Ding ding ding!! It’s round 2 in the public debate between Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President of Waterkeeper Alliance and outspoken mountaintop removal critic. The Hill, a daily
Maria Gunnoe, organizer with Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, shows coal dust she wiped off Frankie Mooney's home in Twilight, WV
congressional newspaper in Washington DC, published a set of opposing op-eds yesterday just as the 5th Annual End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington wrapped up. See Blankenship’s here and RFK Jr.’s here.
This follows the televised debate of Blankenship and Kennedy in Charleston, WV in late January, which helped focus national attention on MTR after Science magazine published an article on its destructive effects earlier in the month. Climate Ground Zero also launched a treesit the same day as the debate, which halted blasting on Massey’s Bee Tree site in Pettus, WV for nine days.
Blankenship is feeling the pressure (and surely realizes Congress is too!) as he alludes to in his op-ed, and he makes clear he believes everyone, including the media, is against “energy producers.”
Here’s a sample of how he paints government and activists:
Yet the Environmental Protection Agency has slowed the approval process and recently pulled 23 surface mining permits in West Virginia for more scrutiny. . . Regulatory shenanigans are just part of the problem. Nuisance lawsuits by environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, which filed 983 lawsuits against the federal government from 2000 to 2009, tie up the legal system and bombard private industry with legal complaints.
So, according to Blankenship, the EPA should just rubber-stamp permits instead of actually evaluating how communities will be affected. Oh and those “nuisance lawsuits” relate to the violations Massey Energy routinely commits that impact coalfield residents’ health. As Kennedy writes,
Mr. Blankenship acknowledged, in a recent debate with me, that mountaintop removal cannot be accomplished without violating the law. His company paid a record $20 million penalty for 60,534 Clean Water Act violations it admitted committing between 2000 and 2006, including spills of deadly chemicals like arsenic and selenium illegally dumped into Appalachia’s waterways . . . But the fines are merely a business expense, which explains why Massey has since admitted to 12,500 more Clean Water Act violations.
Now that sounds like some real shenanigans. But it doesn’t end there.
I saw firsthand the effects of MTR on West Virginia communities while at Climate Ground Zero in January. We visited Frankie Mooney, a disabled former coal miner, who lives in Twilight, one of the many small towns that coal is slowly decimating. Nearby blasting causes coal dust to settle on his house, which is so thick it can be wiped off with your hand. It’s not surprising then that after years of working in the mines and this continued assault on his health, Frankie is ready to move. And it just so happens that Patriot Coal, which Massey is rumored to be buying, is ready to buy him out – Frankie’s property is the lynchpin that would allow the company to begin buying out the entire town in order to mine more coal. Twilight would become another Lindytown, a ghost town the coal companies have demolished in their pursuit of profits.
Massey Energy bought out residents and then demolished their homes in Lindytown, WV
But Frankie is standing up and working with Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition towards a friendly buy-out to protect Twilight. His work and others’ is why the fight against mountaintop removal is intensifying and putting Don Blankenship on the defensive.
However, we have to keep the pressure up. Global warming denier Sen. James Inhofe (R-OKla.) trumpeted Blankenship’s op-ed message by issuing a report on behalf of the minority staff of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works committee today. Only through the continued, collective efforts of residents in Appalacia and allies across the country will we be able to deliver a knockout to mountaintop removal.
What’s encouraging to me is that the issue of mountaintop removal has at last become high-profile enough to get this kind of national attention. For years, coal companies got away with the practice mainly be hoping no one would look too hard at what they were doing. Now their disrespect for Appalachian communities is seeing the light of day, industry leaders like Blankenship can bumble and bluster all they want. Yet that won’t change the clear moral implications of a practice which destroys communities for private profit. Thank goodness we have folks like RFK to call Blankenship on his bluff.