The True Costs of Coal

Below is a piece written by Kentucky Author and KFTC member Jason Howard, reposted from his blog, On the Margin.

Below is a speech that I gave to the Lexington Forum on 5 November, 2009. I followed Nick Carter, President and Chief Operating Officer of Natural Resources Partners L.P. and its subsidiaries (NRP), as well as Western Pocahontas Properties Limited Partnership and New Gauley Coal Corporation.

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Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today, and I am grateful for the intelligent debates and dialogue that have been fostered over the years by the Lexington Forum.

As the invitation to this morning's meeting announced, I am speaking as a representative of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, a grassroots organization whose thousands of members work on behalf of environmental and economic justice issues across the state. I am proud to be associated with KFTC.

However, I am first and foremost an Eastern Kentuckian, born and raised in Dorton Branch, a former coal camp, in Bell County. Some of my earliest memories are of trains rumbling past, rattling our windows, the massive cars loaded down with coal. I spent hours walking those oily tracks with my father and grandmother, collecting pieces of coal dropped by the trains, hemmed in by the surrounding mountains. In the summertime, I placed pennies on the tracks with my friends, eagerly awaiting the distant sound of the train whistle.

I also listened to my family's stories about the rough side of the coal industry. My great-grandfather, McClellan "Clell" Howard, is the first name listed on the Kentucky Coal Miners’ Memorial at Benham in Harlan County. He was murdered while in the mines because of a union dispute. His death is a testimony to what fighting back could get a miner in the early union wars.

My maternal great-grandfather, Garrett Garrison, went into the mines when he was only nine years old, driving a mule team, and worked there most of his life. As an adult, he worked in the Harlan County mines during the bloody strikes of the 1930s, and instilled in our family the belief that unionizing was the saving grace for a miner. He died an excruciating death by way of black lung. In their conversations, my family bore witness to the way coal mining can destroy a body. These stories marked my childhood as much as the coal miners I grew up around, as well as the boisterous stories they told of their workdays.

Now, years later, I am a writer. And I am still listening to stories about coal.

Tales of damaged homes, of contaminated water supplies, of divided families and communities.

Accounts of severe flooding, of sludge and coal ash spills, of alarming asthma and cancer rates.

These stories represent the true costs of coal being paid by the citizens of Kentucky – indeed, by all of us gathered here, regardless of region – a price due in large part to mountaintop removal mining.

The term is concise and straightforward: an entire mountain is blown up for a relatively thin seam of coal, often only eighteen inches. This destructive method of mining requires large areas for disposal of the resulting overburden, or "waste" – topsoil, dirt, rocks, trees (almost never harvested so the coal can be extracted as quickly as possible) – which is then pushed into the valleys below, burying the streams, trees, and animals. This activity is neatly described as "valley fills."

The coal industry tells us that mountaintop removal is necessary for "post-mining development."And indeed, Mr. Carter stated earlier that his company intended that the land be used for such. But intentions too often do not translate into realities. It's something we've seen time and time again in Eastern Kentucky, most recently with the promise of booming industrial parks that instead remain deserted atop barren plateaus created by mountaintop removal and strip mining.

To date, more than 700,000 acres in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia have been destroyed as a result of mountaintop removal. Over 1,200 miles of streams have been buried or polluted since 1985. Each year, the explosive equivalent of 58 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs is detonated by the coal industry in the region.

These are sobering, hard statistics of environmental devastation. But it's impossible to quantify the culture that is disappearing along with the mountains. The laughs of children playing in a clear creek, the memories of walking and knowing every tree and rock on a ridgeline, the sweat that went in to planting and tending a patch of white-half runners. And even more importantly, the resolve of people who are still holding on, determined to keep their land till the bitter end.

People like Rully and Erica Urias of Island Creek in Pike County, whose well has been contaminated by the effects of mountaintop removal. Their experience is especially troubling because they have a young daughter. "Our water is unsuitable to bathe in, but we have no choice," they say. "Makayla loves to take baths and like most children will try to drink the water. We can't let her play with any toys that she can put water into and drink from because of the contamination."

People like Rick Handshoe in Floyd County. "We've gotten extreme dust, fast moving coal trucks, blasting damaging to our property, dust damaging our property. The coal trucks are extremely hazardous. We've called vehicle enforcement about fast driving trucks, coal falling off, breaking people's windows. The dust is extremely bad, you can't use your porch. You cannot raise a garden the way it is. We're hoping it is going to get better, but we're yet to see that.

These are the true costs of coal.

Kentucky has yet to see the benefits of mountaintop removal as well. Although the coal industry's loudest defense of this practice is that mountain people need the jobs mining supplies, the truth is that Appalachia's mining jobs are being buried along with the region's streams. Mountaintop removal is done by giant machines: draglines, bulldozers, and dynamite don't require as large a number of employees as deep mining. According to USA Today, this mechanization has resulted in a net loss of over 48,000 jobs in West Virginia alone during the period from 1978 to 2003.

In his Second Inaugural Address, President Franklin Roosevelt stated, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." Sadly, we continue to see similar statistics in many mountain counties today. What I find particularly interesting is that those very counties are the major coal-producing areas of the Commonwealth.

According to the U.S. Census, 24.7 percent of Pike Countians live in poverty. Bell County, my home county, numbers 35.4 percent. In neighboring Harlan County, 31.6 percent live below the poverty line.

These are the true costs of coal.

Despite these appalling figures, Kentucky continues to look at coal as the state's economic savior. A recent study published by the Mountain Association for Community and Economic Development (MACED) compared the tax revenues generated by the coal industry in Kentucky with the state expenditures supporting it. It found that the Commonwealth provided a net subsidy of nearly $115 million to the industry in 2006.

This is in addition to a recently released report from the independent National Academy of Sciences that discovered coal-burning plants in the United States produce over $62 billion a year in environmental damages and "hidden costs”– damage done to crops and timber yields, to buildings and materials, and most notably, to human health, including illnesses and premature deaths.

These are true costs of coal.

Now, you might assume from my rhetoric that I am anti-coal. That is a mischaracterization and, quite frankly, too simplistic a label. I am against irresponsible mining practices, and I believe that mountaintop removal falls into that category.

I am not here to demonize the coal industry, to simply raise my voice and point my finger. That will have solved nothing. And I don't think that would be in keeping with the spirit and tradition of the Lexington Forum.

So let me say this in closing: ”I recognize the complexities of living in a coal economy. After all, I'm a child of it. Kentucky enjoys some of the lowest electricity rates in the country, due in large part to the coal mined in Appalachia. And many miners working on mountaintop removal sites are doing so in the absence of competitive jobs in other industries; they simply want to put food on the table. No one wants them to go hungry.

But with the Commonwealth's historic role as one of the primary energy producers in the country comes a great responsibility. We must also be energy leaders, thinkers, innovators.

Coming from a state with some of the oldest mountains in the world, surely we can all agree on the beauty found on a ridgeline. So as consumers, can't we commit to using less energy, "to turn off the lights in rooms not being used, at least” and thereby save some acreage?

The United States Geological Survey has projected that Appalachia will "peak coal" by 2020. Can't we therefore acknowledge the need to begin an honest, open dialogue about beginning the transition to a truly sustainable economy?

I believe it is our duty, our moral imperative, to begin that discussion.

Let it begin today.

The Scriptures tell us "where there is no vision, the people perish."

Let us, then, pray to be visionaries.

Thank you.