Letter to the Editor, Washington Post, April 26

Why don’t Congress and the media focus on the real problem with coal?

How "cleanly" it is burned is not the issue. The problem is how it is extracted. Sens. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are being hypocritical at best when they influence their poverty-stricken constituents to fear the loss of their coal-mining jobs. The loss they’re experiencing now as a result of coal mining is far more devastating.

Huge swaths of West Virginia and Kentucky are being systematically and irretrievably destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining. Now and then someone will write an article about it in The Post or elsewhere, seemingly as a way to assuage our consciences, but this travesty should be at the center of every argument against the use of coal.

"As we break the chains of foreign oil," to use the words of Jenny Thalheimer, a spokeswoman for Mr. Byrd, we may find ourselves in new chains, put there by the powerful representatives of domestic coal.