Commonwealth Times

Issue date: 11/12/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Jason Gareau Speaker Daver Cooper [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: Jason Gareau Speaker Daver Cooper [Click to enlarge]

Returning home on a dark evening, you walk into the kitchen and flick on the light.

Chances are, you're not thinking about dusty black coal as the room fills with light, but environmental advocate Dave Cooper, who spoke Thursday at the University Student Commons, said you should.

More than 50 percent of the energy in the United States comes from coal, said Cooper, who joined other advocates to discuss the dirty side of coal power.

"Think about every time you flip the switch on the wall, a mountain top explodes," Cooper said.

New mining techniques that coal companies, such as the Richmondbased Massey Energy Company, use involve explosives to blast off the tops of mountains to get to coal, instead of tunneling into the mountain.

Every day the coal companies use 4 million pounds of explosives to take 600-800 feet off the top of mountains to get coal, Cooper said, causing irreparable damage to the mountains and the communities of Appalachia.

The rubble from the blasting is deposited into river valleys. The coal is washed at the mining site, creating tons of black coal sludge, and dust drifts down into the valleys, providing residents with a constant reminder of what is occurring above in the mountains.

The environmental ramifications of mountaintop removal mining are widespread, Cooper said, and include water contamination, air pollution and flooding caused by the decimation of trees and vegetation in the area.

Containment ponds that hold the sludge sit on top of the mountains and are often abandoned, Cooper said.

In 2000, a dam holding 250 million gallons of coal-mining sludge burst and made its way down a Kentucky mountainside, destroying wildlife and homes along the way.

The Environmental Protection Agency reported that the spill was more than 20 times larger in volume than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Such disasters seem to go handin- hand with the destruction caused by the nature of the mining, Cooper said. A slide presentation illustrated that mountaintop removal mining has destroyed 500 square miles of mountains thus far.

According to Cooper, the rebuilding process is painstakingly slow.

"Experts say it takes 120 years to rebuild one inch of topsoil," Cooper said.

Although a congressional law called the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 requires coal companies to rebuild blasting sites to their original form, it is not required if the area is slated for residential or industrial use, Cooper said. These barren mountaintops remain widely unused, because people feel that if trees cannot grow on the unstable rubble, neither can communities and industries.

Mountaintop coal mining has economic ramifications as well, said Robert "Sage" Russo, who spoke on behalf of Christians for the Mountains, a nonprofit group that urges Christians to respect what they see as God's gift.

People are paying for these mining operations with their lives, he said, as he held up a picture of a child who had been killed when illegal mining practices caused a boulder to tumble down a mountain and into his home. Besides lives, Russo said, communities are losing mining, logging and recreational jobs, and entire towns are being relocated because of floods, water contamination and other things directly related to these mining practices.

Many Virginians feel far removed from the hills of West Virginia and Kentucky, where most mountaintop removal occurs, Cooper said. Such activity, however, is happening in Wise, Lee and Dickenson counties in the western part of the state.

"It affects all of us," Cooper said.

Dominion Virginia Power is planning to build a coal-fired power plant in Wise County. According to a press release by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a nonprofit organization devoted to fighting global warming in the mid-Atlantic region, the plant would use coal that would come from Virginia mountains.

Tom Owens, Virginia campus organizer from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, told students it was up to them to stop the power plant and the nod of approval it gives to mountaintop removal mining.

"We are young people, and we are the future," he said.

Owens urged students to take matters into their own hands, saying that if all Virginians switched to energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs, Dominion Virginia Power would not need to build the plant.

The student movement to change America's energy use to more efficient means is bigger than ever, he said, reporting that last weekend, during the second annual Power Shift youth summit in Washington, D.C., 5,000 students gathered to urge Congress to implement bolder energy-efficient policy.

"We want 80 percent reductions by 2050," he said, referring to carbon dioxide emissions.

Some of the biggest social movements have started in the schools, said Grace Howard, president of the Sierra Student Coalition at VCU, and VCU is mobilizing. The group is working alongside the Student Government Association to turn VCU into a carbon-neutral campus.

"This only seems devastating if we don't do anything about it," Russo said. "Let them know what you think."

