. A finder's fee may be payable according to the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange.
The Company further announces that pursuant to its stock option plan, the Company has granted incentive stock options to its directors, officers, consultants, and employees to purchase in the total of 1,500,000 common shares in the capital stock of the company, subject to regulatory approval, exercisable for a period of five years, at a price of $0.10 per share.
North American Gem Inc. (TSX-V: NAG) is a Junior Exploration Company based in Western Canada. The Company's primary goal is to explore for Coal in North America, currently the focus is in Kentucky, Saskatchewan and West Virginia. In addition to Coal exploration, the Company also has interests in Uranium, Copper, Gold, Molybdenum and other base metals in Canada.
On Behalf of the Board of Directors
NORTH AMERICAN GEM INC.
"Charles Desjardins"
Charles Desjardins
President and Director
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Cautionary note:
This report contains forward looking statements. Resource estimates, unless specifically noted, are considered speculative. Any and all other resource or reserve estimates are historical in nature, and should not be relied upon. By their nature, forward looking statements involve risk and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on factors that will or may occur in the future. Actual results may vary depending upon exploration activities, industry production, commodity demand and pricing, currency exchange rates, and, but not limited to, general economic factors. Cautionary Note to US investors: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission specifically prohibits the use of certain terms, such as "reserves" unless such figures are based upon actual production or formation tests and can be shown to be economically and legally producible under existing economic and operating conditions.
Contact:
North American Gem Inc.
430 - 609 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V7Y 1G5
Phone: 604-683-5445
Facsimile: 604-687-9631
info@northamericangem.com
www.northamericangem.com
http://www.yachtchartersmagazine.com/node/1095514
VANCOUVER, BC -- (Marketwire) -- 09/04/09 -- North American Gem Inc. (TSX-V: NAG) (the "Company") would like to announce that it has arranged a non-brokered private placement, subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange, of up to 5,000,000 units at a price of $0.06 per unit for total proceeds of up to $300,000. Each non-flow through unit will consist of one common share and one full warrant. Each full warrant will entitle the holder to purchase one additional common share of the Company at a price of $0.09 per share for the first year, $0.12 per share in the second year, and $0.15 per share in the third year.
The proceeds of the private placement will be used for exploration work on the Company's coal properties in Kentucky and general working capital. A finder's fee may be payable according to the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange.
The Company further announces that pursuant to its stock option plan, the Company has granted incentive stock options to its directors, officers, consultants, and employees to purchase in the total of 1,500,000 common shares in the capital stock of the company, subject to regulatory approval, exercisable for a period of five years, at a price of $0.10 per share.
North American Gem Inc. (TSX-V: NAG) is a Junior Exploration Company based in Western Canada. The Company's primary goal is to explore for Coal in North America, currently the focus is in Kentucky, Saskatchewan and West Virginia. In addition to Coal exploration, the Company also has interests in Uranium, Copper, Gold, Molybdenum and other base metals in Canada.
On Behalf of the Board of Directors
NORTH AMERICAN GEM INC.
"Charles Desjardins"
Charles Desjardins
President and Director
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Cautionary note:
This report contains forward looking statements. Resource estimates, unless specifically noted, are considered speculative. Any and all other resource or reserve estimates are historical in nature, and should not be relied upon. By their nature, forward looking statements involve risk and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on factors that will or may occur in the future. Actual results may vary depending upon exploration activities, industry production, commodity demand and pricing, currency exchange rates, and, but not limited to, general economic factors. Cautionary Note to US investors: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission specifically prohibits the use of certain terms, such as "reserves" unless such figures are based upon actual production or formation tests and can be shown to be economically and legally producible under existing economic and operating conditions.
Contact:
North American Gem Inc.
430 - 609 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V7Y 1G5
Phone: 604-683-5445
Facsimile: 604-687-9631
info@northamericangem.com
www.northamericangem.com
http://www.yachtchartersmagazine.com/node/1095514
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Judge rules for environmental groups on Virginia power plant!!!!
08.11.2009 – From the Wise Energy for Virginia Coalition
August 11,2009
*****************************************************
JUDGE RULES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS IN CHALLENGE TO VIRGINA POWER PLANT
*****************************************************
Contact: Cale Jaffe, Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney, (434) 760-0816
Cat McCue, Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Communications Manager (434) 953-8672
Kathy Selvage, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, (276) 219-2721
You can download the decision here: http://wiseenergyforvirginia.org/downloads/Wise%20Decision.pdf
(Richmond, VA) – In a momentous victory for clean energy advocates in Virginia, a Richmond Circuit Court judge ruled today that the State Air Pollution Control Board violated federal environmental law in permitting Dominion Power’s coal-fired power plant in Wise County in the southwest corner of the state.
Judge Margaret P. Spencer agreed with a coalition of environmental groups that the “escape hatch” in Dominion’s Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) permit rendered that permit unlawful. The Clean Air Act’s MACT program regulates emissions of hazardous air toxics, such as mercury, which can cause severe neurological deficits in infants, fetuses and young children. Judge Spencer ruled that the “mercury emission limit … must be set ‘irrespective of cost or achievability,’” and that the “escape hatch” was “violative of the laws addressing pre-construction mandates.”
When Congress passed the Clean Air Act, it required that such permits be obtained before construction begins on a power plant, to ensure that it is designed and built in a way to protect the public health and welfare. Dominion, which started construction a week after the Virginia air board approved the permits in June 2008, has said the plant is about 20 percent complete. The judge’s ruling granted the coalition’s requested relief, which was to invalidate the MACT permit.
In addition to the challenge on the mercury permit, the coalition also sued the air board in July 2008 for issuing a permit that failed to adequately limit emissions from the coal plant of approximately 5.4 million tons a year of carbon dioxide, small particles of soot, and other so-called “conventional” pollutants. The court affirmed the “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” (“PSD”) permit, regulating conventional pollutants.
The Wise Energy for Virginia Coalition has raised a host of concerns about the Wise County coal plant over the last several years, including air pollution and the health of the local community, water quality, mountaintop removal coal mining, and the impacts of the plant’s carbon emissions on global warming. Some 42,500 Virginians from across the state signed petitions and sent letters and comments to state and company officials opposing the project.
Following are statements from coalition members.
CALE JAFFE, Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney:
“This is an important victory for the health and welfare of Virginians. Once a coal plant is completed, it may prove very difficult to retrofit after the fact to remedy violations of the Clean Air Act. So this decision is essential for assuring that the Clean Air Act’s most stringent health-based standards will be met before a coal plant is constructed. We hope Dominion will take this ruling as a sign that it needs to leave expensive coal-fired power plants in the past, and move quickly toward developing sustainable, clean energy sources for a 21st century green economy.”
KATHY SELVAGE, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards: “For the citizens of southwest Virginia this ruling today will provide a longer and healthier life. The Commonwealth should be moving swiftly toward producing the energy we need through non-polluting means like the BP/Dominion wind farm proposed for Wise County to further strengthen the health of the people and the environment.”
TOM CORMONS, Appalachian Voices: “Today’s ruling is cause for celebration for Virginians all over the state who’ve opposed the permitting of this plant from the beginning. It underscores the dangers and costs of increased reliance on coal and we hope it will help spur an aggressive move toward clean energy that supplies electricity needs without polluting Virginia’s air or destroying its mountains.”
LAUREN GLICKMAN: “Today’s ruling represents a major step away from the economic and environmental devastation caused by our reliance on coal towards a rational energy policy of renewable energy and efficiency. Although the judge did not send the CO2 issue back to the air board, we hope that as Congress debates sweeping climate change legislation, Dominion will see the writing on the wall and begin to curb its carbon emissions.”
GLEN BESA, Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club: “We would urge Dominion to reassess its decision to build this coal plant. The ruling today is related to air pollution, but Dominion really needs to consider alternatives such as efficiency and renewable energy. Now would be a good time.”
****************************
The mission of the Wise Energy for Virginia Coalition is to halt new coal-burning power plants from being built and end the destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in Virginia, and re-power the Commonwealth with cleaner, less expensive, sustainable energy sources. The coalition includes Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, Appalachian Voices, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Sierra Club and Southern Environmental Law Center.
http://wiseenergyforvirginia.org/2009/08/judge-rules-for-environmental-groups-on-virginia-power-plant/#comment-3883
August 11,2009
*****************************************************
JUDGE RULES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS IN CHALLENGE TO VIRGINA POWER PLANT
*****************************************************
Contact: Cale Jaffe, Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney, (434) 760-0816
Cat McCue, Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Communications Manager (434) 953-8672
Kathy Selvage, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, (276) 219-2721
You can download the decision here: http://wiseenergyforvirginia.org/downloads/Wise%20Decision.pdf
(Richmond, VA) – In a momentous victory for clean energy advocates in Virginia, a Richmond Circuit Court judge ruled today that the State Air Pollution Control Board violated federal environmental law in permitting Dominion Power’s coal-fired power plant in Wise County in the southwest corner of the state.
Judge Margaret P. Spencer agreed with a coalition of environmental groups that the “escape hatch” in Dominion’s Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) permit rendered that permit unlawful. The Clean Air Act’s MACT program regulates emissions of hazardous air toxics, such as mercury, which can cause severe neurological deficits in infants, fetuses and young children. Judge Spencer ruled that the “mercury emission limit … must be set ‘irrespective of cost or achievability,’” and that the “escape hatch” was “violative of the laws addressing pre-construction mandates.”
When Congress passed the Clean Air Act, it required that such permits be obtained before construction begins on a power plant, to ensure that it is designed and built in a way to protect the public health and welfare. Dominion, which started construction a week after the Virginia air board approved the permits in June 2008, has said the plant is about 20 percent complete. The judge’s ruling granted the coalition’s requested relief, which was to invalidate the MACT permit.
