Bushbots Killing Appalachia
The Bushbots are about to try to screw over their Southern base yet again by eliminating regulations restricting coal companies in Appalachia.
Understand that already, the coal industry has used the explosive equivalent (474,000 metric tons) of 27 Hiroshima bombs on that region of the Southern United States in their coal mountain "topping" efforts. Appalachia includes one of the most biologically diverse temperate forest regions on the planet, and is therefore vital for world conservation efforts, yet thanks to criminally reckless commercial enterprises like so-called "mountain topping" is it now critically endangered and literally 95% of the habitat has been degraded in a stunning abuse of the natural world.
Vernon Halton of the local activist group Coal River Mountain Watch has stated Appalachia's 20 million residents are, "treated like a Third World resource colony."
Now the Bush Administration is going to help them further deregulate, by abolishing the 20 year-old requirement that mines need to get a variance (permission) to dump their waste within 100 feet of rivers. Already this rule is regularly ignored, to the point where over 1200 miles of river haven't just been poisoned, but 700 miles have just been flat-out buried.
The Bush Administration is proposing to eliminate the rules entirely and just allow what are called "valley fills". In essence, they clear-cut all the trees off the top of a mountain, bury or burn the timber, blow the top of a mountain off, then dump the top of the mountain into the valley, thus devastating twice as much nature as they're nuking now.
The coal industry is basically going to use the deaths of the coal miners in Utah, as a way to obliterate what's left of Appalachia, under the claim that mountaintop removal is "safer" than underground mining. But this is simply not the case.
Underground mining, PROPERLY REGULATED for safety, is safer for workers and the surrounding area than topping is. Underground mining provides more jobs and impacts surrounding areas less. But topping is cheaper, they don't have to pay more workers or attend to their pesky safety needs, and they can make specious claims like that the coal sickness that surrounding residents are suffering from, comes from some vague other factor, thereby letting them die slowly, while the company's profits increase. That, or let local residents potentially die VERY quickly as it nearly did in 2000, when one of their coal slurries collapsed and buried a community in one of the worst environmental disasters in American history, the Massey Energy Company Coal Slurry Spill.
That spill sent 300 million gallons of coal slurry (basically toxic black goop) cascading down onto people's property in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The slurry contained hazardous chemicals, including arsenic and mercury, and polluted 100 miles of stream, killed everything in the water, all the way to the Ohio River.
It was only by the grace of God, or shear blind luck that no one was killed.
And what is interesting about that spill is its relationship to the current head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy, the coal industry shill, and Bush recess appointment, Richard Stickler, who himself ran mines with shite safety records.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/08/15/mine-safety-czar-richard-_n_60581.html
The Bush Administration tried to cover up the spill by throwing monkey wrenches into the investigation of the disaster, because Massey Energy and CEO Don Blankenship are BIG donors to the GOP.
Ultimately Massey was only fined $110,000 -- for a spill 25 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. (By contrast, Exxon was fined $5 billion dollars for the Valdez incident, and even that was a drop in the bucket fine for all the damage they caused).
If that Massey fine doesn't strike you as corrupt political influence at work, I don't know what will.
The man who blew the whistle on the Massey Energy Company Coal Slurry Spill was Richard Stickler's predecessor, Jack Spadaro, the FORMER head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy. After he revealed the problem, the Bush Administration illegally fired him, and replaced him with the compliant industry hack the Bush Administration was confident would not enforce all those silly safety regulations.
And Stickler didn't enforce the regs. And people died. And now they're trying to use those deaths to put even MORE people at risk.
Nice huh?
These people are not just liars. They are MURDERERS.
Understand that already, the coal industry has used the explosive equivalent (474,000 metric tons) of 27 Hiroshima bombs on that region of the Southern United States in their coal mountain "topping" efforts. Appalachia includes one of the most biologically diverse temperate forest regions on the planet, and is therefore vital for world conservation efforts, yet thanks to criminally reckless commercial enterprises like so-called "mountain topping" is it now critically endangered and literally 95% of the habitat has been degraded in a stunning abuse of the natural world.
Vernon Halton of the local activist group Coal River Mountain Watch has stated Appalachia's 20 million residents are, "treated like a Third World resource colony."
Now the Bush Administration is going to help them further deregulate, by abolishing the 20 year-old requirement that mines need to get a variance (permission) to dump their waste within 100 feet of rivers. Already this rule is regularly ignored, to the point where over 1200 miles of river haven't just been poisoned, but 700 miles have just been flat-out buried.
The Bush Administration is proposing to eliminate the rules entirely and just allow what are called "valley fills". In essence, they clear-cut all the trees off the top of a mountain, bury or burn the timber, blow the top of a mountain off, then dump the top of the mountain into the valley, thus devastating twice as much nature as they're nuking now.
The coal industry is basically going to use the deaths of the coal miners in Utah, as a way to obliterate what's left of Appalachia, under the claim that mountaintop removal is "safer" than underground mining. But this is simply not the case.
Underground mining, PROPERLY REGULATED for safety, is safer for workers and the surrounding area than topping is. Underground mining provides more jobs and impacts surrounding areas less. But topping is cheaper, they don't have to pay more workers or attend to their pesky safety needs, and they can make specious claims like that the coal sickness that surrounding residents are suffering from, comes from some vague other factor, thereby letting them die slowly, while the company's profits increase. That, or let local residents potentially die VERY quickly as it nearly did in 2000, when one of their coal slurries collapsed and buried a community in one of the worst environmental disasters in American history, the Massey Energy Company Coal Slurry Spill.
That spill sent 300 million gallons of coal slurry (basically toxic black goop) cascading down onto people's property in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The slurry contained hazardous chemicals, including arsenic and mercury, and polluted 100 miles of stream, killed everything in the water, all the way to the Ohio River.
It was only by the grace of God, or shear blind luck that no one was killed.
And what is interesting about that spill is its relationship to the current head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy, the coal industry shill, and Bush recess appointment, Richard Stickler, who himself ran mines with shite safety records.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/08/15/mine-safety-czar-richard-_n_60581.html
The Bush Administration tried to cover up the spill by throwing monkey wrenches into the investigation of the disaster, because Massey Energy and CEO Don Blankenship are BIG donors to the GOP.
Ultimately Massey was only fined $110,000 -- for a spill 25 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. (By contrast, Exxon was fined $5 billion dollars for the Valdez incident, and even that was a drop in the bucket fine for all the damage they caused).
If that Massey fine doesn't strike you as corrupt political influence at work, I don't know what will.
The man who blew the whistle on the Massey Energy Company Coal Slurry Spill was Richard Stickler's predecessor, Jack Spadaro, the FORMER head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy. After he revealed the problem, the Bush Administration illegally fired him, and replaced him with the compliant industry hack the Bush Administration was confident would not enforce all those silly safety regulations.
And Stickler didn't enforce the regs. And people died. And now they're trying to use those deaths to put even MORE people at risk.
Nice huh?
These people are not just liars. They are MURDERERS.
posted by CTF Editor at
12:57 PM
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