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Appalachian Voices: Follow the coal money
Want to know how much money your elected representative in Washington, D.C., received from the coal industry? A North Carolina environmental group is pledging to put that information right at your fingertips.
A new Web site tracks and lists the amount of donations that federal politicians receive from coal interests. Follow the Coal Money, at www.followthecoalmoney.org, is the latest salvo in what is turning out to be an increasingly heated battle over the future of coal in the nation's energy policy.
I'm not saying it is a big corporate conspiracy, but what (the money) is being spent for, it is being spent for a good reason, said Matt Wasson, director of programs for Appalachian Voices, which runs the site.
Coal is once again front and center as the nation's top leaders debate energy policy. Both presidential candidates have pledged to take actions to curb global warming, yet at the same time energy use is on the rise, thanks in part to new technology. For example, one Australian study found that a Playstation 3 uses five times the amount of energy as a five-foot high refrigerator.
Coal remains among the cheapest and most abundant energy-producing natural resource. Yet concerns over its environmental impacts have helped stop plans for new coal-burning power plants across the nation.
The coal industry is fighting back by ramping up its public relations efforts. Over the past year it has quadrupled its budget for its primary political campaign, called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, according to news reports The campaign has run advertisements on TV touting the benefits of coal and maintains its own Web site at www.americaspower.org.
Follow the Coal Money is partly a response to that campaign. Its mission is touted on the front page: As Congress debates how to address two of coal's biggest problems mountaintop removal and global warming you can find out how polluters are influencing lawmakers with their dirty coal money.
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I believe it is simply a given that politicians are too devoid of true moral insight as to understand the amount of damage this form of energy continues to do to the planet and the health and safety of human beings. This is why I have little faith that any sort of comprehensive climate bill will pass in Congress regardless of who sits in the White House. In order for that to happen they would have to have a moral epiphany... or, see that the people have taken it upon themselves to bring the alternate energies we need to sustain ourselves and this planet to market. Solar and wind are booming now, but you won't hear that from the corrupt Congress that continues to collect the money of the coal and nuclear industries while touting how much they are for the environment... even as they work to kill tax incentives for those very alternate energy sources they claim we need.
The site Appalachian Voices put together now allows you to follow the members of Congress who talk out of both sides of their mouths to see how much they are taking from coal and to hold them accountable for it as they are accomplices in the continued erosion of our environment. Hopefully louder voices will be heard on the part of the people knowing they have the power to then tell these representatives that if they continue to side with the destruction of our planet in the form of pollution and it's contribution to climate change that we the people have the power to see to it that they do not serve us any longer. It has to begin with us, because it sure isn't going to begin with them. Want to know how much money your elected representative in Washington, D.C., received from the coal industry? A North Carolina environ... more -
Blasting the Appalachian Economy
The Apppalachian people, along with our oldest mountains, are paying the full price for coal. Coal companies are really good at making promises.
The families and communities of Appalachia have, in fact, been the beneficiary of coal company promises for 150 years, with a lasting peace and prosperity always “just over this next dune,” or in the case of Appalachia…just under our next mountain.
Over the last 30 years in Appalachian coal country we have seen more than 1 million acres of some of the most bio-diverse forest in the world destroyed, more than 1200 miles of vital American headwater streams buried and polluted by mountaintop removal mining waste, and over 474 mountains blasted to rubble by mountaintop removal coal mining (check out Appalachian Mountaintop Removal in Google Earth ).
All the while, coal companies have promised up that while there may be some environmental trade-off to mountaintop removal mining – it was SURE to bring great jobs and prosperity to the region. But while many corporate zillionaires from outside the region have profited mightily off of our resources, the Appalachian people have learned that mountaintop removal does the same thing to our economy that it does to our beloved mountains.
In 1995, Harvard economists Jeffery Sachs and Andrew Warner discovered a clear negative relationship between natural resource-base exports, including agriculture, minerals, and fuels, and GDP growth.
They dubbed this phenomenon "The Resource Curse."
Of the 95 countries they investigated, only two achieved a 2% annual GDP growth rate between 1970-1989. A more common occurrence was increased poverty, warfare, and civil strife.
Electric power generation pulled in more than $380 billion in 2005. More than half of that electricity generation came from coal.
If we’ve been mining coal for 150 years...why are the people of Appalachia among the poorest in the country? The Apppalachian people, along with our oldest mountains, are paying the full price for coal. Coal companies are really good at making... more -
EPA proposes allowing coal plants to be built near national parks
Critics fear the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will adopt a rule in the waning days of the Bush administration that will make it easier to build coal-fired power plants near national parks.
The proposed change, pending since last June, comes as the utility industry moves into its biggest building boom in coal-fueled power plants in decades. To meet growing electricity needs, more than 20 plants are under construction in 14 states and more than 100 are in various stages of planning.
Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, vowed in an interview with The Associated Press to push Congress to overrule the EPA if it enacts the rule, perhaps as early as this summer.
The new rule would change the way states, the EPA and others calculate the impact of a new pollution source, like a coal plant, on a park's maximum pollution load, said John Bunyak of the National Park Service's Air Resources Division in Denver. Instead of weighing peak periods of pollution, the new rule would use annual averages.
Don Barger, southern regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, compared it to a person sticking one hand in a block of ice and the other in a fire.
"Your average temperature is just fine, but your hands are not," he said. "You are getting some real impact there."
As an example, he said air quality in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the country's most-visited national park with more than 9 million visitors a year, recently reached an "orange alert" pollution warning. The park straddles the Tennessee-North Carolina border.
When that happens, "the park is getting hammered. People in the park are getting hammered. Plants in the park are getting hammered," Barger said. "It doesn't matter where it averages out some other time. You have a family from Ohio on vacation. It is the only time they are going to be there. What views can they see? What air are they breathing?"
EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn said the rule is part of an EPA program to prevent air quality degradation in national parks and would not change the level of emissions allowed in clean-air areas.
But in a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, Alexander writes that the National Park Service and the EPA's own regional air quality experts have determined the proposal would result in undercounting of actual pollution sources.
Alexander wrote that the National Park Service says the rule "provides the lowest possible degree of protection" for 156 so-called Class 1 areas that include the country's most revered national parks and preserves, from Acadia in Maine to Yellowstone in Wyoming. Critics fear the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will adopt a rule in the waning days of the Bush administration that will make i... more -
Danger of toxic mercury fillings exposed in groundbreaking lawsuit
"The FDA has, for decades, ridiculously insisted that mercury fillings pose no health threat whatsoever to children. While dismissing hundreds of studies showing a clear link between mercury amalgam fillings ("silver fillings") and disastrous neurological effects in the human body, the FDA denied the truth about mercury and effectively protected the mercury filling racket that has brought so much harm to so many people. For over a hundred years, a cabal of "mercury mongers" made up of the American Dental Association, mercury filling manufacturers and indignant dentists have reaped windfall profits by implanting toxic fillings into the mouths of children, all while insisting that mercury - one of the most toxic heavy metals known to modern science - posed no health threat whatsoever.
Today, that reign of toxicity is about to end. Thanks to the tireless, multi-year efforts of people like Charles Brown, National Counsel for Consumers for Dental Choice (www.ToxicTeeth.org), the FDA has now been forced to acknowledge a fact so fundamental that, by any measure of honest science, it should have adopted the position decades ago. What position is that? Simply that mercury is toxic to humans.
The FDA's stonewalling on this issue has been nothing less than a circus of politically-motivated denials, much like the Big Tobacco executives swearing under oath that "Nicotine is not addictive." In similar style, the FDA insisted for decades that "Mercury is not toxic." Both statements, as any sane person can readily conclude, are the outbursts of lunatics. Sadly, those lunatics somehow remain in charge of our nation's food, drugs and cosmetics (and dental care), meaning that any real progress to protect the People must come from outside the FDA.
And that's exactly what just happened. Consumers for Dental Choice teamed up with Moms Against Mercury (www.MomsAgainstMercury.org) to sue the FDA and its commissioner whose name sounds like an evil-minded villian right out of a Marvel comic book: Von Eschenbach. The lawsuit, entitled, Moms Against Mercury et al. v. Von Eschenbach, Commissioner, et al was concluded earlier this week with a reluctant agreement by the FDA to both change its website on the issue of mercury and to reclassify mercury within one year, following a period of public comment (which the agency will no doubt try to drag out as long as possible in order to avoid actually sticking to the terms of the lawsuit agreement).
Remarkably, the FDA's website no longer claims mercury is harmless. The language has now been changed in dramatic fashion, reading: "Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetus."
There's still a lot of fudging there. Note the careful use of the word "may," which means the FDA still isn't sure whether mercury is neurotoxic, but it might be. This is the FDA's way of continuing to stonewall this issue, even as it lost its lawsuit. For any FDA officials who don't yet think mercury is toxic to the human nervous system, I invite them to chug a few milliliters of the substance themselves and find out what the effects might be. It certainly couldn't make them any more mad than they are already!"
By Mike Adams// Natural News
http://www.naturalnews.com/023367.html
Full story at link. "The FDA has, for decades, ridiculously insisted that mercury fillings pose no health threat whatsoever to children. While dismis... more -
Obama, Clinton don't dare challenge King Coal's unspeakable environmenta...
It's the one environmental crime that no US politician will confront – the destruction of Kentucky's mountains. Leonard Doyle visits the Appalachian peaks being blasted by Big Coal.
