Coal

http://www.timesunion.com/

Mountaintop coal removal leaves environmental and health impacts

A few weeks ago, I stood on top of Armstrong Mountain. The day was clear and the valley below filled with spruce, fir and hardwood forest. Unbroken ridges extended into the distance. As my final summit of the 46 Adirondack High Peaks, it was a moment of accomplishment. But while I took in the view, I was troubled by a somber national milestone.

As of this year, over 500 of the Appalachian Mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining. It’s time for New York state to divest from this industry.

According to the Office of State Comptroller’s 2013 asset report, the state has millions invested in companies that practice what the industry decorously calls “surface mining.” But the impact of mountaintop removal mining on the people and landscape of central Appalachia is far from superficial. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates the industry has left 1.2 million acres, or over 2,000 square miles, of barren, scarred land — an area bigger than the state of Delaware. And the devastation continues.

A few days later, Vernon Haltom and I are standing on a flattened ridge in southwestern West Virginia. Here, in the dust above Coal River Valley, summertime means blasting.

“They’re at it six days a week,” says Haltom, executive director of Naoma, W.Va.-based Coal River Mountain Watch.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/

Trying to find the boom in U.S. coal? Stop in the Gillette Brewing Company in Wyoming, which 38-year-old Tom Gorton opened using some of the $70,000 a year he earns mining coal.

“Things were iffy there for a little bit, but it’s picking up now,” Gorton said at his brewery in the center of town, where customers wash down brie baked in a wood-fired oven with gluten-free blue agave ale. “When people have a little extra money, that changes things.”

In the coal region of eastern Kentucky, about 1,300 miles away, extra money is hard to come by. Brandon Farley lost his job there when the James River Coal Co. (JRCCQ) mine closed. Months of looking turned up only one job lead: a minimum wage opportunity at the local Pizza Hut.

“They want coal to be done with,” Farley said. “I believe it’s coming to an end.”

The experience of these two mining communities reflect the conflicting views of coal itself. Environmentalists see signs of its demise in shrinking production and growing concerns over global warming. Boosters point to a surge in demand by developing countries hungry for cheap and plentiful energy. Germany and Japan, too, are burning more coal as they reconsider the risks of atomic power.

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http://www.newyorker.com/

On April 20, 1914, members of the Colorado National Guard opened fire on a group of armed coal miners and set fire to a makeshift settlement in Ludlow, Colorado, where more than a thousand striking workers and their families were camped out. Today, the Ludlow massacre, which Caleb Crain wrote about in The New Yorker in 2009, remains one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of American industrial enterprise; at least sixty-six men, women, and children were killed in the attack and the days of rioting that followed, according to most historical accounts.

Although it is less well-remembered today than other dark episodes in American labor history, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that claimed a hundred and forty-six lives, the Ludlow massacre—which Wallace Stegner once called “one of the bleakest and blackest episodes of American labor history”—changed the nation’s attitude toward labor and capital for the next several decades. Its memory continues to reverberate in contemporary political discourse.

In the summer of 1913, United Mine Workers began to organize the eleven thousand coal miners employed by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. Most of the workers were first-generation immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Serbia; many had been hired, a decade prior, to replace workers who had gone on strike. In August, the union extended invitations to company representatives to meet about their grievances—including low pay, long and unregulated hours, and management practices they felt were corrupt—but they were rebuffed.

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