Coal Summit
A Prospectus

The objectives of the Coal Summit are: 

• To educate environmentalists, politicians, funders, media and all other attendees on the true cost of coal, including the economic, social and environmental costs of each phase of the full coal cycle. 
• To gain more media exposure, funding, and political action in order to eliminate the impacts of all aspects of the full coal cycle. 
• To form an environmental coalition to develop common strategies and an action agenda to work on the broad spectrum of coal issues.

The Coal Summit will be held on June 20-22, 2002, at the Charleston Civic Center in Charleston, West Virginia, which is in the heart of coal country and is in an area where the forests are badly impacted by coal burning industry. The Summit will consist of lecture/workshop presentations at the conference center in Charleston as well as field trips to nearby coalfield communities, Whitesville and Kayford Mountain, and plane flights over the nearby mountaintop removal strip mines and declining forests.

The groups planning the Coal Summit believe that coal issues, especially mining and  human health and forest health related air pollution, tend to be segmented in the environmental world. Each of these issues has its own devotees who are not fully aware of the other, if at all. We believe that a first-hand awareness of coal mining impacts to the environment and to coalfield communities will give clean air activists a new and useful perspective. For coal mining activists to witness first-hand the destructive impacts of air pollution on forests will also be an eye-opener.

The Coal Summit could not come at a more opportune time. President Bush has vowed to make coal a centerpiece of his energy policy, given the vast coal resources in our country. But environmentalists know that coal is the dirtiest possible source of electrical power and that all forms of coal mining- mountaintop removal, longwall, or conventional strip mining- can devastate mountain ecosystems, destroy groundwater supplies, pollute streams, and disrupt the surface drainage patterns of entire watersheds. In the process, there are dramatic impacts to individual lives and to communities in the coalfields.

Presentations at the Summit will be organized around the concept of "the true cost of coal." The question to be answered is what does a ton of coal really cost when the costs of all the environmental and human impacts and government subsidies are added in.

The organizations that are actively represented in the planning of the Summit are American Rivers, Appalachian Voices, Citizens Coal Council, Clean Air Task Force, Coal River Mountain Watch, Friends of the Earth, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Mountain Watershed Association, National Parks Conservation Association, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Sierra Club, and Tri-state Citizens Mining Network.

For further information about the Coal Summit, contact OVEC 304-522-0246, dave@ohvec.org or Appalachian Voices, 828-262-1500, outreach@appvoices.org.