In addition to the challenge on the mercury permit, the coalition also sued the air board in July 2008 for issuing a permit that failed to adequately limit emissions from the coal plant of approximately 5.4 million tons a year of carbon dioxide, small particles of soot, and other so-called “conventional” pollutants. The court affirmed the “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” (“PSD”) permit, regulating conventional pollutants.
The Wise Energy for Virginia Coalition has raised a host of concerns about the Wise County coal plant over the last several years, including air pollution and the health of the local community, water quality, mountaintop removal coal mining, and the impacts of the plant’s carbon emissions on global warming. Some 42,500 Virginians from across the state signed petitions and sent letters and comments to state and company officials opposing the project.
Following are statements from coalition members.
CALE JAFFE, Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney:
“This is an important victory for the health and welfare of Virginians. Once a coal plant is completed, it may prove very difficult to retrofit after the fact to remedy violations of the Clean Air Act. So this decision is essential for assuring that the Clean Air Act’s most stringent health-based standards will be met before a coal plant is constructed. We hope Dominion will take this ruling as a sign that it needs to leave expensive coal-fired power plants in the past, and move quickly toward developing sustainable, clean energy sources for a 21st century green economy.”
KATHY SELVAGE, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards: “For the citizens of southwest Virginia this ruling today will provide a longer and healthier life. The Commonwealth should be moving swiftly toward producing the energy we need through non-polluting means like the BP/Dominion wind farm proposed for Wise County to further strengthen the health of the people and the environment.”
TOM CORMONS, Appalachian Voices: “Today’s ruling is cause for celebration for Virginians all over the state who’ve opposed the permitting of this plant from the beginning. It underscores the dangers and costs of increased reliance on coal and we hope it will help spur an aggressive move toward clean energy that supplies electricity needs without polluting Virginia’s air or destroying its mountains.”
LAUREN GLICKMAN: “Today’s ruling represents a major step away from the economic and environmental devastation caused by our reliance on coal towards a rational energy policy of renewable energy and efficiency. Although the judge did not send the CO2 issue back to the air board, we hope that as Congress debates sweeping climate change legislation, Dominion will see the writing on the wall and begin to curb its carbon emissions.”
GLEN BESA, Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club: “We would urge Dominion to reassess its decision to build this coal plant. The ruling today is related to air pollution, but Dominion really needs to consider alternatives such as efficiency and renewable energy. Now would be a good time.”
****************************
The mission of the Wise Energy for Virginia Coalition is to halt new coal-burning power plants from being built and end the destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in Virginia, and re-power the Commonwealth with cleaner, less expensive, sustainable energy sources. The coalition includes Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, Appalachian Voices, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Sierra Club and Southern Environmental Law Center.
http://wiseenergyforvirginia.org/2009/08/judge-rules-for-environmental-groups-on-virginia-power-plant/#comment-3883
Monday, July 27, 2009
King Coal
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
July 26, 2009 08:38 PM
Over the past decade, nearly one hundred coal burning power plants have died in the proposal stage trumped by the legitimate objections of local communities fearful of a dirty deadly fuel that is neither cheap nor clean. Ozone and particulates from coal plants kill tens of thousands of Americans each year and cause widespread illnesses and disease. Acid rain emissions have destroyed the forests over the length of the Appalachian and sterilized one in five Adirondack lakes. Neurotoxic mercury raining from these plants has contaminated fish in every state--including every waterway in nineteen states--and poisons over a million American women and children annually. Coal industry strip mines have already destroyed 500 mountains in Appalachia, buried 2,000 miles of rivers and streams and will soon have flattened an area the size of Delaware. Finally, coal, which supplies 46% of our electric power, is the most important source of America's greenhouse gases.
Beating our deadly and expensive coal addiction will be lucrative. America's cornucopia of renewable energy resources and the recent maturation of solar, geothermal and wind technologies will allow us to meet most of our future energy needs with clean, cheap, abundant renewables. Bright Source, a solar thermal provider, has just signed contracts to provide California with 2.6 gigawatts of power annually from desert mirror farms. Construction costs are about the same per gigawatt as a coal plant and half the cost of a nuke plant. Once built, the energy is free forever. In contrast, once you build a coal plant, your biggest costs--fuel extraction and transportation and the harm from emissions--are just the beginning.
In the short term, a revolution in natural gas production over the past two years, has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight--and without the expense of building new power plants.
How? Well it's pretty easy. Around 900 of America's coal plants--78% of the total--are small (generating less than half a gigawatt), antiquated, and horrendously inefficient. Their average age is 45 years, with many limping past 75. These ancient plants burn 20% more coal per megawatt hour than modern large coal units and are 60-75% less fuel efficient than high-efficiency gas plants. These small units account for less than 42% of the actual capacity for coal fired power but almost one half the total emission of the entire energy sector! The costs of operation, maintenance, capital improvements and repair costs of these antiquated worm-eaten facilities, if properly assessed, would make them far more expensive to run than natural gas plants. However, energy sector pricing structures make it possible for many plant operators to pass those costs to the public and make choices based on fuel costs, which in the case of coal, appears deceptively cheap because of massive subsidies.
Mothballing or throttling back these plants would mean huge cost savings to the public and eliminate the need for more than 350 million tons of coal, including all 30 million tons harvested through mountain top removal. Their closure would reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain, and slash America's CO2 from power plants by 20%--an amount greater than the entire reduction mandated in the first years of the pending Climate Change Legislation--at a fraction of the cost.
These decrepit generators can be eliminated very quickly--in many instances literally overnight by substituting power from America's existing and underutilized natural gas generation, which is abundant, cleaner and more affordable and accessible today than dirty coal.
Since 2007, the discovery of vast supplies of deep shale gas in the United States, along with advanced extraction methods, have created stable supply and predictably low prices for most of the next century. Of the 1,000 gigawatts of generating capacity currently required to meet national energy demand, 336 are coal fired, many of which are utilized far more heavily than for cleaner gas generation units. Surprisingly, America actually has more gas generation capacity--450 gigawatts--than coal. But most of the costs for coal-fired units are ignored in deciding when to operate these units. Public regulators traditionally require utilities to dispatch coal first. For that reason, high efficiency gas generators, which can replace a large percentage of U.S. coal, are used only 36% of the time. By simply changing the dispatch rule nationally, we could quickly reduce power generated by existing coal-fired plants and achieve massive emissions reductions. The new rule would change the order in which gas and coal fired plants are utilized by requiring that whenever coal and gas plants are competing head-to-head, the gas generation must be dispatched first.
To quickly gain further economic and environmental advantages, the larger, newer coal plants that remain in operation should be required to co-fire with natural gas. Many of these plants are already connected to gas pipelines and can easily be adapted to burn gas as 15 to 20% of their fuel. Experience shows using gas to partially fuel these plants dramatically reduces forced outages and maintenance costs and can be the most cost effective way to reduce CO2 emissions. This change can immediately achieve an additional 10 to 20% reduction in coal use and immediately reduce dangerous coal emissions.
Natural gas comes with its own set of environmental caveats. It is a carbon-based fuel and is extraction from shale, the most significant new source, if not managed carefully, can cause serious water, land use, and wildlife impacts, especially in the hands of irresponsible producers and lax regulators. But those impacts are dwarfed by the disastrous holocaust of coal and can be mitigated by careful regulation.
The giant advantage of a quick conversion from coal to gas is the quickest route for jumpstarting our economy and saving our planet.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/king-coal_b_245117.html
July 26, 2009 08:38 PM
Over the past decade, nearly one hundred coal burning power plants have died in the proposal stage trumped by the legitimate objections of local communities fearful of a dirty deadly fuel that is neither cheap nor clean. Ozone and particulates from coal plants kill tens of thousands of Americans each year and cause widespread illnesses and disease. Acid rain emissions have destroyed the forests over the length of the Appalachian and sterilized one in five Adirondack lakes. Neurotoxic mercury raining from these plants has contaminated fish in every state--including every waterway in nineteen states--and poisons over a million American women and children annually. Coal industry strip mines have already destroyed 500 mountains in Appalachia, buried 2,000 miles of rivers and streams and will soon have flattened an area the size of Delaware. Finally, coal, which supplies 46% of our electric power, is the most important source of America's greenhouse gases.
Beating our deadly and expensive coal addiction will be lucrative. America's cornucopia of renewable energy resources and the recent maturation of solar, geothermal and wind technologies will allow us to meet most of our future energy needs with clean, cheap, abundant renewables. Bright Source, a solar thermal provider, has just signed contracts to provide California with 2.6 gigawatts of power annually from desert mirror farms. Construction costs are about the same per gigawatt as a coal plant and half the cost of a nuke plant. Once built, the energy is free forever. In contrast, once you build a coal plant, your biggest costs--fuel extraction and transportation and the harm from emissions--are just the beginning.
In the short term, a revolution in natural gas production over the past two years, has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight--and without the expense of building new power plants.
How? Well it's pretty easy. Around 900 of America's coal plants--78% of the total--are small (generating less than half a gigawatt), antiquated, and horrendously inefficient. Their average age is 45 years, with many limping past 75. These ancient plants burn 20% more coal per megawatt hour than modern large coal units and are 60-75% less fuel efficient than high-efficiency gas plants. These small units account for less than 42% of the actual capacity for coal fired power but almost one half the total emission of the entire energy sector! The costs of operation, maintenance, capital improvements and repair costs of these antiquated worm-eaten facilities, if properly assessed, would make them far more expensive to run than natural gas plants. However, energy sector pricing structures make it possible for many plant operators to pass those costs to the public and make choices based on fuel costs, which in the case of coal, appears deceptively cheap because of massive subsidies.
