WeLoveMountains

This is a response to a Charleston Gazette op-ed that I submitted yesterday.

In his December 16 Gazette commentary Roger Nicholson, a senior vice-president of International Coal Group (Sago was theirs) said he wants his children to settle in this beautiful state. He figures that coal to liquid plants will make that possible. What he fails to mention is that those plants will increase the already massive mountain top removal strip mining. With that increase there may be no beautiful West Virginia left for Nicholson’s children to find jobs. The beauty will be gone with the disappearance of even more mountains and the burial of even more streams.

Jeff Goodell says, in his book Big Coal, that about three and a half barrels of water are consumed for every barrel of fuel made from coal. Nicholson backs Governor Manchin’s goal of producing 1.3 billion gallons of fuel from coal every year. That will take about 5 billion gallons of water per year, 14 million gallons a day. Boy that ought to dry up a bunch of streams, underground aquifers and water wells. Goodell also says that the carbon dioxide produced in coal to liquid plants can be 50 to 100 percent higher than refining petroleum. Nicholson sloughs off concerns of reputable scientists about the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a view held by global warming alarmists.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Nicholson tried to place negative labels on thousands of West Virginians who love the mountains just as they are. He called us extremists, alarmists, obstructive and a vocal minority. Nicholson becomes extreme, and alarmists himself in the act of trying to scapegoat people who love mountains more than they do coal and money. For the coal industry to call anyone else extreme is a knee slapper. It is hard to imagine what could be more extreme than the massive mountain top removal strip mining that will increase with coal to liquid plants.

Contrary to Nicholson’s mean spirited labels, the people I know who love the mountains just as they are more easily fit the labels of gentle, kind, aware and intelligent.  They are folks who are indeed alarmed at the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of West Virginia mountains. They are extremely angered by the burying of over a thousand miles of West Virginia headwaters. And the only thing they want to obstruct is the wholesale destruction of the environment, a very worthy obstruction. 

Thanks to the first amendment to our constitution we are all free to be vocal. We are not a minority as Nicholson claims, far from it.  Even if we were a minority we would still have the right to be vocal, to express our opinions, to seek mercy from the courts. Vocal is good. Indeed for democracy to survive we must be vocal when we see crimes against man and nature..

Predictably Nicholson wraps himself in the flag. He uses the phrases “help our country”, “our nation’s energy needs”. We are called upon to be patriotic, to remain silent, to be a sacrifice zone for the rest of the country. Nicholson seems to be paraphrasing the infamous quote from the Vietnam war; we have to destroy the state to save it and the nation.

And jobs, they never leave out jobs, except at the mine site. When my dad was an underground miner there were over 100,000 miners in West Virginia. Now there are less than 20,000. As Larry Gibson says if that is job creation I hope they stop before they run clear out of jobs. Whenever it will save money coal miners will continue to be replaced with machines. No matter what smoke screens the coal companies put up it is money they care about.

 At hearings on mountain top removal and other forms of strip mining permits it is always the same; Speakers for the permit stand to make money from the destruction of the mountains. Those who speak against the permit are not there for the money; they are there for the mountains. Those who want more mountains destroyed are in it for the money. Upton Sinclair said it best; "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

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