Mountain State Matters

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Lenny Kohm, the campaign director for Appalachian Voices. Appalachian Voices is a non-profit with several offices throughout Appalachia; the organization’s goal is to bring people together to solve the region’s environmental problems. Recently, the group has been spending most of its time on issues involving clean air and mountaintop removal.

You can click on the media player to listen to the interview in its entirety (it’s five minutes long) or read the transcript of the interview, posted below.

Download Lenny Kohm Interview

Transcript

Erica Peterson: I’m on the phone with Lenny Kohm, the campaign director for Appalachian Voices. Thanks for talking with me, Lenny. So, tell me about your campaigns that specifically affect West Virginia.

Lenny Kohm: Well, there’s two. Obviously the most important one that we work on that affects West Virginia is trying to stop mountaintop removal and one of the vehicles we’re using is the Clean Water Protection Act, which is a bill in the House of Representatives that would basically make using the rubble from mountaintop removal explosions as valley fill.

EP: It would make that illegal?

LK: Well, yeah. It would make it illegal to put that waste into a stream. The way it is now, the current administration defined the waste from mountaintop removal as fill, which is legal to put in a body of water. But this legislation would once and for all make the definition of that rubble as waste and according to the Clean Water Act, you can’t put waste in any body of water in the United States.

EP: And what kind of opposition are you facing from coal companies on that legislation?

LK: I think we’ve gotten their attention. I really haven’t seen anything about the legislation from the coal companies yet. But certainly the coal industry is aware that they’re under the gun and I imagine that we’ll start seeing some push-back pretty quickly on the Clean Water Protection Act, H.R. 2169. I imagine, depending on how the election comes out, the way it looks like it’s going to come out, they’ll be pushing back pretty hard.

EP: Does Appalachian Voices do any work towards advocating alternative forms of energy?

LK: Yeah. You know, we work on clean air. Air is one of our programs, and one of the things we’re doing in that program is trying to stop coal-fired power plants from being built in the region. As part of that, we’ve done some studies on like, Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, a wind feasibility study that shows that they would actually realize more potential for electric power over a 50 year period from the wind than from knocking the mountain down. When a congressperson or a decision-maker asks us, ‘well, 50 percent of all the electricity in the United States comes from coal-fired power plants,’ we do talk about the options. It doesn’t have to be that way.

EP: And what do you think about clean coal?

LK: There is no such thing as clean coal. When they talk about clean coal, ‘they’ being the proponents of clean coal, basically what they’re talking about is when it’s burned in a power plant and it comes out of the stack, it’s probably cleaner than it was. But they’re only considering one part, the end part, of the process. They’re not considering extraction. What we say as part of our argument against clean coal, or the concept of clean coal, is how can coal that is mined using mountaintop removal coal mining possibly be clean? It can’t. I mean, it destroys the environment, it destroys people’s lives and the Appalachian culture. It can’t be clean coal. It’s sort of like ever since the surge started in Iraq and everyone’s saying how terrific it is. It knocked down American soldiers from being killed at 100 a month to 50 a month. How is that good? It’s sort of the same thing. Yeah, it burns cleaner, probably, not because the coal is clean, because the technology is better, but they still haven’t talked about the extraction part of it and all the steps in between.

EP: So are you saying that coal mined underground could potentially be clean coal?

LK: No. I mean, there are so many things the coal industry would have to do. First of all, they’d have to obey the law, which they haven’t been doing. So I think that there’s a long way to go. We’re not going to be off of coal tomorrow, and whatever coal mining they do, we would prefer they do it underground—it’s less destructive, and more miners would work and that’s really what they’re interested in doing.

EP: Is there any end to mountaintop removal in sight?

LK: Yeah, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, I guess is the phrase they use. I hesitate to talk about it, because when you start talking about ‘things are looking good,’ then people tend to slack off. But the point is that today they’re blowing up mountains in West Virginia, and as long as they’re doing that, they’re doing it, right, and we have to stop it. So, the end may be in sight, but it’s not in sight today and that’s what we’re after. I mean, I think that over the period of a couple years we’ll probably at least get the Clean Water Protection Act passed, but there’s a lot of work to be done, we’re not there yet. But we’re doing really well, and in the Congress we have 138 co-sponsors for the Clean Water Protection Act. So we’re doing pretty well, but doing pretty well is not the same as winning.

EP: Well, that’s all the time we have. Thanks so much for your time, Lenny, and good luck with your campaigns.