Let’s say that you’re CEO of a coal corporation, and you want to get at the deposits of black gold
deep inside the beautiful, verdant mountains of Appalachia. You have a choice.
You could adopt modern methods that combine industrial ingenuity and
environmental finesse to extract the coal. Or, what the hey, why not just ram
tons of explosives into the terra firma, blow up the entire top third of those
peaks, bulldoze the resulting rubble down the mountainsides into the streams
below, then — voila! — simply scoop out the exposed coal? Yes, mountain decapitation is brutish and
nasty, but, wow, it’s so much more profitable for your corporation. What’s a CEO to do?
Blowing the tops off mountains might give you pause, but it’s just another day’s work for America’s coal barons, who do not hesitate to grab an extra dime in profit by resorting
to what they euphemistically call “mountaintop removal.”
First, they scalp the mountaintops. All the trees and brush are clear-cut,
bulldozed into huge piles and burned as trash. Next, they scrape the forest
floor down to the bedrock, shoving all plant life, organisms and topsoil into
piles.
Then come the fireworks. Holes are drilled into the mountain core and filled
with explosives that have 10 times the force that Tim McVeigh used to destroy
the federal building in Oklahoma City. This explodes the top third of the
mountains into rubble.
Finally, all those tons of rock, soil and so forth (which are dubbed “spoil” by the industry) must be removed so the companies can get to the coal. Do they
truck it away? Good heavens, no! That would cost money, making mountaintop
removal unprofitable. Instead, they merely shove the spoil down into the
valleys below, burying streams, animals, habitat and anything (or anyone) else
in the way.
Some 1,600 miles of Appalachian streams have already been destroyed by
mountaintop removal, and we’ll lose another 100 more miles of streams each year the practice
continues.
Shouldn’t such rank profiteering be against the law, you ask? It is. Since 1983, the
Clean Water Act has banned coal operators from dumping their mountaintop spoil
within 100 feet of streams. Good rule. Unfortunately, Big Coal’s political clout has kept regulators from enforcing it.
In recent years, though, spunky grassroots groups in Appalachia have won
lawsuits to require enforcement. This has led the Bush administration to rush
into action — not to protect the mountains and the people who live there, but to protect the
coal corporations.
Now, just in time for the holidays, Bush has literally put lumps of coal in the
Christmas stockings of folks in Appalachia. Claiming that the 100-foot buffer
requirement needed “clarification,” Bush and Co. issued a new rule this month that is a classic semantic sham. It
declares that dumping spoil near streams continues to be prohibited —unless a corporation shows it has a need to dump in the stream.
This is a license to “shoot and shove,” as the industry so delicately terms its mountaintop-removal process. The rule
change was announced by the head of Bush’s council on environmental quality, James Connaughton. Guess who he is. Yes, a
former lobbyist for the coal giants.
Jim Hightower is a national radio
commentator, columnist and author.
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2008.
