Gov. Manchin touts one clean room in a dirty house

Hey Joe (4.00 / 1)

show us some of that MOUNTAINeer spirit and do something to preserve the place you call "Almost Heaven" including mountains, streams, forests and wildlife or quit calling yourself a Mountaineer.

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by: wv voice of reason @ Wed Oct 07, 2009 at 02:04:55 AM UTC

Clem, you left out one option (4.00 / 4)

Don't assume that Manchin was either simply misquoted or that he was lying.  It could be that he's misinformed. After all, we can only guess the extent to which he's just another willing tool for the coal magnates pulling the strings of politicians all across Appalachia for the better part of a century. However, Ken Ward provides pretty solid evidence that Governor Manchin is purposely choosing to ignore studies showing that mining coal hurts the state far more than it contributes when, Ward revealed

...[T}he [research] work by Hendryx is a more sophisticated (and difficult) analysis, which tries to do what a lot of political conservatives and folks in the coal industry say needs to be done: Weigh coal's costs and benefits against each other when considering government policies that would impact the industry.

Oddly, this research hasn't been cited much by Friends of Coal, like West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin. After Hendryx published one of his papers last year, I asked the Manchin administration if they planned to look into the issue, and this is the response I got:

Gov. Joe Manchin plans no immediate state review of coal pollution's impacts on public health following the release of four (4!) studies that raise questions about the industry's effects.

   Manchin asked two state agencies to look at the studies, but any serious follow-up investigation should be left to the federal government, state officials said.

"If what they are saying about coal, if you follow that assessment, that's not just a West Virginia issue," said Lara Ramsburg, Manchin's communications director.

Interesting, given that these days, the Manchin administration's position is that federal officials ought to keep their noses out of West Virginia's coal industry.

Not to belabor the point, Clem, but back on February 26, 1972, at a symposium in the Charleston Civic Center held by Purdue University, WVU economist William Miernyk declared outright

if allowed to continue, the environmental damage of strip mining would be so dire that other economic development would not occur, and this future would be irreversible.  He noted that surface mining has a limited life, either until all the coal is retrieved or until the legislature halts it, and with the economic and environmental health of the state at stake Miernyk supported the latter. SOURCE (PDF FILE)

Considering that Manchin graduated from WVU, one might assume that he'd be more respectful of what WVU researcher Hendryx and WVU economist Miernyk have to say, particularly when decades apart they both lead to essentially the same conclusion regarding the dire consequences of letting King Coal have its way with our natural resources. Which, come to think of it, pretty much rules out any argument that Manchin is "misinformed", doesn't it? On the other hand, since Manchin's WVU degree was in "information management" it's no leap to assume that he has more than a passing familiarity with the term "plausible deniability".

In other words, it is abundantly apparent that he's not only willfully ignoring scholars from his own Alma mater for his own political purpose, he's doing it to the extreme detriment of those who he's sworn to serve.

At this point one is only left wondering if, after Manchin's dismal display of disinformation, WVU has ceased awarding diplomas for "information management" without first requiring passing grades in several levels of ethics courses.

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by: One Citizen @ Wed Oct 07, 2009 at 02:59:53 AM UTC

fascinating (4.00 / 1)

I wasn't aware of the history of William Miernyk. When he talked about strip mining driving out other economic development, that was based on a ground-breaking scientific model:

In 1973, Wassily Leontief won the Nobel Prize for Economics for the developing input-ouput analysis -- the same methods Miernyk used in his analysis of the West Virginia economy.

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by: Clem Guttata @ Wed Oct 07, 2009 at 09:50:52 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

I was aware of Miernyk's input-output methodology (0.00 / 0)

but I wasn't aware that a Nobel prize was awarded for the development of it. That's a great point.

The reason it's important to know is because when debating the studies revealing why coal hasn't been good for West Virginia, the most effective challenge I've seen to Hendryx's research is that being merely "peer reviewed" didn't automatically mean that his conclusions were accurate.  The pro-coal faction argues that far more thorough studies should be conducted, perhaps by the CDC before we alter our current economic course in any way.

That Miernyk used Nobel-prize winning methodology back in the early seventies to reach essentially the same conclusion is therefore a real debate stopper. His input-output methodology predicted West Virginia sinking deeper and deeper before thousands of miners were fired even as strip mining expanded into surface mining and long before surface mining developed into quarry mining (aka "mountain top removal") all across Appalachia.

The only other argument I've encountered which coaliacs use coming even close to being salient was when they attempted cast doubts on modern researcher Hendryx's methodology of phoning coalfield residents to inquire about the cost of their families' health care. As a group, pro-coal debaters strongly insinuate that coal field residents lie about the health of their families at a rate of over 5 times greater than non-coalfield Appalachian families.

It should be noted that although researchers relied on interviews of coalfield residents to some extent, the follow-up research revealed that the interviews were supported by existing records.

Hendryx and Ahern found that as the amount of coal mining rose in Appalachian counties, average incomes and education went down. Meanwhile, poverty rates, unemployment rates and mortality rates went up. The researchers were particularly interested in the high mortality rates in Appalachian coal counties. On average over the years of the study, coal mining counties had 3,975 more deaths each year than a similar population of non-coal residents of Appalachia.

The two West Virginia University professors found that these premature deaths in coal communities cost the country $18.2 billion per year. source

While it's revealing that Kentucky's Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED) demonstrated that in 2006 coal mining cost the Commonwealth of Kentucky $115 million more in subsidies and expenditures than the state collected in taxes and fees, it is even more remarkable that West Virginia politicians haven't publicly clamored for our state to mount a comparable breakdown. Could that be because they know that WVU economist Miernyk's predictions from 1972 have all come true?

Clem, since you're on far better terms with Ken Ward than am I, perhaps you could persuade him to publish the other three modern WVU research papers which he has only abstractly referenced on his Coal Tattoo blog and in his newspaper articles.
 

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by: One Citizen @ Wed Oct 07, 2009 at 14:00:38 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Another problem the EPA did not cause (0.00 / 0)

The big fracking fluid spill in Doddridge County.

West Virginia regulators aren't saying exactly what happened, but environmentalists are growing increasingly concerned about a large spill of  "fracking fluid" from a gas drilling operation in Doddridge County.

The incident in question apparently occurred in late August along Buckeye Run, between West Union and Salem.  The stream is a tributary of Middle Island Creek, and the drilling operation run by West Union-based TAPO under a permit issued by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.

Gov. Manchin, what are you doing to solve this problem?

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by: Clem Guttata @ Wed Oct 07, 2009 at 13:41:52 PM UTC

How did stevewvu describe fracking fluid? (0.00 / 0)

oh yeah

most frack jobs in wv have that lethal mixture of water, nitrogen, sand and small amounts of stabilizers....hardly a witches brew...

NFTT: Support My Team or I Will Dance

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by: CA Berkeley WV @ Fri Oct 09, 2009 at 04:00:52 AM UTC