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The road slicing through the thickly forested hills of eastern Kentucky used to be called the Daniel Boone Parkway. It was named for the controversial American folk hero who fought his way across Indian country to settle a state where many of his descendants still live.
That was before the coal industry began blowing up the Appalachian Mountains as a cheap way of getting at the black stuff below, behaviour decried by the environmental group Appalachian Voices as "one of the greatest human rights and environmental tragedies in America's recent history".
Daniel Boone's road is now the Hal Rogers Parkway, named after one of the Kentucky coal industry's closest friends in Washington, a Republican Congressman of 34 years. It passes through a mountain range older than the Himalayas and is blanketed in broadleaf forests rivalled only by the Amazon basin in its biodiversity.
But the canopy of trees which lines the parkway as it rises from the bluegrass horse country to the mountains is a trompe l'oeil. The lush forest gives way to scraggly trees along the ridge-line, and behind those trees is evidence of unspeakable ecological violence. In a process known as mountaintop removal an upland moonscape is being created, which is incapable of regenerating trees. As far as the eye can see, the land is grey and pockmarked with huge black lakes, filled with toxic coal slurry.
This has come about because of America's insatiable appetite for cheap coal to generate electricity, a process enthusiastically backed by the Bush administration as it tries to displace the consumption of imported oil. And the Democrats are little better. They control Kentucky and neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton have dared to challenge "King Coal" while campaigning.
The devastation being wrought on Appalachia is best appreciated from the air. An organisation called Southwinds offers people an eagle-eye view of the carnage, not readily appreciated from the road. Another way to see what's going on behind the ridge-line is to take a Google Earth virtual tour of an online memorial to the 470 mountains blown up and levelled in recent years. It's the one environmental crime that no US politician will confront – the destruction of Kentucky's mountains. Leonard Doyl... more -
Celebrate clean coal, come on!
In one TV commercial, Kool and the Gang warble their celebration of good times because coal, yes, coal, makes the party possible in America. In another, white and black, young and old, male and female, and even someone in a doctor's green scrubs, stare into the camera and soulfully declare: "I believe" American know-how will make coal clean and stop it from contributing to climate change. Not sold? Maybe you missed the newspaper ads and billboards warning that turning away from coal could mean blackouts, unemployment and higher electric bills.
These messages and other variations on the coal-is-great theme are flooding the nation courtesy of the coal industry, coal-fueled utilities, railroads and related industries. The pro-coal marketing campaign -- known by its tag line "Clean Coal" -- has kicked into high gear as prospects for new plants have turned bleak. Wall Street is tightening financing, leading to what one analyst told the Christian Science Monitor is a "de facto moratorium on coal power." The expected election of a more environmentally friendly president may lead to the first federal limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Even red states like Kansas are now battling the construction of coal-fired plants. Last year, 59 new plants were either canceled or halted across the nation.
When it comes to the threat of global warming, "the coal industry are the last people to get it," says Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit, progressive think tank. "That's why they're fighting so hard. They're on a death spiral right now."
The coal industry's woes have risen as worries over climate change have increased. Today's coal-fired plants emit copious amounts of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas. One new plant planned for Iowa, for example, would dump 5.9 million tons of the stuff into the air in just one year. Two proposed Kansas plants would add 11 million tons annually.
snip
As the coal debate continues, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced April 23 that global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by 19 billion tons in the last year. The worldwide concentration is now 385 parts per million. The level that is expected to tip the world into disaster is 450 parts per million.
But climate change isn't raining on the coal industry's campaign. In April, Barack Obama acknowledged a voter sporting one of the industry's hats at a campaign stop in Dunmore, Penn., and then used the industry's own terminology to talk about his support for investing in carbon storage research. In an appearance in Charleston, W.Va., Hillary Clinton also used the industry's own words to pledge her support for doing the same.
Obama, Clinton and John McCain all favor legislation to fight climate change. The nearly identical programs proposed by the two Democrats are more far-reaching than that put forth by McCain. However, none of them support a moratorium on building new coal-fired plants.
Meanwhile, the Clean Coal marketing machine keeps rolling. As one commercial declares, coal powers "our way of life." On the soundtrack, Kool and the Gang sing, "Celebrate good times, come on!"
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What an insidious campaign. And all the presidential candidates go along with it! It is time to tell them to stop this pandering to those industries who care about nothing but their own balance sheets. CO2 levels are now the highest they have been in 650,000 years and it is because of the very garbage being spewed by coal plants.
"Clean coal" is an assault on reason! Shame on Obama, Clinton, and McCain for giving it credence to get votes while people die from its effects. In one TV commercial, Kool and the Gang warble their celebration of good times because coal, yes, coal, makes the party possible in Am... more -
Clinton, Obama talk up clean coal
US Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are talking more about "clean coal" and less about global warming as they woo voters in West Virginia and Kentucky - two states that sit at the heart of the nation's coal economy.