Mothballing or throttling back these plants would mean huge cost savings to the public and eliminate the need for more than 350 million tons of coal, including all 30 million tons harvested through mountain top removal. Their closure would reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain, and slash America's CO2 from power plants by 20%--an amount greater than the entire reduction mandated in the first years of the pending Climate Change Legislation--at a fraction of the cost.
These decrepit generators can be eliminated very quickly--in many instances literally overnight by substituting power from America's existing and underutilized natural gas generation, which is abundant, cleaner and more affordable and accessible today than dirty coal.
Since 2007, the discovery of vast supplies of deep shale gas in the United States, along with advanced extraction methods, have created stable supply and predictably low prices for most of the next century. Of the 1,000 gigawatts of generating capacity currently required to meet national energy demand, 336 are coal fired, many of which are utilized far more heavily than for cleaner gas generation units. Surprisingly, America actually has more gas generation capacity--450 gigawatts--than coal. But most of the costs for coal-fired units are ignored in deciding when to operate these units. Public regulators traditionally require utilities to dispatch coal first. For that reason, high efficiency gas generators, which can replace a large percentage of U.S. coal, are used only 36% of the time. By simply changing the dispatch rule nationally, we could quickly reduce power generated by existing coal-fired plants and achieve massive emissions reductions. The new rule would change the order in which gas and coal fired plants are utilized by requiring that whenever coal and gas plants are competing head-to-head, the gas generation must be dispatched first.
To quickly gain further economic and environmental advantages, the larger, newer coal plants that remain in operation should be required to co-fire with natural gas. Many of these plants are already connected to gas pipelines and can easily be adapted to burn gas as 15 to 20% of their fuel. Experience shows using gas to partially fuel these plants dramatically reduces forced outages and maintenance costs and can be the most cost effective way to reduce CO2 emissions. This change can immediately achieve an additional 10 to 20% reduction in coal use and immediately reduce dangerous coal emissions.
Natural gas comes with its own set of environmental caveats. It is a carbon-based fuel and is extraction from shale, the most significant new source, if not managed carefully, can cause serious water, land use, and wildlife impacts, especially in the hands of irresponsible producers and lax regulators. But those impacts are dwarfed by the disastrous holocaust of coal and can be mitigated by careful regulation.
The giant advantage of a quick conversion from coal to gas is the quickest route for jumpstarting our economy and saving our planet.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/king-coal_b_245117.html
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Children’s IQ Can Be Affected by Mother’s Exposure to Urban Air Pollutants
Comment: Uranium mill may use coal, many trucks running up and down local roads, do not forget about the blasting powder, radon gas and uranium dust! Please watch out for future mothers and our children!
Contact: Stephanie Berger
212-305-4372
sb2247@columbia.edu
Children’s IQ Can Be Affected by Mother’s Exposure to Urban Air Pollutants
July 20, 2009 -- Prenatal exposure to environmental pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) can adversely affect a child’s intelligence quotient or IQ, according to new research by the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) at the Mailman School of Public Health. PAHs are chemicals released into the air from the burning of coal, diesel, oil and gas, or other organic substances such as tobacco. In urban areas motor vehicles are a major source of PAHs. The study findings are published in the August 2009 issue of Pediatrics.
The study, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a component of the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several private foundations, found that children exposed to high levels of PAHs in New York City had full scale and verbal IQ scores that were 4.31 and 4.67 points lower, respectively than those of less exposed children. High PAH levels were defined as above the median of 2.26 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3).
“These findings are of concern because these decreases in IQ could be educationally meaningful in terms of school performance,” says Frederica Perera, DrPH, professor of Environmental Health Sciences and director of the CCCEH at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and study lead author. “The good news is that we have seen a decline in air pollution exposure in our cohort since 1998, testifying to the importance of policies to reduce traffic congestion and other sources of fossil fuel combustion byproducts.”
The study included children who were born to non-smoking Black and Dominican American women age 18 to 35 who resided in Washington Heights, Harlem or the South Bronx in New York. The children were followed from in utero to 5 years of age. The mothers wore personal air monitors during pregnancy to measure exposure to PAHs and they responded to questionnaires.
At 5 years of age, 249 children were given an intelligence test known as the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of the Intelligence, which provides verbal, performance and full-scale IQ scores. The researchers developed models to calculate the associations between prenatal PAH exposure and IQ. They accounted for other factors such as second-hand smoke exposure, lead, mother’s education and the quality of the home caretaking environment. Study participants exposed to air pollution levels below the average were designated as having “low exposure,” while those exposed to pollution levels above the average were identified as “high exposure.” A total of 140 children were classified as having high PAH exposure.
“The decrease in full-scale IQ score among the more exposed children is similar to that seen with low-level lead exposure,” noted Dr. Perera. “This finding is of concern because IQ is an important predictor of future academic performance, and PAHs are widespread in urban environments and throughout the world. Fortunately, airborne PAH concentrations can be reduced through currently available controls, alternative energy sources and policy interventions.”
Mailman School of Public Health’s Li Zhigang, Robin Whyatt, Lori Hoepner, Shuang Wang, David Camann, and Virginia Rauh were co-authors of the study.
The Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health – part of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University – is a leading research organization dedicated to understanding and preventing environmentally related disease in children. Founded in 1998, the Center conducts research in New York City, including the study of mothers and children in Northern Manhattan and South Bronx, a World Trade Center Study, as well as Krakow, Poland, and Chongqing, China. Its mission is to improve the respiratory health and cognitive development of children and to reduce their cancer risk by identifying environmental toxicants and conditions related to poverty that increase their risk of disease. In NYC, the Center collaborates with residents and partner organizations in Washington Heights, Harlem and the South Bronx to share research findings with the local communities in ways that are meaningful and usable in daily life. (www.ccceh.org)
About the Mailman School of Public Health
The only accredited school of public health in New York City and among the first in the nation, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting millions of people locally and globally. The Mailman School is the recipient of some of the largest government and private grants in Columbia University’s history. Its more than 1000 graduate students pursue master’s and doctoral degrees, and the School’s 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as infectious and chronic diseases, health promotion and disease prevention, environmental health, maternal and child health, health over the life course, health policy, and public health preparedness. www.mailman.columbia.edu
http://www.mailmanschool.org/news/display.asp?id=770
Contact: Stephanie Berger
212-305-4372
sb2247@columbia.edu
Children’s IQ Can Be Affected by Mother’s Exposure to Urban Air Pollutants
July 20, 2009 -- Prenatal exposure to environmental pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) can adversely affect a child’s intelligence quotient or IQ, according to new research by the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) at the Mailman School of Public Health. PAHs are chemicals released into the air from the burning of coal, diesel, oil and gas, or other organic substances such as tobacco. In urban areas motor vehicles are a major source of PAHs. The study findings are published in the August 2009 issue of Pediatrics.
The study, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a component of the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several private foundations, found that children exposed to high levels of PAHs in New York City had full scale and verbal IQ scores that were 4.31 and 4.67 points lower, respectively than those of less exposed children. High PAH levels were defined as above the median of 2.26 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3).
“These findings are of concern because these decreases in IQ could be educationally meaningful in terms of school performance,” says Frederica Perera, DrPH, professor of Environmental Health Sciences and director of the CCCEH at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and study lead author. “The good news is that we have seen a decline in air pollution exposure in our cohort since 1998, testifying to the importance of policies to reduce traffic congestion and other sources of fossil fuel combustion byproducts.”
The study included children who were born to non-smoking Black and Dominican American women age 18 to 35 who resided in Washington Heights, Harlem or the South Bronx in New York. The children were followed from in utero to 5 years of age. The mothers wore personal air monitors during pregnancy to measure exposure to PAHs and they responded to questionnaires.
At 5 years of age, 249 children were given an intelligence test known as the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of the Intelligence, which provides verbal, performance and full-scale IQ scores. The researchers developed models to calculate the associations between prenatal PAH exposure and IQ. They accounted for other factors such as second-hand smoke exposure, lead, mother’s education and the quality of the home caretaking environment. Study participants exposed to air pollution levels below the average were designated as having “low exposure,” while those exposed to pollution levels above the average were identified as “high exposure.” A total of 140 children were classified as having high PAH exposure.
“The decrease in full-scale IQ score among the more exposed children is similar to that seen with low-level lead exposure,” noted Dr. Perera. “This finding is of concern because IQ is an important predictor of future academic performance, and PAHs are widespread in urban environments and throughout the world. Fortunately, airborne PAH concentrations can be reduced through currently available controls, alternative energy sources and policy interventions.”
Mailman School of Public Health’s Li Zhigang, Robin Whyatt, Lori Hoepner, Shuang Wang, David Camann, and Virginia Rauh were co-authors of the study.
The Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health – part of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University – is a leading research organization dedicated to understanding and preventing environmentally related disease in children. Founded in 1998, the Center conducts research in New York City, including the study of mothers and children in Northern Manhattan and South Bronx, a World Trade Center Study, as well as Krakow, Poland, and Chongqing, China. Its mission is to improve the respiratory health and cognitive development of children and to reduce their cancer risk by identifying environmental toxicants and conditions related to poverty that increase their risk of disease. In NYC, the Center collaborates with residents and partner organizations in Washington Heights, Harlem and the South Bronx to share research findings with the local communities in ways that are meaningful and usable in daily life. (www.ccceh.org)
About the Mailman School of Public Health
The only accredited school of public health in New York City and among the first in the nation, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting millions of people locally and globally. The Mailman School is the recipient of some of the largest government and private grants in Columbia University’s history. Its more than 1000 graduate students pursue master’s and doctoral degrees, and the School’s 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as infectious and chronic diseases, health promotion and disease prevention, environmental health, maternal and child health, health over the life course, health policy, and public health preparedness. www.mailman.columbia.edu
http://www.mailmanschool.org/news/display.asp?id=770
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Coal protesters assaulted and shot at, says Hansen - June 26, 2009
Comment: This may be our future in the Piedmont area of Virginia if the Corp. Virginia approves uranium mining! IT IS RUMOR SOME PEOPLE IN OUR LOVELY COUNTY IS AFRAID TO DISPLAY "NO URANIUM SIGNS" AROUND THIER HOME!
