West Virginia Blue
The Best Blogging Community in West Virginia Democratic politics, progressive policies, the good life and free living in Wild, Wonderful West Virginia.
West Virginia has been plundered and re-plundered first by the logging industry during the early 20th century, producing denuded mountains, fires, mudslides and flooding. Then came the coal industry bringing even worse devastation with acid mine drainage, mine subsidence from conventional underground mining and the ultimate destruction of entire mountain ranges and streams with mechanized Mountain Top Removal. West Virginia is now ground zero for another environmental disaster, Marcellus Shale gas extraction. If it is allowed to continue without regulation, Marcellus Shale drilling and fracking could make Almost Heaven, Wild Wonderful WV virtually uninhabitable. But this isn't about the environmental concerns that everyone should be familiar with by now. This is about the politics of the issue. Logging, coal, oil and gas extraction will not bring about the ruin of West Virginia, but our State Legislature and its inability and refusal to protect us surely will.
The Alternative Coal Slurry Disposal Act (SB 248; HB 2850) actually went somewhere this year! It was sent to Judiciary and Finance in both houses of the Legislature. Both judiciary houses took up the respective bills, however, gutting them of their initial purpose. Environmental coalition Sludge Safety Project pushed the bills at the State Capitol.
The bills were never brought up for discussion in either Finance Committee meeting. There's always next year, right?
The Alternative Coal Slurry Disposal Act would have put a ban on future injection sites and modifications of current ones. Permits for injection sites are for up to 5 years.
It is believed that well water can be compromised in locations where underground slurry injection is taking place. Slurry related well water contamination is a problem for many in Prenter and Rawl, W.Va.
In the above March 1st video, Mathew Louis-Rosenburg, an organizer with Sludge Safety Project, talks about the slurry bills and their importance, SCR 15 and the ridiculous study that resulted from it, and a heated exchange in Senate Judiciary with a certain person from the DEP (actually named-unlike in Ry Rivard's recent Daily Mail article).
After screening "Dirty Business:'Clean Coal' and the Battle for our Energy Future," a panel discussion followed with filmmaker Peter Bull, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition Executive Director Janet Keating and Rory McIlmoil, energy project manager for Downstream Strategies. The event was part of a nationwide series of Center for Investigative Reporting sponsored screenings of the film as an effort to promote public dialogue on America's energy future.
About the film: DIRTY BUSINESS: "Clean Coal" and the Battle for Our Energy Future is a 90-minute documentary produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting that investigates the true cost of our dependence on coal for electricity in the age of climate change. It is the first major public media project to explain and demystify "clean coal" and to explore the extent to which increased energy efficiency and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar thermal power might make "clean coal" unnecessary and uneconomical. America burns more than a billion tons of coal a year-and coal-fired power plants are the single greatest source of the greenhouse gases. From West Virginia to China, the film reveals the true social and environmental costs of coal power and tells the stories of innovators pointing the way to an alternative energy future.
The film was written, produced and directed by Peter Bull and co-produced by Justin Weinstein, the team that produced the PBS FRONTLINE and CIR co-production, Hot Politics, about the politics of global warming. The narrator and editorial consultant on Dirty Business is Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal, the Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future and contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine (his latest article there being the one on Massey CEO Don Blankenship that some speculate helped lead to his resignation). Alex Gibney, producer/director of the 2008 Academy Award winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, is consulting producer on DIRTY BUSINESS.
You can't be friends with coal. You can't be a friend of coal. You can't be coal's enemy or out to destroy coal or declare a war on coal. Coal is just a black rock. To be more specific, it's a "black or dark brown mineral substance consisting of carbonized vegetable matter." It cannot be your friend or your enemy.
I am writing this in response to the many articles, editorials, ads, billboards, radio spots and just run of the mill conversations that I have seen and heard concerning coal since I moved back to the Ohio Valley last summer. I am tired of the all or nothing, with us or against us attitude that so many seem to have around this issue. People claim to be "friends of coal" and berate imagined scary liberals in Washington who are out to "destroy coal."
Too many in the West Virginia legislature are fine with poisoning wells:
House of Delegates committee on Monday eliminated a permanent ban on disposing of coal slurry by pumping it underground from legislation aimed at curbing the practice.
The decision by the House Judiciary Committee is a win for coal mine operators, who want to continue slurry injections. And it's a defeat to coalfield residents and environmental groups who say the practice pollutes groundwater and is linked to cancer, lead poisoning, kidney failure and other health problems.
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Joe Stanley, a retired coal miner from Pritchard, blasted the committee's action.
"I thought the amendment gutted the legislation," Stanley said. "The technology exists to do this a different way."