In a bid to draw voters ahead of Democratic primaries in West Virginia tomorrow and Kentucky on May 20, both candidates are playing up the ascendant role of commercially untested and so far economically nonviable ways of converting America's plentiful coal supplies into electricity without spewing massive quantities of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
"We need some big investments right now in figuring out how to capture and store carbon dioxide from coal," Senator Clinton told a rally in the rural town of Clear Fork.
To get there, she took a windy road through the Appalachian Mountains that passed at least four big coal mines cut into the mountainside.
Not to be outdone, Senator Obama's campaign has distributed flyers in Kentucky stating that "Barack Obama believes in clean Kentucky coal." The flyers show a picture of giant barges carrying coal down the Ohio River.
Coal-fired power plants generate about half of US electricity supplies, and account for about 40 per cent of US greenhouse gas emissions - the biggest single industrial source. US Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are talking more about "clean coal" and less about glob... more -
Court Strikes Down EPA's Plan On Mercury
The EPA hoped to make it easier for plants to spew mercury emissions by organizing a
'cap and trade' system that would actually do little to address the problem. Now they will have to enforce the more stringent guidelines on mercury emissions outlined eight years ago that will save the lives of thousands of newborns in this country. This is surely a victory for environmentalists and the world. The EPA hoped to make it easier for plants to spew mercury emissions by organizing a ... more -
An Open Letter to Lush Rimbaugh - true "Excellence in Broadcasting"
An Open Letter to Lush Rimbaugh
Dear Lush,
I love watching your show or catching it on the radio. It sort of capsulizes the whole day's news for me. I used to have to contend with trying to get the REAL news of the day while still avoiding the heavily biased Mainstream Media every single day as I drove hither and yon. Now, however, I have figured out that everyone in our own corner of the world (Radio Rightyland) takes their cue from you and that they simply rehash what you’ve already said. That way, I don’t have to catch Sean Insanity, Michael “Silly” Savage, Jerry Boil, Lars Larceny, Laura Inbred, Michael Medhead, Mark “the voice” Levin and the rest of the people who warn us about those awful Liberals.
Sometimes, I can even skip watching the FAUX “News” Channel when you bless us with one of your real in-depth tirades.
Way back when you commented that those Abu Ghraib prison abuse pictures were just “bored kids having fun with a camera”, I couldn’t have agreed more.
I mean Rumsfeld's possession of those same pictures and his own pre-approved decision to skip the Geneva Convention guidelines was just because he had too much to do to sit down and go through a bunch of whiney reports from his own chain of command, Amnesty International and The International Red Cross in the months before the scandal broke in the Mainstream Media. People just don’t realize how busy Secretaries of Defense are under President Bush.
I especially loved that obvious mental giant, Timothy Hitchens, on your show that time when he was supposed to debate Michael Moore. I'm not entirely sure, but I think he narrowly defeated an absent Michael Moore at least on answering your questions and the sound byte editing of Moore's comments put even F-911 to shame as far as honest reporting goes. Well, I think that was your show but it could have been "Scarborough Country" (Oh, it really doesn't matter since you are usually the source for the rest of them.)
Lush, I know the GOP Platform states that Republicans are against the Endangered Species Act but I’d like to ask a favor, kind sir.
With your being "connected" in reality-based environmental circles and knowing so much about the hoax of global warming really being caused by Mount Pinatubo, I was wondering if you could check to see if any of the money we'll save when Republicans get the Endangered Species Act overturned could be used to help genetically engineer a fish that eats mercury before Tunas can get to it? I say that only because my wife and I love Tuna fish sandwiches almost as much as your maid loved oxycontin. Did you ever get her off that stuff?
You know also you might just check with your doctor to see if she might have been trying to poison you with oxycontin since high doses of it can cause hearing loss and you still have not determined why you lost your hearing. You never know what those illegal aliens will put in your food just because you report on their crossing the border without papers.
All in all, Lush, you simply can’t know how much I appreciate your capsulization of Rightyland for the whole day for me. You save me so much aggravation when I try to get all the bits and pieces from everywhere else. You are truly the “Host with the Most”!
All those terrible Liberals want to do is scream about how much of the earth they think the Republicans have been responsible for scorching and otherwise destroying each day.
Any time you'd like to have me on your show, I'd be honored to tape several hours of drivel while masquerading as some Liberal nut job and have you edit it to show just how awful they are.
Again, Lush, thank you for all you do!
Yours truly,
Ivan Norris “Ino” Fulwell
May George Bush bless you and keep you and cause his face to shine upon you and give you peace. An Open Letter to Lush Rimbaugh Dear Lush, ... more
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Mercury Poisoning
