Written by Lance Brisbois, Holly Jones and Juliana Williams
While Robert Kennedy Jr. and Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, debated mountaintop removal coal mining last night, the momentum against coal is building across the country and world. Beginning yesterday, three activists with Climate Ground Zero halted blasting on Coal River Mountain, and they are continuing their tree sit today despite Massey’s intimidation efforts which include felling trees near the activists and deafening noise machines. Delhi, India, with a population of over 12 million residents, announced that it will shut down all five of its coal-fired power plants over the next four years. Earlier this month, Rising Tide in Australia blocked coal trains in protest of the weak outcomes of Copenhagen.
And the fight against coal continues in Iowa. Over a year ago the Iowa EPC started preliminary efforts to create stricter regulations for coal ash disposal sites however these efforts were quickly derailed by owners of disposal sites, including the
University of Iowa, coal producers, and the announcement of the US. Environmental Protection Agency’s vow to release national regulations by the end of the year. These moves were prompted by the massive coal slurry spills in late 2008, where more than a billion gallons of coal slurry flooded homes and poisoned water supplies in Tennessee. Such a disaster should never have been allowed to occur, and we must act to prevent similar incidents. The EPA’s promise has yet to be fulfilled, and the deadline is postponed indefinitely.
Iowa currently has four unlined landfills where coal ash is being disposed, one of which is the dumping site for Iowa’s three public universities which are among the largest ash producers in Iowa. After the July 2009 announcement that the three state universities would look into their ash dumping procedures it was decided, through a
closed investigation, that the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa would continue their questionable coal ash disposal practices. Following the discovery of these practices, students in Iowa have been pressuring their schools to change their irresponsible methods with positive results! After feeling pressure from the students and the public, Iowa state universities announced that they will now begin to
monitor groundwater at their coal ash disposal site. While this is a step forward in regulating coal ash dumping in the state, students in Iowa have just begun their fight against coal. A joint effort between campus organizations, environmental nonprofits across the state, and the
Sierra Student Coalition’s Campuses Beyond Coal will launch this spring to ensure that coal-fired power plants are eliminated from campuses and communities in Iowa for good!
Coal ash contains such toxins as mercury, lead, and arsenic, yet these disposal sites are not required by the state to install protective liners, nor are they required to test groundwater for leaching. Despite an EPA report showing that arsenic in groundwater increases the cancer risk by 500 times, the federal government still has not taken action to protect Americans.
The EPA’s failure to act puts state coal ash policy in limbo. This week the Iowa EPC decided that it did not want to wait any longer on updating it’s rules. They sent a unanimous
letter to the EPA demanding an update to the rules. Stringent federal legislation would, of course, cover all the states, improving public health and environmental quality nationwide.
Help amplify Iowa’s call to action on coal by urging your state to press the EPA for coal ash rules. Wherever you are, there is work to be done to fight coal. Go!
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Thanks for posting this! It would be appreciated if the Rising Tide action was covered correctly – it was a month ago – not yesterday Please check that.
I hope the tree sitters on Coal River Mountain can stop blasting for many days to come!
There is very good news to report about the Iowa EPC. It took action this week, voting to send a letter to the U.S. EPA urging action on coal ash. Iowans can be proud as their EPC was the first environmental protection board in the country to take this step. http://iowaindependent.com/25944/iowa-epc-calls-for-federal-coal-ash-rules
Kelly Fuller
Communications Director
Plains Justice
Nick – thanks for the correction, it’s fixed.
Kelly, I’m not sure how it happened, but the EPC’s action was accidentally omitted from the post and is back in. Thanks so much for the work that you folks have done on this – it really is exciting to see such a strong step.
More attention should be paid to it.
Mountaintop removal is a horrific method of mining coal and must be stopped. Five hundred beautiful mountains have been already been destroyed forever.
America desperately needs coal while waiting for solar, hydro, wind and nuclear to come on line. Big coal companies can make a healthy profit mining coal underground. There are millions of tons of high quality coal deep underground. We have new technologies that enable miners to produce the coal safely, using methods that are environmentally acceptable. Dick Blizzard
All of this is great news, and I’m especially heartened by the report that Delhi is shutting down five coal plants! Maybe some of our US utilities could learn a lesson from those in India. Here in Oregon, Portland General Electric (PGE) has balked at closing the Boardman Coal Plant by 2014, claiming it would be impractical. Yet in Delhi FIVE coal plants are closing within a similar time frame to that which we climate activists in Oregon are pushing to close Boardman by. Apparently one of the supposedly greenest regions of the US can’t keep pace with Delhi, and our utilites are being left behind by those in India in the race to be rid of coal. I hope PGE takes note.
Great article, thanks for covering these developments!
TO THE AUTHORS: The coal work happening at Iowa State last semester was with the campus environmental group ActivUS. This work was supported by the Greenpeace Student Network (http://www.greenpeacestudents.org). We are continuing to fight coal in Iowa this semester, and I would love the opportunity to keep the authors updated for any future articles that may be written covering Iowa coal fights and the campus coal work happening this semester.
Thanks!
David Pinsky
Student Organizer
Greenpeace Student Network
The idea that some time in the future coal powered electricity generators will sequester CO2 on a grand scale, overlooks the fact that while 1 atom of carbon comes out of the earth and then gets put back, 2 oxygen atoms will be robbed from the atmosphere. And already, scientists have noticed an inexplicable fall in atmospheric oxygen since 2003 – Google “Atmospheric oxygen depletion”.