From the 2003 Department of Defense study, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
October 2003:
Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor. The shifting motivation for confrontation would alter which countries are most vulnerable and the existing warning signs for security threats.
There is a long-standing academic debate over the extent to which resource constraints and environmental challenges lead to inter-state conflict. While some believe they alone can lead nations to attack one another, others argue that their primary effect is to act as a trigger of conflict among countries that face pre-existing social, economic, and political tension. Regardless, it seems undeniable that severe environmental problems are likely to escalate the degree of global conflict.
The throngs of protestors in the streets of Cairo this week have a host of grievances. There are the decades of authoritarian rule of course, and the lack of political expression or economic opportunity. But the uprising grew in part out of protests against high food prices.
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Egypt is among the world's largest importers of wheat, and the global wheat market received a number of nasty shocks recently. The worst came last summer, when Russia was hit by an unprecedented drought and heat wave that destroyed 40 percent of its wheat harvest.
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"I think we are seeing some of the early effects of climate change on food security," says veteran environmental analyst Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute. In particular, Brown says the heat wave that led to the collapse of Russia's wheat harvest was no ordinary weather event.
"If someone had told me that there was likely to be a heat wave in Russia in which the average temperature would be 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm -- that's pushing the envelope. I mean FOUR degrees would be a lot."
Brown and many others say the Russian heat wave only one of several recent events effecting global food supply that likely were linked to climate change. And he believes that the stresses these events are putting on food supplies are contributing to unrest around the world.
"You can't prove that link," Brown says. "But you can say it is highly likely that that is the case."
Acting Senate President Jeff Kessler is thinking outside the box about West Virginia's natural resources. Kessler's natural gas proposal would have the State hold back a quarter of the severance tax dollars stemming from the production of Marcellus Shale. This money would be placed into an interest-bearing special revenue account and could be used for the State's long term liabilities, economic diversification, and improvements to our crumbling infrastructure in the decades to come.
I think a candidate like Kessler is the State's best hope of bucking the trend of absentee robber barons exploiting the State for our natural resources. I hope they tax the hell out of this natural gas and increase the severance tax on coal as well. This is our land and we need to make sure that our resources are extracted in a way that do not destroy our communities; put our workers at risk; and once extracted, benefit our citizens for generations to come.
Here's something to keep an eye on as the West Virginia 2011 Gubernatorial Election heats up.
How many non-essential activities will Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin, over-acting as Governor, take on? For example, how many non-essential appointments will he make and how many new positions will he create?
This week Tomblin has created a special new task force stacked with executives and lobbyists for chemical or energy companies-- Tomblin's new "Marcellus to Manufacturing Task Force". There is one token labor member and one token environmentalist assigned to this twelve member task force, but no one representing citizens at large or surface owner's rights.
If Tomblin was more confident of winning elections in May & October he could patiently wait for a term as a legitimate Gov., not an "acting as" one, until he installed his hand-picked favorites into multi-year positions.
This move looks like a desperate attempt to buy off some votes.
Scott Calvin, Professor of Physics at Sarah Lawrence College has graciously provided permission to reprint this diary that originally appeared at DemConWatchBlog.
By Scott Calvin
With the death of cap and trade, significant climate change is now inevitable. Sooner or later, we will reach a tipping point, at which point climate change is not just a prediction, or a small effect that needs to be teased out by careful statistical analysis. Sooner or later, there will be a year where the cumulative effects of climate change will become undeniable. What would that year look like?
First of all, to be undeniable, we want it to be a year that "should" be cool according to other factors. Solar cycles add some variability to the Earth's temperature, so a year toward the end of a deep solar minimum would be good. El Niño is a natural phenomenon that tends to raise the temperature of the globe, so to be convincing it shouldn't be an El Niño year--ideally, it should be a La Niña year, when the Earth would be expected to be cooler. If the planet still experienced record warmth under those conditions, we'd know it was due to climate change, and not just a perfect storm of natural cycles.
The extreme heat would trigger drought and fire. Picture one of the world's great capitals shrouded in smoke from the country side for a week--that warning would be hard to miss, wouldn't it?
Heat triggers evaporation, and evaporation falls back to earth as rain and snow, so this year would likely also be the wettest on record, generating extreme floods. Imagine a "thousand-year flood" in a US city, submerging the central city. Entire countries would suffer from severe, unprecedented flooding, creating humanitarian catastrophes.
And then there are the inexorable changes--direct manifestations of climate. Island nations would be making plans for the day they need to leave their drowning homeland. Coral reefs would die en masse. And most dramatically, the familiar image of the Earth from space, with its white polar caps, would be forever changed, as the northern cap dwindles away in the summer.
Think this is alarmist? Evidence for this scenario below the jump.
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Here's something to keep an eye on as the West Virginia 2011 Gubernatorial Election heats up.