Jim Hansen has released a statement about his arrest earlier this week at a protest against coal mining by the company Massey Energy in West Virginia.
The NASA scientist and doyen of climate change protestors was arrested after those protesting against Massey’s mountaintop mining faced off against the company’s supporters. While Hansen describes local police as “courteous and professional”, he backs allegations made by some protestors that a supporter of the mining company assaulted one of their number. He also says that local man Larry Gibson, who has refused to sell his property for mining, has been the target of drive-by shootings.
However, he adds, “If Gandhi had the sequence right (first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win), we are already three-quarters of the way there. I noticed that it was only a handful of Massey people who were really vocal.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/06/coal_protesters_assaulted_and.html
Jim Hansen has released a statement about his arrest earlier this week at a protest against coal mining by the company Massey Energy in West Virginia.
The NASA scientist and doyen of climate change protestors was arrested after those protesting against Massey’s mountaintop mining faced off against the company’s supporters. While Hansen describes local police as “courteous and professional”, he backs allegations made by some protestors that a supporter of the mining company assaulted one of their number. He also says that local man Larry Gibson, who has refused to sell his property for mining, has been the target of drive-by shootings.
However, he adds, “If Gandhi had the sequence right (first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win), we are already three-quarters of the way there. I noticed that it was only a handful of Massey people who were really vocal.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/06/coal_protesters_assaulted_and.html
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
INVESTIGATION: Do dirty coal plants make us more vulnerable to swine flu?
Comment: Arsenic, which is also in uranium tailings ponds, which could be located all over Virginia, will ruin our water and our health. Just read the news piece about the swine flu and the environment, coal sludge ponds are all over VA too, some are located on the New River! Demand the State of Virginia ban uranium mining and milling now!Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu -- and it's a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities.
The culprit is arsenic, a highly poisonous semi-metal which, according to a new study by researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Dartmouth Medical School, compromises a person's ability to mount an immune response to the H1N1 swine flu virus.
Most disturbingly, the study -- published last month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives -- found that arsenic can weaken the immune response to swine flu even in the low-level exposure levels that are commonly found in contaminated drinking water.
When normal people or mice are infected with the flu, they immediately develop an immune response where immune cells rush to the lungs and produce chemicals to battle the infection, the researchers explain. But in mice who over the course of five weeks had ingested 100 parts per billion (ppb) of arsenic in their drinking water, the immune response to H1N1 infection was initially weak. When the response finally did kick in days later, it often overwhelmed the animal.
"There was a massive infiltration of immune cells to the lungs and a massive inflammatory response, which led to bleeding and damage in the lung," explains MBL senior scientist and report co-author Joshua Hamilton. The animals exposed to the arsenic were more likely to die from the infection than their counterparts who were not exposed.
The currently federal standard for arsenic in drinking water is 10 ppb, but levels in drinking water in some parts of the country routinely exceed that. A 2005 analysis of contaminants in drinking water by the Environmental Working Group found that the average arsenic levels in water supplied by at least 144 systems in Texas and 11 systems in Florida exceeded that standard -- in some cases at levels approaching those given to the experimental mice.
For example, average arsenic levels in water from the Bruni Rural Water Supply Commission in Webb County, Texas were 90.87 ppb. Levels of over 100 ppb were also documented in the drinking water in Jim Hogg County, Texas.
When Hamilton and his colleagues heard about the recent H1N1 outbreak, they were struck by the fact that there are high arsenic levels in well water in many parts of Mexico. That includes Veracruz, where news reports placed the first case of H1N1 swine flu, though there are now questions about that time line since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta more recently reported that the virus likely started circulating among the Mexican people as early as the fall of 2008.
No link has been established between any specific case of swine flu and arsenic exposure, "but it's an intriguing notion that this may have contributed," Hamilton says.
The coal power-arsenic connection
Arsenic has been linked to cancers of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidney, nasal passages, liver and prostate as well as fetal malformations. Earlier research by Hamilton and colleagues found that arsenic also disrupts the endocrine system that controls the release of hormones.
There are many parts of the United States where groundwater naturally contains high arsenic levels, including large swaths of Texas and Florida (click on map at left to see a larger version). If tests show that your water has high levels of arsenic, the Natural Resources Defense Council recommends purchasing filters certified by NSF International to remove it.
But arsenic is also released into the environment through industrial pollution. Across the United States, there are more than 700 toxic waste sites overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program where arsenic is a contaminant of concern. There are also scores of industrial facilities that routinely release arsenic and arsenic compounds to the air and water or dump it into surface impoundments like the one that collapsed last December at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston plant in Roane County, Tenn., according to the EPA's online Toxics Release Inventory. All of these create potential exposure pathways for people.
Of the top 25 industrial emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds via point-source air emissions (that is, releases through confined streams like smokestacks) in 2007, 22 were coal-fired electric power plants, according to the most recent TRI data available. The big arsenic air polluters are concentrated in the South, with 10 of the top 25 arsenic-emitting facilities located in the region.
In the Southern states, the biggest emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds to the air were the Southern Company's Bowen plant in Bartow County, Ga. and Progress Energy's Roxboro plant in Person County, N.C., each of which released 2,200 pounds of arsenic to the air in 2007 alone. Besides coal-fired power plants, the other big arsenic emitters were copper refineries in Texas and Utah and a glass plant in Kentucky. The following are the top 25 point-source air emitters, their location and the amounts released:
Industrial facilities -- and particularly coal-fired power plants -- are also dumping large quantities of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters such as streams and rivers. Of the top 25 emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters in 2007, 22 were coal-fired power plants. The facilities dumping arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters are again concentrated in the South, with 16 of the top 25 arsenic water polluters located in the region. Arsenic pollution of waterways is a particular concern since the pollutant concentrates up the food chain, which can render fish unsafe to eat.
In the South, the biggest dumper of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters in 2007 was Dominion Power's Chesterfield power plant in Chesterfield County, Va. at 4,500 pounds. It was closely followed by the TVA's Johnsonville plant in Humphreys County, Tenn. at 4,200 pounds and TVA's Widows Creek plant in Jackson County, Ala. at 3,900 pounds. In fourth place was TVA's Kingston plant, which dumped 2,700 pounds of arsenic and arsenic compounds into nearby waterways in 2007. The following chart shows the top 25 emitters of arsenic to surface waters:
The failure of the Kingston plant's coal ash impoundment also released significant quantities of arsenic into the environment. An analysis of water samples taken downstream of the spill and released earlier this year showed elevated levels exceeding standards set to protect humans from dangerous concentrations of pollution, with arsenic levels more than double acute toxicity levels. The tests, which were sponsored by the Environmental Integrity Project and United Mountain Defense, also found widely fluctuating arsenic levels in the nearby Emory and Clinch rivers, with some 37 times higher than safe drinking water standards.
Catastrophic failures like the one at the Kingston plant are not the only ways coal ash impoundments are contaminating the environment with arsenic. For example, high levels of the chemical were recently discovered in water and sediment samples collected downstream of Progress Energy's coal-fired power plant near Asheville, N.C., raising concerns that arsenic contamination from unlined coal ash impoundments is seeping into the environment. In addition, a 2007 assessment by the EPA documented coal ash waste dumping sites around the country associated with arsenic contamination.
Enormous quantities of arsenic are currently being dumped into these unlined and poorly regulated surface impoundments at coal-fired power plants across the country. An EPA analysis found people living near these coal ash dump sites have as much as a 1 in 50 chance of getting cancer from drinking water contaminated by arsenic, and evidence has surfaced since then suggesting the risk may be even higher.
Of the 25 surface impoundments where the greatest quantities of arsenic and arsenic compounds were dumped in 2007, 17 were at coal-fired plants; of those 17 plants, 12 are located in the South, as shown in the following chart. Note that TVA's Kingston plant doesn't even make the list of the top 25 facilities; the 44,000 pounds of arsenic and arsenic compounds it dumped into its surface impoundment in 2007 put it at number 27 on the list.
The fight for tougher coal waste regulation
In the U.S. to date, the swine flu virus has sickened more than 13,000 people and caused at least 27 deaths, according to the CDC. This week the World Health Organization said it was getting close to declaring a pandemic as the virus has infected more than 26,500 people in 73 countries, while researchers warn that the current outbreak may be only a "dress rehearsal" for a wider pandemic to come.
Many questions still remain about the virus. For example, last month we reported that scientists working to understand the genetic makeup of the current H1N1 strain linked it to a virus behind a 1998 swine flu outbreak at an industrial hog farm in eastern North Carolina. But Dr. Barrett Slenning, an epidemiologist at N.C. State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, points out that subsequent laboratory research suggests the 1998 virus was not a direct predecessor to the current H1N1, with recent genetic analyses showing greater similarities to flu strains from Asia.
"It all points to the importance of human health, animal health, and environmental health workers needing to come together," says Slenning. "You cannot protect one without protecting the others."
And when it comes to protecting ourselves from the worst effects of swine flu, it might also help to exercise precaution by reducing our exposure to arsenic -- which ultimately means cleaning up dirty coal plants and carefully regulating their toxic waste.
