Kentucky pays steep environmental price
by Lauren McGrath and Teri Blanton
Lexington, KY - Mountaintop removal is an assault on the land, people and common sense. It is the number one source of water pollution in the eastern Kentucky coalfields, a drain on the state budget, and a black eye for Kentucky.
Mountaintop removal is as it sounds — the blasting off of the tops of mountains to get at thin seams of coal. Accompanying the practice, and just as destructive, is the pushing of this debris into the nearest valley, a process that buries forests and streams and creates "valley fills." More than 1,400 miles of eastern Kentucky headwater streams already are buried or severely degraded by this practice, according to state and federal studies.
Pollution from strip mining is the number one upstream polluter of the four rivers with their headwaters in the coalfields, including the Kentucky River that is essential to central Kentucky's economy. The heavy siltation snuffs out aquatic life, makes water treatment more expensive and diminishes recreational uses. The toxic elements carried by the silt, such as the bio-accumulator selenium found at dangerous levels below valley fills, furthers this degradation of our streams.
No evidence has ever been presented that dumping toxic mining wastes in streams is good for water quality, or good for the people, farms and businesses downstream that depend on safe water. Allowing our ecologically essential headwater streams to be destroyed means we pay the price in central Kentucky.
Today Kentucky's political and business leaders have an opportunity to invest resources to start building a more diversified, stable economy that will ensure healthy communities and a strong economic future for Kentuckians. If coal was going to bring prosperity to Kentuckians, it would have done so long before now. Eastern Kentucky still includes 20 of the 100 poorest counties in the United States. In fact, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, the presence of coal is the best predictor of the presence of poverty in the Central Appalachian region.
Ending mountaintop removal and valley fills, as needs to happen immediately, would employ more workers and help local economies. Per ton of production, deep mining employs more miners than mountaintop removal. Eastern Kentucky needs those jobs.
Kentuckians deserve a diversified, stable economy — this means an investment in clean energy solutions. There are an abundance of cost-effective alternatives that could eliminate the need for all the electricity generated from mountaintop removal coal. The availability and low cost of these alternatives — including energy efficiency, renewable sources such as wind power, solar hot water and low-impact hydroelectric — offer Appalachia the opportunity to diversify the rural and regional economies, and to create high-paying local jobs that will remain as long as the wind blows and the sun shines.
Ending mountaintop removal would have a negligible effect on electricity prices in the eastern United States, where mountaintop removal coal is currently burned. Many factors contribute to the cost of electricity, with coal prices just one small part. The actual impact on electricity markets would vary in different regions depending on whether the wholesale electricity markets have been deregulated, but in no case would the impact be significant. Kentucky's electricity rates have to do with proximity to fuel sources and state subsidies. Neither would change.
A study by the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development found that the coal industry costs Kentucky taxpayers more than it brings into the state – a net loss of more than $100 million annually when looking at all the direct and indirect revenues and expenses. The costs include: increased road expenditures, operating mining-specific health and safety systems, supporting training and research and development for the industry, and numerous tax breaks and subsidies. This estimate does not include health care costs, loss of home values, and the need for water treatment borne by the rest of us.
The coal industry has been successful at reducing the debate about mountaintop removal to whether post-mining land has any usefulness or value — even though less than 2 percent of the nearly one million acres of Kentucky land that has been strip mined is used for any beneficial commercial or industrial purpose (unfortunately, the media also picked up this narrow focus, helping to skew the public debate). The real issue is the destructiveness of the mining while it is taking place and forever thereafter — the pollution of streams, the increased frequency and severity of flooding, the altered hydrology, loss of property value for neighbors, damage to nearby homes and the loss of water wells, dust falling on workers and neighbors, loss of aquatic habitat, the decline of wildlife species and a host of other consequences — especially when a host of alternatives are available.
Kentuckians across the board can agree on two things — we want jobs and we want healthy communities. Moving beyond mountaintop removal and investing in a clean energy future for Kentuckians would help bring us both.
Lauren McGrath is the regional representative for the Sierra Club's National Beyond Coal Campaign. Teri Blanton is a Canary Project Fellow with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth.