Mountain State Matters

Let’s just say that hypothetically a small mountain community is able to choose between two different types of energy production. Both will put their town in a place of providing energy for a good chunk of the country. Both will provide jobs. One will be sustainable. The other will ruin the town’s mountains and streams and be used up in 14 years.

This is the quandary in which the folks of Coal River Mountain find themselves. An article today in the Register-Herald outlined the community’s proposal to the Raleigh County Commission to support a wind farm, rather than strip mining, on the mountain’s ridges.

A study was conducted that found the mountain’s ridges had strong Class 4 to Class 7 average annual wind speeds.

“It was found that Coal River Mountain has enough wind potential and land area to accommodate 220 two-megawatt wind turbines. Calculations showed that this was enough energy to power over 150,000 homes or over 90,000 total electricity customers, including residential, commercial and industrial units,” [Rory Mcilmoil of Coal River Mountain Watch said.]

Mcilmoil claims production estimates in the strip mining permits show that mining operations will last for only 14 years.

“Once the coal is gone, there will be no more jobs available, the water will be contaminated, many of the residents will have moved out or been bought out, and the forest, another source of potential jobs and revenue, will be gone for decades to come, as will the possibility of producing clean wind energy on the scale that is currently available,” he said.

The project also has the support of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Appalachian Voices and the Sierra Club.

A fact that’s key is that mining permits haven’t yet been issued for the land, so there could be time to get a wind farm in. Let’s hope the Raleigh County Commission realizes a great opportunity for Southern West Virginia to begin cultivating more sustainable, environmentally-friendly energy sources.

Photo by: Lost Bob

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.

The Associated Press reported today that Massey Energy plans on opening up a new coal mine at the rate of one every 17 days this year.

Massey is positioning itself to take advantage of soaring demand and prices for Appalachian coal. The expansion is centered on underground coal mines, giving Massey alternatives if a court decision that would make it more difficult and time consuming to get federal permits for surface mines is upheld.

“We have all the permits,” Chief Executive Don Blankenship told Wall Street analysts during a conference call Friday. “We have a line of equipment that’s set up that takes us beyond these currently announced expansion plans.”

Massey has a significant presence in West Virgina. Most recent notable Massey news:

• The company had to pay $20 million civil penalty in a corporate-wide settlement for polluting the streams of West Virginia and Kentucky in a flagrant violations of the Clean Water Act.
• Massey refused to do anything about the fact that one of their mountaintop removal mines was located 400 yards upslope from an elementary school (Marsh Fork Elementary in Sundial, WV), and a break in the impoundment dam would allow school officials only three minutes to evacuate the entire student population before the school would be under 15 feet of water.
• Massey CEO Don Blankenship was accused of threatening to shoot an ABC News producer when the reporter tried to interview him in a parking lot.

Appalachian Voices has a petition up to gather names of those against Dominion building more coal-fired power plants in Virginia’s Wise County. While not in West Virginia, it’s pretty darn close. Rather than building more polluting power plants, App Voices argues, the focus should be put on developing clean energy sources that won’t ruin the mountains, pollute the streams and accelerate global warming. They want the petition to be a mile long, and right now it’s at 3,155 feet. If you support this cause, sign the petition.

The Washington Post has a very informative article about mountaintop removal up today. Their reporter visited sites all over West Virginia, including Mud, Mingo County and Kayford Mountain, and wrote about the ties between Washington D.C. and West Virginia. I thought he also did a good job of showing the Catch-22: mountaintop removal is awful for the environment, but without it where would West Virginia’s economy be?

Larry Lodato, of the economic development authority in Boone County, W.Va., said he worried that environmentalists would succeed in stopping permits for new mountaintop mines.

“We’re hurting” if that happens, Lodato said. “A lot of our companies would be looking elsewhere. There would be a lot of jobs lost.”

According to a map from the American Coal Foundation, Appalachia is one of the country’s major producers of medium and high-volatile bituminous coal (the coal-producing states out west produce mostly sub-bituminous coal and lignite). The region produces 40 percent of the nation’s coal (in July 1996). A lot of the coal companies would be looking elsewhere? It really doesn’t seem like there would be a whole lot of places for them to look. If the country could successfully pass laws protecting mountains and miners, most companies would have no choice but to comply. Unfortunately, with all the lobbying and money floating around, that looks unlikely.

Anyway, check out the Washington Post article. It has a pretty cool slide show as well.

Photo: Daniel Shea

Speaking of green technology in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette reported today that the Canaan Valley Institute will break ground on a new Research and Education Center which will use new green technology to make it entirely self-sustaining.

Cool! The building will cost $8 million, however. Is this the future of green building in this country?

Photo: Brungrrl

There was an article in the State Journal this morning about the possibility that green jobs may be coming to West Virginia.

I’m not entirely sure why this didn’t happen a couple of years ago…the state is full of open space (albeit most of that space is on mountains) and definitely needs the economic development. The State Journal said that most of the jobs that will be coming only require a high school diploma, which in my mind means that the 75.2 percent of the state with a high school education should be able to take advantage of these jobs.

The article mentioned three jobs specifically: wind turbine technician, recycling center worker, and hybrid car manufacturer.

Dave Groberg of Invenergy said his company expects to employ about 20 people at salaries of about $35,000 at the facility it proposes for Greenbrier County.

“In some parts of the country where you have a more advanced industry and have a lot more projects, like west Texas, we are starting to see training programs crop up at local technical colleges,” Groberg said. “West Virginia certainly has the potential to create a decent-sized wind industry,” one that would justify training programs.

Ironically, running right next to this story in the Journal was another one about how green jobs will require new skills.

The lesson here is that if West Virginia wants to take advantage of the industry, the state will have to start providing the necessary skills to students in its vocational and technical schools. Otherwise, the companies will go back to West Texas, where there’s definitely a lot more flat land.

Photo: Friends Friends Friends

Photo: Erica Peterson

The Charleston Gazette reported yesterday that the United Mine Workers union won’t oppose a ban on mountaintop removal. In the past, the union has been reluctant to choose a side, I would guess because they’re interested in protecting and representing all miners, not just those employed in underground mines.

This all went down at a panel discussion at the Appalachian Studies Association’s annual meeting on March 29 at Marshall University. As the participants went around the room, naming their goals for the region, several mentioned sustainability (strip mining is anything but sustainable) and environmental concerns. Finally, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy Vice President Julian Martin said his only real priority was to “end mountaintop removal.”

The article gave some useful stats on strip mining and the union in West Virginia:

“Statewide, unionized strip mines account for 760 of West Virginia’s 5,400 strip-mining jobs, according to government data. That’s about 14 percent. Unionized strip mines account for 13 percent of the state’s surface coal production, data shows.”

So, I guess it’s not too surprising that UMW Communications Director Phil Smith would be able to take a stand, albeit a hypothetical and tentative one. Then, he backpedaled a bit.

“I don’t think we have a problem with the concept of ending mountaintop removal,” Smith said. “If he had said end mountaintop removal tomorrow, I think we would have had a problem with it.”

Smith said the UMW would continue to support its members who are currently working on strip mines. The union is also actively trying to organize existing nonunion strip jobs, Smith said.

“If there were suddenly 5,000 UMW jobs in mountaintop removal instead of 500, there would be a political element within the union to deal with that,” Smith said. “President Roberts and the union can’t pick and choose which workers to represent and which not to represent.”

Want to learn more about mountaintop removal? I Love Mountains made a pretty cool video about it.