But that won't be easy. While environmental advocates have been pressing hard for enforceable federal standards governing disposal of coal ash waste in the wake of last December's Kingston disaster, some in Washington are working to protect the dirty and dangerous status quo -- despite new research suggesting that regulations to require safer storage of coal ash waste will likely produce far more benefits than costs.
This week, for example, congressional allies of electric utilities have been circulating "Dear Colleague" letters that oppose regulating coal ash as hazardous waste, instead calling only for federal "guidelines" for coal ash disposal rather than enforceable standards. The letters are based on the notion disproved by the Kingston spill that the current patchwork of state regulations is adequate for protecting the environment and public health.
Leading the effort to gather signatories are Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Rep. Tim Holden (D-Pa.). Among the lawmakers from the South who have signed the letter opposing tough federal standards so far are Reps. Marion Berry (D-Ark.), Travis Childers (D-Miss.), John Fleming (R-La.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), Jerry Jim Moran (D-Va.), Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), Mike Ross (D-Ark.) and Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.).
In response, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project -- which has taken a lead role in pressing for better regulation of coal ash -- is urging concerned citizens to call their representatives in Congress and ask them not to sign the letter. Instead, says EIP, lawmakers should support consistent and enforceable regulations of arsenic-contaminated coal ash waste to better protect their constituents' health.
By Sue Sturgis on June 10, 2009 11:00 AM
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/06/investigation-do-dirty-coal-plants-make-us-more-vulnerable-to-swine-flu.html
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Appalachia and Colombia: The People Behind the Coal
Comment: Mining is mining, uranium and coal mining ruins people lives, land and air with the Federal and State gov't approving the mining!Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts. The most recent books she has written are Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class. (Duke University Press, 2008) and They Take Our Jobs! And Twenty Other Myths about Immigration. (Beacon Press, 2007). She has also recently co-edited The People Behind Colombian Coal: Mining, Multinationals and Human Rights/Bajo el manto del carbón: Pueblos y multinacionales en las minas del Cerrejón, Colombia (Casa Editorial Pisando Callos, 2007) and The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2003).
Chomsky is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector. She just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation (May 28 – June 6) that traveled to two regions devastated by coal mining: the state of Kentucky and to northern Colombia. The Kentucky segment was sponsored by Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC), where participants witnessed the impact of Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on local communities. In Colombia the delegation met with human rights activists, trade unionists, members of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, and others affected by coal production in Colombia.
Hans Bennett: Having just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation’s trip to Kentucky and Colombia, can you please tell us about your visit to Kentucky, and about the group ‘Kentuckians For The Commonwealth’ (KFTC)?
Aviva Chomsky: KFTC is a community organization working on social justice issues, one of them being local resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining that is destroying lands and communities in Appalachia. I’ve been working with them since last summer, when 4 people from that organization came with us on our delegation to the Colombian coal region. The connections they made between the two regions were amazing. In both, big companies run roughshod over some of the poorest and most marginalized people. People are losing their land, their water, their right to clean air, and their homes to the coal mines. The Kentuckians felt a real link with the Colombian communities, that they were part of the same struggle. Last fall, we worked with KFTC to organize a tour for two Colombian coal union leaders. They spent a week in Kentucky, seeing for themselves the results of mountaintop removal, and speaking to different audiences there. The Colombians were also incredibly moved by the destruction of land and lives in Kentucky. They couldn’t believe that this was happening in the First World. We decided we’d really like to organize a delegation that would visit both regions—and that’s what we did this summer. We spent 3 days in the Kentucky coal region, and then went to Colombia. We also had 5 people from Appalachia, all involved in different aspects of the movement against mountaintop removal, with us on the Colombian part of the delegation.
HB: What did members of the group share with the delegation?
AC: One thing that really struck me was the ways that people in both the Colombian and the Kentuckian coal regions talked about the land. I’m from the city, and have lived a pretty cosmopolitan life. For people in eastern Kentucky, like those in northern Colombia, the land is tied to the essence of their identity. People have generations-long ties to the land, they farm the land, they feel personally connected to the mountains, to the rivers, to the farms. Also, in both regions, people are aware that they are seen as expendable, not only by the coal companies, but by the centers of power. Both regions suffer from a lack of state services, and have been really politically marginalized. But also in both regions, there is a really powerful sense of collective identity that I think has contributed to the strength of the social struggles there.
In one interview a few years ago, a Colombian indigenous leader explained to us that for his people, the earth was “la madre tierra,” mother earth. “It hurts us to see the earth damaged,” he said, pointing to the gaping hole of the mine. People in eastern Kentucky talked the same way about their mountains.
HB: What has been the impact of the coal mining industry, Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on the local communities?
AC: The impact has been devastating. I’ve never been anywhere else in the United States where you can’t drink the water! But the tap water smells so sulfurous that I was even wondering if it was safe to shower in. People in the region complain of the same kinds of illnesses and reactions that we’ve seen in Colombia—respiratory ailments, rashes and skin diseases, eye diseases—reactions to coal particles in the air and in the water. Rivers that used to run crystal clear have turned into toxic sludge. People’s homes are being surrounded by the various impacts. A mountainous region is being flattened. A way of life and a people are being forced into extinction.
After visiting Kentucky, the Colombian union leaders told us they were shocked by how “irrational” the mining was there. I didn’t really understand what they meant until I saw it myself. In Colombia, there are huge 7-foot seams of coal. The mines there are giant operations that have opened up many-mile long areas. In Kentucky, whole mountains are being felled for little seams that are only a few inches wide! And believe it or not, there seem to be more serious reclamation efforts going on in Colombia than in Kentucky.
HB: After visiting Kentucky, the delegation flew to Colombia, which your flyer explains is “the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere, and also the country with the highest levels of official and paramilitary violence, including forced displacement, killings of journalists, trade unionists, and human rights activists.” The flyer asserts that “foreign corporations are some of the major beneficiaries of this situation.” How do the corporations benefit from this? How does US financial and diplomatic support for the Colombian government influence the situation?
AC: Colombia is the poster child for neoliberalism in Latin America. Since the 1970s the United States—and the international financial institutions that it plays a leading role in, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—have been pushing a development model on Latin America that calls, essentially, for governments to act in the interests of multinational capital. Governments are supposed to invite in foreign investment, and provide it with low taxes, low wages, and low regulation. They are supposed to cut back on social spending, and offer state enterprises up to the private sector. And, they’re supposed to quash any popular protest against these policies, using force if necessary. These policies have gone by names such as structural adjustment, the Washington Consensus, the Chicago Boys prescriptions (referring to the role of Milton Friedman and other economists from the University of Chicago), or neoliberalism. The United States has played a key role in the implementation of these policies—from working for the overthrow of elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and their implementation there, to Plan Colombia today, by which the United States provides military and economic aid that goes directly to implementing this economic model and crushing protest.
Union leaders have been some of the most visible victims. In the U.S.-owned Drummond mine in northern Colombia, three union leaders were assassinated in 2001. The company is currently facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly paying a paramilitary force to carry out the murders. Another U.S. company, Chiquita Brands, admitted to making payments for years to the paramilitaries. They claimed that they made the payments to protect their workers, but banana workers—and especially union activists—were the main victims among the hundreds murdered by paramilitaries during the 1990s and early 2000s.
HB: Before we talk about the delegation’s visit to Colombia this month, I’d like to first refer back to our 2007 interview in Z Magazine titled Colombia Solidarity Work, and ask you to please give an update about what has been going on since then, during this two year period since then.
AC: When we visited the Cerrejón mine in the summer and late fall of 2006, the company had taken the stance that it would not recognize or negotiate with the displaced Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco. It also insisted that community issues and union issues be kept completely separate. The union had included a demand about the rights of the communities in its 2006 bargaining proposal, and the company absolutely refused to include this in the contract—although they did agree to a side letter inviting the union to participate in the company’s social programs.
In the summer of 2007, Cerrejón announced that it was forming a Social Review Panel to evaluate its relations with the communities and provide recommendations. The Panel concluded that the displacement of Tabaco was a festering wound, and that the company simply had to rectify this if it wanted to develop any kind of working relationship with the local communities. The company agreed, finally, to engage in collective negotiations with former Tabaco residents, aimed at a resettlement of the community. This was a struggle that had been going on for ten years! In December of 2008, the company signed an agreement with the community defining the terms of the relocation and for compensation for the people who had been displaced. This was a huge victory.
Still, in some ways we were struck with how much has not changed. Although the agreement was signed with Tabaco, the relocation process has not yet begun—so people are still displaced. In the other communities we work with, the company has been engaging in collective negotiations for relocation—but they are still desperately poor, landless, and living in the shadows of the world’s largest open-pit coal mine.
In the Cesar Department, where the U.S.-owned Drummond mine operates, things are even worse. Union leaders there live in daily fear for their safety and lives. We had hoped to return to one community that we visited last summer, Mechoacán—but it had been wiped off the map. We met with the communities of Boquerón, El Hatillo, and Plan Bonito, that are slowly being strangled by the mine. Drummond, unlike Cerrejón, still refuses to recognize any right to collective relocation for these communities, and is simply trying to starve people out in hopes that they will leave.
HB: Okay, now let’s talk about your recent visit to Colombia. Who did you meet with and what did they talk about? What were the key issues addressed?
AC: The main issues we’ve been working on, with our partners in Colombia, are labor rights and community rights, in the areas where the multinational coal mines operate. The coal region in Colombia is in the north, close to the Caribbean coast, in the Cesar and La Guajira Departments. The people who have lived there for decades, in some cases centuries, are mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous peasants who have survived by farming, hunting, fishing, and day labor on ranches owned by large landholders in the area.
