Winds of Change Newsletter, December 2005     See sidebar for table of contents

	Just one of the impacts of “clean” coal in WV – the looming destruction of entire communities by mountaintop removal/ valley fill mining.

Unclean Coal: Myth Perpetrators Get an Earful

Many people are dismayed by news articles promoting the myth of “clean” coal power plants. It’s not that we don’t want power plants to be far-less polluting.

The problem is having the words “clean” and “coal” used together. The problem is the lack of consideration of the full cycle of coal.

Coal’s dirty when you dig it, dirty when you haul it, dirty when you burn it, dirty when you dispose of the ash left over from burning, and it sure dirties up politics.

Mary Wildfire sent this e-mail to someone promoting “clean” coal gasification plants:

“You need to turn off the sound on your computers before sending this message to West Virginia and other coal states…to protect your ears from the screaming when we see that even outfits like yours are taking the ‘no denying we’re going to burn coal’ tack.

“Sure, (gasification) plants are a good deal cleaner, but we already have the highest rate of premature death from power plant pollution in the country – and nobody’s talking about shutting down or cleaning up old plants, just adding new ones. They want to add them here, because the coal is here – and the coal apologists are waving green ribbons around and singing gaily about how wonderful they are.

“Sure, they should research the idea of carbon sequestration – but you’re talking like it’s a mature and reliable technology, when in fact no one knows if it will work. How do we know it won’t all come blasting back out – perhaps decades later? How do we know it won’t increase seismic activity?

“Then there’s the mining. Here, they do what they call mountaintop removal mining, which means destruction on an appalling scale, using machinery sitting on wheels clad in tires twice the height of a man, after clearcutting some of the most diverse hardwood forest in the temperate world…and burning or burying it, because the profits from timber are too trivial to be worth their time. Please investigate the website of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, www.ohvec.org, for more information – including checking out some of the high-resolution pictures.”

It’s time the country understood the full cycle, the full toll of our continued reliance on fossil fuels. If enough of us speak up, those “clean” coal research dollars can go into truly clean energy research!