With the debate heating up a new coal-fired power plant in S.C., the coal advocates have brought in the big guns — ABEC (Americans for Balanced Energy Sources).
This organization promotes themselves like a grassroots nonprofit, but is funded and headed by coal executives and lobbyists.
Check out the website www.learnaboutcoal.com. Yes, those are 12-year olds preaching the valor of coal. I’m guessing their parents don’t live beside a Kentucky stream running with toxic coal sludge, although they may be poisoned with mercury and not know it yet. However clean you burn it (a joke in and of itself) doesn’t make mountain top removal acceptable.
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We care about the environment. That’s why we make sure to comply with current rules, which have been in effect since 1983, that require coal operators to establish a buffer around streams. There are other steps in place to make sure extraction is as clean as we can feasibly make it. And any project undertaken has the endorsement of the Army Corps of Engineers on ecological issues.
Buffer Zone? Valley fills are mountaintops dumped INTO the streams. I agree. It is unacceptable.
David is untruthful. The coal company and their employees blast our mountains and our homes, and poison our streams and water. The Army Corps and the Office of Surface Mining does NOT enforce the weak laws. The fox is guarding the hen house in the coal mining industry. Both agencies has been sued several times and we have proved that this is true. Both agencies are now trying to weaken the 100 foot stream buffer zone rule. Mountaintop removal strip mining is immoral, illegal and sheer madness.
Thank you June. I have to wonder about the people making money from mountain top removal. They’re separated from reality and unwilling to accept the fact that they’re harming innocent people. It’s very frustrating.
I encourage everyone to give http://www.ilovemountains.org a look. There’s a devastating map of the nearly 500 ancient mountains that have been destroyed in Appalachia.
Sorry… Thank you Judy.
I was raised at Seng Creek, WV. The hills there were my playground. The tunnel that was destroyed there for coal should have been on the National Registry of Historic Places….but instead, is gone. The EPA in WV is a joke. It stands for the Environmental Protection Agency. How have they protected the envronment? Mountaintop Removal, Sludge Ponds above populated areas…and lets remeber, coal is a finite resource. When it’s gone Massey and all others will be gone. Unless they get into the call center trade. I pray daily for WV. Wake up people before it’s too late.
You sound like you’ve made your mind up with respect to using coal to generate electricity. But technology has already made coal a cleaner energy resource – overall our plants are 70 percent cleaner based on regulated emissions per unit of energy produced. Department of Energy figures show that.
And with new advances in technology, we’re looking at a future where coal will meet America’s growing electricity needs with little to no emissions of the pollutants regulated by federal and state clean air laws.
As a nation, we cannot ignore coal as a source of energy. (It accounts for 50 percent of the electricity generated today.) We cannot be left worrying about how we meet our future energy needs without becoming more reliant on imported forms of energy. We have to invest in our energy future by recognizing that coal is a fuel for America’s future.
– David, with Americans for Balanced Energy Choices
That sounds good. But I live in Kansas now, and Sunflower Energy here is fighting to produce coal fired electic plants. Why? Where the Kansas winds blow year round, why would you want coal, a finite resource that has to be purchased and transported ( not to mention emitions ) over wind…..an infinite resource that once the intitial cost of the turbines are accounted for, is forever free?