Multinational mining came to La Guajira in the 1980s, to Cesar in the 1990s. These mines are almost unbelievably gigantic operations—Cerrejón claims to be the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and Drummond is currently undergoing expansion that it says will make it overtake even Cerrejón’s size. Each one employs thousands of workers, some directly, and some through subcontractors.
The main people we spent time with there were the unions at the two mines—including the Injured Workers Association at the Drummond mine—and the communities that have been displaced, or are in the process of displacement. Everyone we met with there seemed to share the belief that getting their stories out to the U.S. public was essential to protecting their lives and their livelihoods. Drummond is a U.S. company, and much of the coal produced by both mines is imported by U.S. power plants. People in Colombia are also acutely aware at the huge influence that the United States has on their country’s policies. Mostly, they want us to tell their stories here in the United States, so that people here will pressure Drummond, the companies that buy the coal, and the U.S. government, to make sure that workers and communities in the coal region have the same rights that we here enjoy—the right to personal safety, the right to clean water, to education, to safe working conditions, to form unions, to be able to provide for their children, to not live in fear of their government or of the companies that operate in their midst.
HB: How does the union organizing in Colombia compare to the organizing in Kentucky, and the US in general?
AC: We were shocked to learn that there are no unionized mines left in eastern Kentucky. Not even in Harlan County. Yet despite a high level of disillusionment with the United Mineworkers among many of the people we met with in Kentucky—because of its weak or non-existent critique of surface mining, and because of the capitulations it has made to industry that people believe are responsible for its demise in the region—people there have an incredibly high level of union consciousness. Nearly everybody we met talked to us about how their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers, had fought and in some cases shed blood, to bring in the union.
Unions in Colombia—especially those in the coal mines—are extremely militant, and have a strong current of leftist analysis and environmental consciousness that are pretty uncommon among unions in the U.S. today. The union leaders we met with talk about foreign mining companies raping the land and the people, looting their country’s natural resources, lining the pockets of shareholders with coal produced with the blood and the land of Colombians.
In both the U.S. and Colombia, union density has been falling. In Colombia, the main cause has been violence against unions; in the U.S., deindustrialization has played a big role. The AFL-CIO has a checkered history in Colombia, as it does in the rest of Latin America. Historically, the federation has been closely linked to U.S. foreign policy goals through the American Institute for Free Labor Development or AIFLD. I think the AFL-CIO is trying to overcome this past, and the suspicion it has generated in Latin America. Yet it is also struggling with internal conflicts, and now the accelerating economic crisis, and I think it has not made as much progress as it could in the area of trying to develop real international solidarity.
HB: How does the coal mining trade fit into the current global energy crisis and fossil fuels’ effects on the environment, including global warming?
AC: We had an interesting conversation about this during one of our meetings in Colombia. One of our delegates works with the Move America Beyond Coal campaign, and she asked Jairo Quiroz, the president of the Sintracarbón union that represents workers in the Cerrejón coal mine, more or less the same question: don’t we just have to stop mining and burning coal altogether, given its environmental impact? Jairo’s response really challenged all of us, I think. “There is no clean source of energy,” he said. “You in the United States are the ones who use most of the world’s energy resources. What do you propose to use, if we stop mining coal? Petroleum and natural gas are no better for the environment than coal is, and both contribute to global climate change. Nuclear energy also requires mining, and creates waste products even more dangerous than coal’s. Solar energy and wind energy are only viable where those resources are sufficiently available, and they also require production, transmission and storage techniques and equipment that depend on mining (for turbines, batteries, solar panels, etc.) and the use of toxins. So-called biofuels are the worst of all, because they expand the agro-industrial model which has profound environmental effects—from deforestation to desertification to overuse of pesticides and fertilizers—and it also disrupts the whole food chain by channeling agricultural land to the production of fuel instead of food.” Basically, his point was that rather than pointing the finger at coal, we needed to think about the underlying causes of environmental destruction—like our overuse of energy. “As long as you want to keep using that much energy,” he said, “we’re going to keep mining coal.”
There’s always a challenge, in a campaign for social and political change, to choose a target that’s narrow enough that you can effectively organize around it, but making sure that you don’t get distracted from the larger goals by the narrow target. In Salem, we have a coal-fired power plant. Some people argue, from an environmental perspective, that we should shut down the plant. But what are the larger implications of that argument? Unless we are planning to stop using electricity altogether, it just means that we’ll be getting it from another plant somewhere else. It can turn into a kind of NIMBY-ism [i.e., “not in my back yard”]—we don’t want to have to see the impact of our standard of living, we want to displace it onto somebody else. That’s how our system works—and that’s how we’re encouraged to think. We need to think more profoundly about the causes of global warming and environmental destruction if we really want to address them.
This may seem only peripherally related, but one of the communities we visited, in the Cesar Department, was located right next to the trash dump for the city of La Loma. Trash is blowing around, and it smells awful. Also, many of the communities we work with have no running water—thus no real latrines. These issues made me think about the multiplications of our privileges in the First World. We don’t have to see where our energy comes from, and we don’t have to see where our waste goes—we just live in this bubble of plenty and our waste is invisibly whisked away—all of which encourage us to continue abusing and wasting the earth’s resources!
HB: How has the recent election of several leftist and ‘left of center’ Presidents throughout Latin America (most recently in El Salvador) changed US power and influence? How do you think the US is reacting to this? What role with Colombia play in US strategy given that it is one of the last remaining right-wing governments?
AC: The United States is clearly counting on Colombia to play a major role in maintaining and promoting what they call “U.S. interests”—which generally means the interests of U.S. corporations—in Latin America. Ecuador’s new government recently announced that it is not renewing the U.S. lease on its military base in Manta, Ecuador. So among other things, it looks like Colombia will be the site of the new base that will replace Manta.
There are really two things that a leftist government in Latin American needs to accomplish—neither one of them simple. One is to redistribute their countries’ resources internally, to address the region’s devastating social and economic inequalities. The other is to reformulate Latin America’s relationship with the rest of the world, to break out of the pattern established after 1492, in which Latin America provides cheap labor, and cheap resources, for the benefit of Europe and later the United States. These are monumental problems, and the United States government has shown itself pretty committed to keeping the status quo, even if doing so requires violence, murder, invasions, or coups.
Many of the people I spoke with on this trip seemed to feel a lot of hope that we’re entering a new era, in which the United States will choose—or be forced—to accept major structural changes in Latin America. Despite Obama’s diplomatic language, he’s already shown that he’s quite ready to use military methods to further what the U.S. defines as its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But other factors—the swing to the left in Latin America, the work towards alternative regional economic integration, the economic crisis, and the growing global awareness of the environmental crisis and the planet’s limited resources—could contribute to some real changes.
HB: How can readers best help support the current work of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, Witness for Peace, and those in Colombia who you recently visited?
AC: We’re hoping to bring one or two community leaders from the Colombian coal region to the U.S. on speaking tours this fall. We are also planning another delegation for next summer. And, we do occasional “urgent action” requests in support of the work our Colombian partners are doing. You can join the Witness for Peace or NSCSC e-lists to get updated information about all of these activities, or write to us directly at nscolombia@comcast.net if you want to get more involved in the planning.
Hans Bennett is an independent multimedia journalist, whose website is www.insubordination.blogspot.com.
Friday, June 12, 2009
From the Archives: A School in Coal’s Shadow
Comment: Good story, just replace the coal with uranium. The government will protect us with their lose standards, so demand our county to protect us against uranium mining and milling!By Kari Lydersen, January 2007 issue
Even though he has told this story many times recently, Ed Wiley still struggles to hold back tears as he talks.
Wiley, forty-seven, describes his years working for a contractor for Massey Energy, which builds and maintains sludge impoundments—reservoirs that hold the gooey black waste from cleaning coal—here in West Virginia, the heart of coal country. Coal provides just about the only decent-paying jobs in Appalachia, and Wiley’s work helped him build his family’s beautiful cabin with big windows looking out on a creek meandering by outside.
“I was making $13.50 an hour, and I had a medical card,” says Wiley. “I’d never made that much before. That had me blinded. I never thought about the environment. I never thought about nothing.”
But then two and a half years ago, his granddaughter, Kayla, called him three days in a row to have him pick her up early from nearby Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, West Virginia. She was complaining of coughing and severe headaches. On the third day, he started leafing through the register parents sign when they pick up sick kids. There seemed to be an unusually high number: 15 to 20 out of about 270 students were leaving sick each day.
Kayla had her own diagnosis: the coal processing plant and sludge impoundment operated by subsidiaries of Massey Energy that loom right above the school.
“I looked over at Possum”—his nickname for Kayla—“and she had a weird bluish-purplish look,” says Wiley, his face twisted with emotion. “When she looked back at me she had tears running down her face and she said, ‘Gramps, that coal mine is making us kids sick.’ Those tears are what woke me up. I realized I was setting things up that could possibly kill my granddaughter and hundreds of other kids.”
Just a few hundred yards from the school’s playground, directly adjacent to school property, sits a silo full of coal and the Goals Coal processing plant, where coal is washed and pulverized. Large conveyor beltlines snake through the surrounding hills bringing coal to the plant. Above the processing plant is a 385-foot-tall earthen dam with a steep, terraced face, holding back the sludge impoundment. Wiley worked on this, the Shumate dam, and similar structures all over West Virginia. The Shumate dam can hold up to 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge, a mix of coal byproducts and more than sixty chemicals used to clean coal. Toxic heavy metals including arsenic, mercury, uranium, manganese, cadmium, and nickel, among other things, are found in coal sludge.
“I’ve worked on just about every Massey site,” said Wiley. “I’ve wallered in this slurry, laid in it, worked in it all day. They don’t teach you about all the chemicals in there.”
