Raucous pro-coal crowds pack mining hearings

Source: AP, via The Charleston Gazette

PIKEVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Thousands of coal miners fearing the loss of jobs if mountaintop removal mining is curtailed or outlawed shouted down a handful of environmentalists at crowded public hearings Tuesday on the much-debated practice.

Many in Kentucky and West Virginia wore hardhats and T-shirts and waved signs proclaiming the merits of coal. Environmentalists who have fought for decades to end the destructive form of mining that blasts away peaks to unearth coal showed up in small numbers.

Mining supporters in West Virginia heckled the few environmentalists who testified in favor of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposal to eliminate or at least suspend a streamlined permitting process for surface mines in six Appalachian states. Hearings were also being held in Tennessee and are set for later this week in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Read more: http://wvgazette.com/ap/ApTopStories/200910130939?page=1&build=cache

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The mountaintop removal proponents and coal owners are borrowing a page from the teabaggers' faux-populist playbook

Contact your legislators and Obama's admin about putting an end to this type of mining, even limiting coal use altogether and stop the coal industry from stealing money that should go to green investments.

But what are these people supposed to do when their local economies are strangled by our efforts?

I resent the suggestion that people worried about their jobs are compared to Teabaggers.

The President is only beginning to look at unfair trade with a couple of recent tariff decisions and until we all decide to protect American workers, I think people like this have a right to be scared. We fail to communicate let alone convince these people that there is a better alternative and that there will be new and better jobs some day.

Equating them with teabaggers is missing the point. People having jobs is something progressives should want to protect. How is being a birther or deather anything like being a worried mother or father who just want to work. Supporting those people is what being a Democrat is supposed to be about. Their employers are another story.

Not thrilled about this kind of mining. But I see far more jobs being destroyed by environmentalism
than being created. What do you want to bet all these green jobs (where are they BTW?) will go to China anyway....better jobs "some day" isnt going to cut it. We need good paying jobs NOW!

Well, we could fix all these roads and bridges that the overweight coal trucks have destroyed, for starters. We could build waste treatment plants that work. We could dredge all the streams that the coal companies have filled full of sediment and prevent flooding. We could tax the hell out of imported goods until "Made In The USA" becomes competitive again. We could quit ruining the mountains in West Virginia that have created tourism and great hunting and fishing opportunities, which does BTW provide jobs and revenue NOW!

As far as I'm concerned, Mountain Top Removal Mining should be sent to India and China or another planet. West Virginia is starting to look like another planet. A planet not fit for human habitation.

The next lizard to be snuffed out for eternity by these valley fills, may be your own lizard!

They could still be free to start businesses or find other employment in the meanwhile.

That was an idea in Ross Gelbspan's "Boiling Point".

Compared to around 82,000 in coal mining (of which less than half is 'surface mining')

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Coal_and_jobs_in_the_United_States#Total_coal-related_jobs

so I'm not clear why you think jobs are being destroyed by environmentalism? Maybe you can provide some facts and figures?

Have them clean up the messes and damage from mining (see post #3), and train them to manufacture and install solar and wind apparatus; subsidize w/stimulus funds and tax breaks for companies willing to invest/convert to green technology...

with you. But so far, no one has showed me how that will work.

"Environmentalism" is the concern that our children will have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and un-poisoned
soil in which to grow their food.

Do you not want these things?

... someone will eventually need to start filling the old, subterranean coal mines with carbon to sequester.

We don't want to take away their jobs.

We want to give them new jobs doing something else, even if it means using federal dollars to train them or pay them to do it.

they were all there

it was all a masterfully-coordinated "grassroots" turnout

and they're being fed a load of shit about jobs. MTR costs the area jobs by closing down traditional mines, replacing the labor with machines and allowing the companies to mine more coal at a faster pace while employing fewer

The offensive comments made against workers will divide people who want to protect our world and those who prefer their current paycheck. If real jobs were there then you could easily convince them, no?

Why drive workers away from our Progressive movements with ugly comments towards them? The middle class deserves to be treated with same respect and dignity that we show our natural world. These folks are not teabaggers though I see how you confused them. But you know those new jobs won't show up anytime soon, don't you? They know it too.

Any publicity is ultimately going to kill their business.

The Corps had to have public hearings and address opposition concerns. We were from the local university and one of the faculty organized us to explain in the meeting exactly what the downsides of stream channelization were (actually, there is no upside except it creates a half dozen jobs locally for a short period of time, which is the real reason the local congresspeople lobbied for the project in the first place. Then you are left with a ditch instead of a river or stream, and at the end of the channelization you have massive flooding problems.)

The locals resented us as "outsiders." The locals lost their living waterway and in return a half dozen people got heavy equipment jobs for six months.

So I've got mixed feelings. One part of me resents losing another part of a beautiful natural landscape.

Another part of me is spitefully pleased that the locals have to live with their mess forever. Serves them right.

But in Appalachia, the locals are going to destroy the entire countryside, then move to your neighborhood and look for jobs doing the same thing.

My feelings about the poor loggers that need jobs cutting the last old growth timber on the continent, and the coal miners that need jobs raping one of the Northeast's last pristine wilderness - go fuck yourselves and find another way to make a living.

Any time new environmental regulations are proposed the industry being regulated starts whining that it's going to cost jobs, and coal companies have become masters at it. There are other ways to get that coal out, just not as fast or cheap (although ideally any coal will stay where it's at and those people could start constructing clean energy farms).

would be calling for their heads! Why should coal get away with doing that to OUR COUNTRY! Those mountains do NOT belong to the coal miners or energy whores!

