A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes in an op-ed piece in today's The Washington Post, A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia, that the president needs to step up and insist on enforcing existing laws that protect the Appalachian Mountains from the ever-increasing depredations of coal-mining operations.

The image at left, by Jeff Gentner of the Associated Press, is of a mountaintop coal mining site at Kayford Mountain in West Virginia. Kennedy, who is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, writes of such ugliness: "Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day — the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly — to blow up Appalachia's mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains — encompassing about a million acres — buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region's air and water."

If you blow the top off a mountain in the Appalachians, you can expect to expose seams of coal for relatively easy — and cheap — removal. You might think the hard-hatted miners would love it, as a way of guaranteeing jobs. Not necessarily. "In 1966," Kennedy writes, "46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Mechanization has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000. They extract more coal annually, but virtually all the profits leave the state for Wall Street."

Coal is presently crucial to electricity generation in the U.S. — click on the chart at right to enlarge it — as 48.9 percent of our electric power comes from coal. (The chart is from this Wikipedia article.)

Other sources say coal accounts for fully 50 percent of our electric power.

Coal is also much "dirtier" than other fossil fuels, in terms of how much carbon the burning of it puts in the atmosphere. According to this web article:

Coal is responsible for nearly 40% of America’s CO2 emissions. (Here it’s interesting to remember that the U.S. emits 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases). That’s because over 50% of our electricity comes from coal. Over half! And because — joule for joule — coal emits the most carbon of any fossil fuel.

We hear so much about our dependence on foreign oil that the fact that, in the chart above, petroleum accounts for just 1.6 percent of U.S. electricity generation may come as a jolt. To be sure, oil as the source of gasoline and diesel fuel is a huge part of our transportation budget. As the source of home heating oil, it looms large in many household budgets. But if we stopped worrying so much about oil and replaced the burning of coal, as a way of generating electricity, with wind, solar, hydroelectric, biomass, nuclear, and other non-polluting sources of renewable energy, our greenhouse gas emissions would drop by some 27 percent (see Coal and Climate Change Facts from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change), and the entire world's greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 25 percent of that.

25 percent of 27 percent equals 6 3/4 percent, which is roughly equal to 1/15. We could lower world greenhouse gas emissions by one-fifteenth — and save untold mountaintops — if America just stopped burning coal!