(Calls to Massey Energy for this story were not returned.)
If the impoundment above Marsh Fork Elementary were to fail, according to a report by Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) inspector Jim Elkins, the more than 200 elementary students and other local residents would be in grave danger.
“Fatalities would be expected to occur,” says an MSHA report by Elkins.
“We’re expendable,” says Maria Gunnoe, an outspoken area resident who says her well water supply was poisoned by nearby mining. “[The failure of the Shumate dam] is a catastrophic event that will happen, and no one will do anything to stop it from happening, and the people who are trying are being ridiculed and threatened.”
More than 150 of these sludge impoundments, also called slurry ponds, dot the mountains of West Virginia. From the air, they look like black or unnaturally green ponds nestled on blasted off mountaintops or filled-in valleys.
In October 2000, a Massey subsidiary’s impoundment failed in Martin County, Kentucky, and released more than 200 million gallons of coal slurry. Wiley worked on the cleanup. In an infamous 1972 disaster, a sludge deluge resulting from an impoundment failure in Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, killed 125 people and destroyed thousands of homes.
The Shumate dam already has a troubled history. The processing plant and impoundment were built in the 1980s, long after the school, which was originally constructed in the 1930s. In the 1990s, Massey Energy, one of the country’s largest coal companies, purchased the facility from Peabody Energy, another industry giant. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 prohibits coal facilities within 300 feet of a school, but since permits for the Sundial operation were pending before the act passed, it was grandfathered in.
In November 1998, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined the company for piling coal refuse in layers up to ten feet thick, when they are supposed to be only a foot thick, as journalists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman noted. Larger layers are harder to compact and thus present a greater risk of collapse down the line. A few months later, Elkins again cited the dam for refuse layers five to ten feet thick, noting that “it is reasonably likely an accident would occur” if changes weren’t made. Those citations resulted in fines of only $680.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the impoundment at least seventeen other times in the past decade, for allowing erosion gullies to form and for using wood waste to build up the dam, noted Mokhiber and Weissman. Once the wood rots, it creates spaces that weaken the dam.
But an August 19, 2005, report from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection states that after inspections by several state and federal agencies, the Shumate impoundment was found to be constructed and maintained in compliance with federal and state laws.
A Massey subsidiary operates a 1,849-acre strip mine in the hills just above the impoundment. Wiley says that he can often feel his house shaking from blasting in the strip mine.
“If my house is shaking, what is it doing to that unstable dam?” he asks.
Meanwhile, the daily health problems mount. In May 2005, the local grassroots group Coal River Mountain Watch did a survey of sixty households with children attending the school and found that 91 percent of the children had respiratory problems such as asthma or chronic bronchitis and 81 percent reported feeling sick at school with headaches, nausea, or other ailments.
Knowing the coal operations won’t be moved or curtailed any time soon, some residents, including Wiley, have been begging the state to build them a new elementary school in the community. But a spokesperson for the state Department of Education said there are no current plans to close the elementary school or build another one.
After a series of protests and rallies outside the coal prep plant, members of Coal River Mountain Watch met with West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin on June 22, 2005, to voice their concerns about the school. They said he promised to look into the matter and get back to them within several days. But instead of hearing back from him, a week later they found out the state government had approved plans for a second coal silo next to the school. (Last summer, the state department of environmental protection denied the permit for the second silo since it would be within 300 feet of the school. The coal prep plant continues to operate.)
“It’s my feeling that the state government can’t acknowledge the dangers of having a prep plant so close to an elementary school because they would be acknowledging the bigger issue that coal extraction and processing are threatening communities’ health overall,” says Hillary Hosta, an organizer for Coal River Mountain Watch. “There is so much coal extraction and processing so closely entwined in the area, that by acknowledging problems at Marsh Fork Elementary they’d be opening a much bigger can of worms.”
On July 5, 2005, an angry Ed Wiley drove about an hour to the state capitol and camped out on the steps until Manchin met with him and promised a thorough investigation of residents’ concerns.
Two days later, state inspectors visited the school to do air quality tests. A July 11, 2005, report from the West Virginia Department of Education says that air quality and air filters in the school met government standards, and no serious problems were found.
“We went in and did the air quality tests we do in all the schools in the state, and we did not get any information that would tell us to close the school for health reasons,” says education department spokesperson Liza Cordeiro.
But according to Stephen Lester, science director of the Virginia-based Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, the air quality tests done at Marsh Fork were “extremely limited” and “provide meaningless information” since they did not test specifically for heavy metals like nickel, lead, arsenic, and mercury found in coal dust. Rather, they conducted standard state tests for mold, air flow, and air filter upkeep. Lester said the Department of Education’s tests “fail to address the primary concern raised by parents” about whether their children are endangered by coal dust and chemical emissions from the processing plant.
A letter from the governor’s office on September 30, 2005, declared the multi-agency investigation into Marsh Fork completed. “The extensive investigation revealed no evidence of health risks or regulatory noncompliance,” the letter said.
But in response to pressure, the Raleigh County schools superintendent asked the EPA to conduct tests for coal dust. Cordeiro said they are still awaiting the results, though she said “initial reports do not indicate a problem.”
Wiley says, “They always say it meets federal standards, but so does Drano. That doesn’t mean you let your kids inhale it.”
Though the state still maintains it has no plans to build another elementary school, Wiley has founded an organization called Pennies of Promise to try to raise enough money for it, one penny at a time. The superintendent has said a new school would cost about $5 million. Last spring, the group collected about $460 worth of pennies from young students in the Bronx who heard about their struggle. In May, the group delivered these, in addition to pennies from Kayla’s piggy bank, to Governor Manchin in the lobby of the state capitol.
In September, Wiley walked nearly 500 miles from Charleston, West Virginia, to Washington, D.C. Along the way, he stuffed fliers in mailboxes and walked into barbershops and cafés to talk about the issue. When he arrived, Wiley and New Jersey Representative Frank Pallone held a press conference, along with Lois Gibbs (the hero of Love Canal) and other environmentalists. Wiley also met with West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who promised to help relocate Marsh Fork elementary students.
“If I have to, I’ll weld two wheelbarrows together like a piggy bank and wheel it around town asking for pennies and dimes to pay for the new school,” he says. “Those kids can’t stand up and tell the teacher, ‘I’m going home. I don’t like this.’ So we need to stand up for them.”
Kari Lydersen is a staff writer at the Washington Post Midwest bureau and a youth journalism instructor in Chicago. Her website is www.karilydersen.com.
http://www.progressive.org/lyderson0107.html
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Massey slurry pollution trial now set for October
Comment: The Corporations will ruin our Mother Earth for money!! They must be stop! We are tired of the greed of Electrical companies ruining our mountains, dumping the coal waste products in our streams, now Virginia wants to ruin our Piedmont, Mountains Valleys with future uranium mining and milling!!! Demand that Corporate Virginia to stop Mt Top Removal and Ban Uranium mining now!! Associated Press - June 10, 2009 4:55 AM ET
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) - After being delayed by southern West Virginia flooding, a pollution lawsuit against a Massey Energy subsidiary is now set for trial Oct. 20.
Hundreds of current and former residents of several Mingo County towns are suing Rawl Sales & Processing for injecting coal slurry into old underground mines between 1978 and 1987.
They say slurry seeped into the aquifer, poisoning wells and causing health problems.
Virginia-based Massey has denied the allegations and said the disposal was legal.
West Virginia regulators allowed underground injection for decades but said last month they can't answer many questions about safety and will stop permitting new sites.
Plaintiffs' attorney Kevin Thompson says it's unclear how that might affect the case.
http://www.wric.com/global/story.asp?s=10507427
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
15 people arrested for protesting Virginia Congressman Boucher’s efforts to gut climate bill
Rep. Boucher’s Handouts to Coal Lobby Hurt Working Families15 people arrested for protesting Virginia Congressman Boucher’s efforts to gut climate bill
WASHINGTON, May 21, 2009-Fifteen concerned citizens were arrested today for peacefully blocking the entrance to Virginia Congressman Rick Boucher’s office protesting his efforts to gut strong climate legislation at the expense of American families. Congressman Boucher has driven efforts in Congress to give away billions of dollars worth of free permits directly to coal, oil and other dirty fossil fuel companies under a cap and trade bill.
“The problem is Rick Boucher, the victims are American families, and the solution, as proposed by President Obama during his campaign, is a simple and fair polluter-pays cap that solves the climate crisis while rebating consumers,” said Mike Tidwell, Executive Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, who was among those arrested today.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) co-authored the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which regulates greenhouse gases. The Energy and Commerce Committee released the 946-page bill last Friday and has spent this week marking it up. Congressman Boucher, who received $176,000 from the coal industry during his most recent re-election campaign, has led efforts to weaken the bill in committee.
Instead of making polluters pay for the permits to dump carbon into the atmosphere, an approach President Obama supported during his campaign, Rep. Boucher negotiated a deal where 35 percent of the allowances will be given away directly to utilities, also called local distribution companies. Allowances given to these companies would be worth $20.8 billion a year starting in 2012.
In April, the Environmental Protection Agency conducted an analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill (in discussion form) and found that giving free allocations to utilities under a cap and trade program would raise the total cost of the program and hurt poor Americans the most.
“Returning the allowance value to consumers of electricity via local distribution companies… makes the cap-and-trade policy more costly overall,” the EPA concluded in its analysis. “Freely distributed allowances to firms tends to be very regressive. Higher income households may actually gain at the expense of lower income households under this policy.”