Given the choice, I'd rather be broke than drink poison.
If they don't like being broke, they can always drink poison later.
:hide:

on the line from the pollution and sludge created.

http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/


http://climategroundzero.org/

you have the heart of the problem: "the environmental side." That's how exploitative corporations, with their great power over politicians and the media, frame the discussion, so that no one can see the common good--that we are all utterly dependent on Mother Earth, and that our human industrial cleverness and manipulative ability is, literally, killing the only livable planet that we know about. The common good is not being served because no one can see it--it has been deliberately obscured. And it is such a pity--and so very deliberate--that the people with the least power in this situation--the workers--have been made dependent on the profits of those who are directly responsible for killing our only home.

If the resources of the state and the country were treated as "the commons"--as our common property, and as the products of the vulnerable natural matrix upon which we all depend--and if we had a real democracy, these kinds of decisions would be subject to a much better process, up front. The political, financial and organizational power of the elected government would be used to encourage the best industries--those that protect the environment and the workers. Workers would never be dependent on this kind of profiteering for good jobs. But we have a system which can barely be described as democracy at all, in which a decision, say, to strip-mine West Virginia, is made far away from the voters and the workers, in an extremely corrupt process in which they have no say whatsoever. The workforce--the poor majority--can take the good jobs while they last, or starve. That is their only choice.

To the workers and the voters of West Virginia, I would say: Attend to your democratic institutions--transparent vote counting, clean (no corporate or private money) elections, grass roots political organizing and other means for insuring that "the will of the people" is done and that the common good is served. You should not be faced with this restricted choice--destroy the environment or starve. There ARE better paths to prosperity, but they have been utterly blockaded from the top--in the corporate boardrooms that run the political system. The corporate boardrooms are the problem--not the environmentalists.

Environmentalists are just ordinary people like me with a high sensitivity to Nature, who know that we humans are on a suicidal path. We are the "canaries in the coal mine." We know that when the bees stop coming to our farms and gardens, something is very, very wrong. When the birds whose paths have been diverted by global warming, or who have ceased to produce young because their nesting habitat is gone, don't show up in our farms and gardens, something has gone blooey haywire with the planet itself. Coal burning, unfortunately, is one of the chief culprits for what we are seeing. And blowing off whole mountaintops, to get at more coal, to further this suicidal process, is a really bad idea. We environmentalists know, or I know (I can't speak for everybody), that workers are not responsible for these decisions, and have no say whatsoever in the kinds of jobs that our corporate-run political system creates. I am working class myself. I know how limited our choices are. And all I can say is--as I said above--we MUST change this political system. Our children's futures depend upon it. We must think big. We must recreate our sovereignty as a people--our democracy--throw off the global corporate predators who are oppressing us and everybody else, and achieve government that does its best for the common good, for us all. And--"canary in the coal mine" speaking here--we don't have a lot of time in which to do it.

Have you ever been to the mountains of WV? I have many times. What other choices would those be?

in mines. That is until we build all these wind mills we've been promised.

Then there's water treatment plants they could build and work
trying to make up for the damage they've done to their own community.

For all I care they can dig out the river beds and put them back on the mountain tops,
because the level of ignorance they're showing is appalling.

Just like the car manufacturers in MI right?

Since their paychecks trump their lives and the lives of their children
they sound like just the sort Prince Eric is looking for.

Not much training needed there either,
anybody can pull a trigger and kick a peasant.

people who have jobs and are in no danger of losing theirs are always the ones wanting to sacrifice others for the "greater good" or "grand scheme."

and my wife's job is far from secure.
I have a mortgage and a 12y old.
I have no intention of working for Eric OR poisoning peoples drinking water.
Any more assumptions?

Imagine if both you and your wife worked for a mining operation and it closed overnight. If anything is to be done, it must be extremely gradual.

And that's something that seems to be suspiciously missing from the national debate.

We're told that the banks need to get bailed out (of their own stupidity),
and the precious insurance co.s can't sustain any damage whatsoever,
and the Big Corps have to be allowed to do whatever they need to to rake it in.

But once again our overlords put us peons at the bottom of the priorities list.
If they were concerned about the national economy they would admit that it rests on the backs of the workers, and ditch NAFTA and the WTO and punish these outsourcing traitors.

We have an international gov that's up for auction and can't be bothered with petty local inconveniences like tent cities and health care bankruptcies.
I'll bet my imaginary pay check that there's not one pol in the Three Branches that can't afford to pack it up and move to greener pastures when this place falls apart.
At this point it seems like they're milking a dying cow.

btw: see post #26, I'm ashamed I didn't suspect that right away. That's so not like me.

is difficult due to to a massive trade deficit. Unfortunately, the only solution for that is inflation.

If you have a family you will know this.

You would be willing to do anything to keep your kids from starving.

And there are only two reasons I would kill a person to feed them:

1) If that person was stealing their food
2) If we were going to eat that person

I can find better food than people,
and I won't kill for money...not even alot.

mountaintop mining must stop.

Many of them are recycled teabaggers.

with shittier pay, much shittier safety precautions and environmental rape much worse than any potentially inadequate green legislation could do...and naturally, the big bosses feed them a line, point them in the direction of the "do-good, outsider, tree-hugging, sandal-wearing libruls" and like clockwork the miners dance like puppets on a string...

what the hell happened in this country? we have people actually DEFENDING health insurance jackals and strip-mining fatcats...

if these small-change jobs and mining livelihoods are so golden that they want to fight some much-needed no-brainer reform to the death, why is it that mining towns are almost invaribly rife with decay, poverty, despair, illiteracy and next to no health care? do they realize how expendible they are to the big bosses while putting up such a loyal and vocal defense??