Rebuttal to LTE originally provided by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

March 17, 2006

Rebuttal: Please do come take a look at what Raney's industry is doing to our homeland

W. Va. Coal Association president Bill Raney responded your recent article "Almost Flat, West Virginia" with a letter to the editor that sounds as though he's taking lessons from Rush Limbaugh. He described your reporter's efforts as a "misguided attempt to be cute." People generally use name calling and the like when they have nothing of real substance to say.

Raney felt you article was ".stacked heavily against a modern and responsible industry." We wouldn't be having this discussion if the industry was acting responsibly. Take a look at this March's issue of National Geographic and see how 'responsible' coal is mined here.

Raney wrote, "The activist group in West Virginia can be noisy at times, but it is small." Yet, 56% of the people in the state oppose mountaintop removal mining according to a poll conducted by the Appalachian Center for the Economy and Environment.

Raney objects that the story was "dedicating only five paragraphs to the defense of the industry." Perhaps he is too used to the billion-dollar coal industry's constant barrage of ads on T. His industry has spent millions of dollars since 1996 to fund political campaigns to curry favor with our politicians. I think he just can't stand it when anything other than his point of view gets exposure.

Raney misleads when he writes, "As I told the reporter during our phone interview, the truth is that less than 1 percent of West Virginia's land has been disturbed in any way by mining." Mountaintop removal is not practiced everywhere in the state; where it is going on, in some counties like Boone, the disturbance is closer to 25%. That disturbance devastates communities and the environment.

Raney states, "And the majority of the land that has been touched has been reconstituted in a way that allows people to use and enjoy the land." This is simply a lie. Reconstituted land? We're not talking orange juice here, but about the lush, ancient Appalachian mountains, forests and streams-some of the most biologically diverse forests on the planet. The biological losses are incalculable and in many cases, the land is off limits to people. What's left to 'enjoy'?

Raney said, "there is great merit in reconstructing rural lands in ways that nurture development, sustain the surrounding environment and please most people." Poppy cock. Approximately 1% of the mountaintop removal and strip-mined land out of around 400,000 acres in West Virginia has any development on it. In Kentucky, development has been problematic-consider the prison dubbed "Sink-Sink." About $40 million has been used to shore it up because of instability of the "reconstituted" land.

Janet Keating, Co-Director
Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
304-522-0246