Page 1 of 1

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Issue date: 11/12/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Jason Gareau Speaker Daver Cooper [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: Jason Gareau Speaker Daver Cooper [Click to enlarge]

Returning home on a dark evening, you walk into the kitchen and flick on the light.

Chances are, you're not thinking about dusty black coal as the room fills with light, but environmental advocate Dave Cooper, who spoke Thursday at the University Student Commons, said you should.

More than 50 percent of the energy in the United States comes from coal, said Cooper, who joined other advocates to discuss the dirty side of coal power.

"Think about every time you flip the switch on the wall, a mountain top explodes," Cooper said.

New mining techniques that coal companies, such as the Richmondbased Massey Energy Company, use involve explosives to blast off the tops of mountains to get to coal, instead of tunneling into the mountain.

Every day the coal companies use 4 million pounds of explosives to take 600-800 feet off the top of mountains to get coal, Cooper said, causing irreparable damage to the mountains and the communities of Appalachia.

The rubble from the blasting is deposited into river valleys. The coal is washed at the mining site, creating tons of black coal sludge, and dust drifts down into the valleys, providing residents with a constant reminder of what is occurring above in the mountains.

The environmental ramifications of mountaintop removal mining are widespread, Cooper said, and include water contamination, air pollution and flooding caused by the decimation of trees and vegetation in the area.

Containment ponds that hold the sludge sit on top of the mountains and are often abandoned, Cooper said.

In 2000, a dam holding 250 million gallons of coal-mining sludge burst and made its way down a Kentucky mountainside, destroying wildlife and homes along the way.

The Environmental Protection Agency reported that the spill was more than 20 times larger in volume than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Such disasters seem to go handin- hand with the destruction caused by the nature of the mining, Cooper said. A slide presentation illustrated that mountaintop removal mining has destroyed 500 square miles of mountains thus far.

According to Cooper, the rebuilding process is painstakingly slow.

"Experts say it takes 120 years to rebuild one inch of topsoil," Cooper said.

Although a congressional law called the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 requires coal companies to rebuild blasting sites to their original form, it is not required if the area is slated for residential or industrial use, Cooper said. These barren mountaintops remain widely unused, because people feel that if trees cannot grow on the unstable rubble, neither can communities and industries.

Mountaintop coal mining has economic ramifications as well, said Robert "Sage" Russo, who spoke on behalf of Christians for the Mountains, a nonprofit group that urges Christians to respect what they see as God's gift.

People are paying for these mining operations with their lives, he said, as he held up a picture of a child who had been killed when illegal mining practices caused a boulder to tumble down a mountain and into his home. Besides lives, Russo said, communities are losing mining, logging and recreational jobs, and entire towns are being relocated because of floods, water contamination and other things directly related to these mining practices.

Many Virginians feel far removed from the hills of West Virginia and Kentucky, where most mountaintop removal occurs, Cooper said. Such activity, however, is happening in Wise, Lee and Dickenson counties in the western part of the state.

"It affects all of us," Cooper said.

Dominion Virginia Power is planning to build a coal-fired power plant in Wise County. According to a press release by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a nonprofit organization devoted to fighting global warming in the mid-Atlantic region, the plant would use coal that would come from Virginia mountains.

Tom Owens, Virginia campus organizer from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, told students it was up to them to stop the power plant and the nod of approval it gives to mountaintop removal mining.

"We are young people, and we are the future," he said.

Owens urged students to take matters into their own hands, saying that if all Virginians switched to energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs, Dominion Virginia Power would not need to build the plant.

The student movement to change America's energy use to more efficient means is bigger than ever, he said, reporting that last weekend, during the second annual Power Shift youth summit in Washington, D.C., 5,000 students gathered to urge Congress to implement bolder energy-efficient policy.

"We want 80 percent reductions by 2050," he said, referring to carbon dioxide emissions.

Some of the biggest social movements have started in the schools, said Grace Howard, president of the Sierra Student Coalition at VCU, and VCU is mobilizing. The group is working alongside the Student Government Association to turn VCU into a carbon-neutral campus.

"This only seems devastating if we don't do anything about it," Russo said. "Let them know what you think."

Page 1 of 1

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