Old Rocks
Diamond Member
- Thread starter
- #41
What the fuck? The EPA is supposed to fix what the coal companies have screwed up? So you are cheering for the companies privatizing the profits and socializing the costs. So now we see your true colors. You want us to pay for the electricity twice. Coal's image is the fault of the coal companies. And there is no cheap way to make coal clean. Time for that source of energy to be put in the dustbin where it belongs.Then why are they not doing it, except for a few Potemkin Villages.My, my, how you 'Conservatives' love your 'alteranative facts. What a lying asshole you are. Here is the reality of what is happening;
Plundering Appalachia - The Tragedy of Mountaintop-Removal Coal Mining :: The Issue
Mountaintop-removal mines in Appalachia are estimated to produce just 5 to 10 percent of total U.S. coal production, and generate less than 4 percent of our electricity—an amount that could be eliminated from the energy supply with small gains in energy efficiency and conservation. This highly destructive form of surface mining is disfiguring an entire region, the coalfield areas of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, because of one reason: profit.
More than 470 mountains in the southern Appalachians, which are among the oldest mountains on Earth, have already been sheared off. Vast areas of wildlife habitat, the most biologically diverse forest in North America, have been obliterated. Roughly 2000 miles of streams have been filled or severly degraded by mining waste, all in pursuit of coal. And coal is a lousy way to power a society.
From mining to burning to disposing the combustion waste, it’s a dirty business. Unfortunately, in our reductionist age, too often people looking at the coal problem don’t consider the whole problem. Only by contemplating the entire life cycle of fossil energy—coal extraction, preparation, transportation, combustion, and waste disposal of by-products—can one fully understand the enormity of coal’s toxic legacy.
See how coal’s toxic legacy stretches from blown-up mountains to a dangerously warming planet to coal ash dumps polluting air and water:
The most profitable way to decapitate a mountain. Blow its top off, section by section, and then move the rubble with heavy equipment. Sometimes the forest cloaking the condemned mountain is clear-cut; more often the trees are simply scraped away, bulldozed into a pile, and burned. A pad is leveled, and a large drilling rig bores a series of holes. Into them goes a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—the same type of explosive that homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh used to bomb the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Prior to detonation, warning whistles sound. When the charge explodes, the earth shudders. The explosions may shake and crack house foundations, startle wildlife, and spray a large area with dust and flying rock. Coal mining is far and away the largest industrial consumer of explosives in the United States. According to government figures for 2005, more than 1.8 billion pounds of high explosives were used in West Virginia and Kentucky alone, primarily in surface-mining operations.
The most ancient mountains in North America, plundered for profit. The forest covering these venerable ridges and valleys is a global hotspot of biological diversity. An estimated 800,000 acres of that forest have already been destroyed—and more than 470 mountains sheared off—by surface-mining operations. Sometimes hundreds of feet of elevation are lost as a mountain’s original contour is blasted away. The topsoil, foundation of the landscape’s exceptional diversity of life, is wasted. Broad, plateau-like mesas remain. Federal law does not require formerly forested mine sites to be reforested during “reclamation.” Even when operators meet their legal obligations to reclaim mined areas, the result is a biological wasteland compared to the native forest—generally a thin, green sheen of exotic grass growing on compacted rubble. The return of a vibrant, ecologically healthy natural community that approaches its former richness is a distant dream.
Mountaintop removal is strip-mining on steroids. Massive dump trucks, huge bulldozers, and ten-story-high draglines can undo in months what geological processes took millions of years to build. Typically, multiple coal seams are exposed as a mountaintop-removal operation dismantles the landscape, piece by piece. The earthmoving equipment requires only a handful of operators. Mine- related employment in the Appalachian coalfields has plummeted in recent decades because of increasing mechanization, and because production has shifted from underground to surface mining—“taking the miner out of mining,” as local residents say. These radical strip-mining operations not only obliterate the former habitat and homes of innumerable wild creatures, they also reshape the very contour of the horizon. The familiar curves and folds of the landscape, the mountains that have anchored communities for generations, are simply gone.
Awwwwwww ... Such a sad story. How come you only told HALF of it and left out the happy ending???
http://mining.state.co.us/Programs/Abandoned/Reclamation/Pages/AwardsandAccolades.aspx
Or in Virginia.
Geez.. You'd think that REAL environmentalists -- even lefty ones --- would be smart enough to find ways to address the problem OTHER than crying and throwing hissy fits..
Most damage can be fixed if there is a will and enough $$.
I have no issue with forcing companies that break things to fix them, but using regulations as an excuse to kill an industry under the guise of regulating it is dishonest.
Exactly. It's used as excuse. The damage is NOWHERE NEAR permanent if it's addressed and if there was the WILL -- companies and jobs would be created to move Mother Nature back into place. Better than before.
Not costly to plant stuff and regrade. Not at all.
Because the EPA is spending too much money on Climate Change and wants to KILL the coal industry rather than make it look pretty?? C'mon man. Think !!!! They WANT the ugly pictures.. They HAVE the power and money to fix it. It's a drop in the freaking bucket if they were motivated to help coal clean up it's image.