More than fifty people gathered outside Congressman Boucher’s office at noon today to highlight how Boucher’s handouts to the coal industry will hurt working families and diminish efforts to fight global warming. They said they hoped their efforts would send a message to other members of Congress that now is the time for bold, urgent action to solve global warming and that they will be held accountable for their stance on the bill.
Virginia Tech student Joshua Deutschmann traveled to Capitol Hill to join the protest.
“As a student and a voter in Southwest Virginia, I was deeply disappointed by Representative Boucher’s response to the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” he said. “It appears he has played a key part in dismantling the core of the bill, emphasizing dirty coal instead of clean renewable technology and jobs in Southwest Virginia.”
Protesters compared the polluter giveaways to the government’s recent bailout of Wall Street and American Insurance Group. Except, unlike Wall Street, utility companies are not failing. Last year alone, America’s 48 largest utilities earned profits of $28 billion. Dominion Resources, a major campaign contributor to Congressman Boucher, made a whopping $1.8 billion last year.
Today’s protest was endorsed by Southern Appalachian Mountain Steward, a conversation group based in Wise County, Virginia. Participants stood outside the doorway holding statements of support sent in by southwest Virginians.
“I’ve been a supporter of yours since your first race, but it’s time to put the health of the planet ahead of short-term profits,” read a statement from Chris Prokosch of Floyd, Virginia. “The coal industry will have to clean up sooner or later — later may be too late for all of us.”
Click here to view article on CCAN website.
http://ecoclub.umwblogs.org/2009/05/25/543/
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Global Warming Bill Passes
May 22, 2009Global warming bill passes key committee -- after arrests of anti-coal protesters
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has approved a mammoth bill on climate change that, as the Washington Post notes, represents "the most dramatic extension of government's regulatory powers into the workings of the economy since the early days of the New Deal."
"I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that this is a turning point, in the history of the United States and [its] energy sources," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who co-sponsored the bill with Ed Markey, D-Mass. "This is a day we've waited a long time on."
The bill "would be the first in the U.S. to establish a federal cap-and- trade system for cutting emissions tied to climate change," notes Bloomberg. "Government-issued pollution permits would be distributed to utilities, manufacturers and refiners, which could buy and sell them. The measure also would require expanded wind and solar power production."
But to get the bill passed, House Democratic leaders weakened some provisions in the bill -- for instance, giving away most of the pollution credits rather than auctioning them off, as President Obama had called for, and requiring utilities to buy at least 12% of their electricity from renewable sources, rather than 25 % as the bill orginally required.
Another provision in the bill so angered some environmental activists that they got arrested for protesting it, notes the Huffington Post:
"Capitol police arrested 15 demonstrators from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network... who were blocking the office door of Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) in protest of his support for the coal industry. Rep. Boucher has been successful at inserting into the Waxman-Markey bill billions in incentives for coal, which plays a large role in the region of Virginia that he represents."
Republicans contend the plan would hurt U.S. consumers while having only a negligible impact on the planet’s warming, according to Bloomberg. A recent EPA analysis says the bill "would drive the clean energy transformation of the U.S. economy" but the overall impact would be too small to significantly dampen economic growth, reports the Post.
Some of the bill's biggest critics may wind up being Waxman and Markey's fellow Democrats. The New York Times quotes one longtime Democratic congressman from Mississippi, Gene Taylor, as saying, "I think of the whole cap-and-trade idea as a Ponzi scheme ... If the vote was today, I'd vote 'no.'"
--Craig Pittman
http://blogs.tampabay.com/energy/2009/05/global-warming-bill-passes-key-committee-after-arrests-of-anticoal-protesters.html
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Russian Company Purchases WV Mining Company
Comment: Do what?CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)
Posted: 7:45 AM May 9, 2009
Last Updated: 5:56 PM May 8, 2009
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A A A Russian mining and metals company Mechel OAO says it has completed the acquisition of Appalachian coal producer Bluestone Industries and several associated companies.
Moscow-based Mechel said Friday the deal includes Dynamic Energy, JCJ Coal Group and several subsidiaries.
Mechel announced in April it had agreed to buy the companies for $436 million cash, 83.3 million preferred shares of stock, and the assumption of $132 million in debt.
Beckley-based Bluestone Industries is the parent of Bluestone Coal. It primarily produces coking coal used by steelmakers to fire blast furnaces.
Friday's announcement comes a day after Bluestone's former owner announced the purchase of The Greenbrier, an internationally known resort in West Virginia, from CSX Corp.
http://www.whsv.com/home/headlines/44612842.html
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Time running out for surface mining
May 1, 2009 · West Virginians have been mining coal for 120 years. There's still a lot left--but it might not be accessible through surface mining.Last month there was a story about the controversy over mountaintop removal in the State Journal, where Congressman Nick Rahall said that the state’s most productive coal seams likely will be exhausted in 20 years.
It turns out, the answer depends on whether you’re talking about underground mines, or surface mines.
According to 2007 estimates from the Energy Information Administration, there are about 18 billion tons of recoverable reserves in West Virginia. That’s a lot, especially considering in 1997—the state’s record production year—about 182 million tons of coal were mined.
But the same statistics paint a dire picture for the state’s surface mining. Surface mine production has been increasing, but the amount of coal that can be reached by that method is small and getting smaller.
West Virginia has always produced more coal by underground methods than by surface mining, but over the years, the amount of surface-mined coal is steadily rising, while underground coal production is steadily falling.
In 1994, underground mines produced more than 61 million more tons of coal than surface mines did. By 2007, there the difference between the two had narrowed to about 16 million tons (see attached PDF).
So operators are mining almost as much coal from surface mines as underground mines in West Virginia -- but it turns out there’s relatively little coal that can be mined that way.
According to the Energy Information Administration, there are a bit more than 2 billion tons of coal reserves that you can recover from surface mining. There are 15 billion in underground mining.
That same government data shows that about 50 million tons of coal is being surface mined each year in West Virginia. Those numbers alone suggest there are about 43 years of surface mining left in West Virginia, compared to 165 years of recoverable reserves through underground mining.
There are many assumptions in that calculation however, most of which may not prove to be true. This assumes that operators recover the coal at the same rate every year as we have in recent years.
Fred Freme is a coal industry statistician with the Energy Information Administration. He says there are a variety of factors that actually change the economically recoverable reserves.
“Not only the changes in technology, the changes in the coal prices, because as the price increases it’s more economical to mine the center seams,” he said.
So these numbers assume that we don’t make any huge technological breakthroughs in coal mining, which would allow us to get at smaller coal seams that aren’t recoverable right now.
There are coal resources in the mountains of West Virginia, but only a percentage of those are available for development. If all of the coal in West Virginia is a pie, a large slice of the pie is coal that operators can’t get to. Some of that coal is already gone—it’s been mined in the past. Sometimes land restrictions make it impossible to get the coal—you can’t mine under a town or a state park, for example.
Another section of the pie is recoverable coal reserves. This is all the coal that is potentially mine-able in the future, and what the previous statistics are based on.
But coal mining is a business and company owners need to ensure that their mines turn a profit. The smallest slice of the coal pie is the economically recoverable coal reserves, and that slice represents the coal that is in the ground, can be mined, and will make a mining company money.
It all depends on the price and demand of coal. If the price is high, companies will be willing to move more rock to get to less coal.
“You’ve also got the fact that excluding recessionary years, if you want to call them that, consumption has constantly been increasing every year,” Freme said. “So to take into account the ‘number of years’ you’re going to have to have some kind of assumption as to the annual increase in consumption of coal.”
If the demand for coal goes down –because of federal regulations or because of renewable energy developments – then there will be more years of surface mining left. But the current trend has been to depend more and more on production from surface mines.
Between 2004 and 2007, according to EIA statistics, the mining industry only managed to deplete the state’s underground mine reserves by less than 2%. During the same time period, the surface mine reserves were diminished by more than 6%.
“I think if you talked to different representatives of the industry in West Virginia or the major players, there are only a limited number of true mountaintop removal mining sites left in West Virginia,” said John Morgan, a coal consultant and the president of Morgan Worldwide.
“And by that I mean 2000-acre size mines, which is removing all the coal seams from outcrop to outcrop. There just aren’t that many of those sites left.”
In recent years, the overburden has also gotten larger, which means that mountaintop removal mines are disturbing ever-larger areas to get at the same amount of coal.
“I think we have to make decisions based on the most efficient type of mining which we want to utilize,” Morgan said. “And because the resources are becoming depleted—that’s a function of any mining operation, you’re depleting a natural resource—that you have to make sure those impacts are minimized and we’re getting the most out of the disturbance.
“So we need to be looking at the mines that are giving the largest amount of coal for the area we’re disturbing and the mines that are creating the least impacts to offsite, such as stream impacts or impacts to communities, so those have to be part of the equation.”
In a way, Morgan says it could be good news for workers in West Virginia.
“Because the type of deposit which is suitable for large surface mining equipment at low ratio is gone or will be gone, the same way that some of the more accessible underground mines which are thicker and closer to the surface will probably be depleted,” he said.
“So the remaining reserves are going to be less productively mined. Therefore the tons per manshift will be decreasing. You’re going to have more people working in the mining industry to get the same amount of coal.”
No, but Morgan stressed that we need to concentrate on training younger workers to work in underground mines, because that’s where the jobs will be.
“Fundamentally there’s going to be a mining industry in West Virginia for a significant period of time,” he said.
“Most of it is going to be underground and I think we need to start thinking about technology and how do we recover those underground reserves, particularly if we’re going to have a workforce that doesn’t necessarily want to work underground and if we don’t educate future employees as to the benefits of the mining industry, it’s going to face a double challenge: one of more difficult reserves and second, of a workforce that isn’t as motivated to work in those mines.”
Representatives from the West Virginia Coal Association were unavailable for comment.
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