Coal Country premieres in West Virginia
Jeff Biggers writes at HuffPost about a new documentary, Coal Country.
As a groundbreaking clean energy counterpart to this summer's extraordinary Food, Inc. documentary on the agribusiness, the long-awaited Coal Country film on the cradle-to-grave process of generating our coal-fired electricity will be hitting the theaters next week with the big bang of an ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosive.And Big Coal ain't happy.
After a year-long campaign of threats and intimidation, the Big Coal lobby plans to have its Friends of Coal sycophants out in force to picket the premiere of the film on July 11, 7pm, at La Belle Theater in the South Charleston Museum in Charleston, West Virginia.
It looks like a good Liberty Brew & View movie.
Biggers writes about a public hearing in West Virginia where a young man comes to the same conclusion I remember hearing in Harlan County, USA.
“Both sides are scared. And we’re screaming insults back and forth at each other, and I think we’re losing sight of the source of our fears. West Virginia is the poorest state in the country, and southern West Virginia is the poorest part of it. And I think people are scared that they will lose their jobs and be flipping burgers. You look out and that’s all you see. Mining and flipping burgers. And I argue that the coal company, that they want it that way. That they want that to be the only options. That is the only way they can get support on the way they treat their workers and treat our community.”
The same thing could be said for Southern Illinois.
The soundtrack is by Kathy Mattea who's worth listening to even if you don't see the movie.
Comments
Robert F Kennedy, Jr. in his recent Washington Post article has made it easy to understand what needs to be done to combat mountaintop coal mining in Appalachia.
All that is needed is to ENFORCE THE LAWS as they are written. Here's what he has to say.
"First, the White House should fix the "fill" rule the Bush administration adopted in 2002 to allow coal companies to use streams as waste dumps. Under this perverse interpretation of the Clean Water Act, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been interred under mining waste. Obama could reverse the "fill" rule to reflect its original meaning, which forbids waste matter from being dumped into waterways.
Second, the Interior Department should strictly enforce the widely ignored "buffer zone" rule that forbids dumping waste within 100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.
Third, our laws require companies to restore mined areas to their original condition. The administration should end the absurd fiction that extraction pits filled with unconsolidated rocks and rubble where trees will never grow and streams will never flow are "reclaimed."
Fourth, current law forbids the issuance of "fill" permits that will cause "significant degradation" to waterways. It is absurd for the Army Corps of Engineers to endorse the canard that filling miles of streams is not causing significant degradation. The president should require the Corps to deny and rescind permits where operations will cause downstream damage.
Fifth, the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that they can restore the "function and structure" of affected streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act. Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this requirement.
Sixth, the administration should enforce the law requiring an environmental impact study for each permit when a mine "may have significant environmental impacts," individually or cumulatively. The Corps of Engineers routinely allows coal operators to escape this mandate - an illegal practice that should stop."
The full article is here - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070203022_pf.html
Posted by: Beth Adams | July 10, 2009 12:05 PM