The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [38]
And now we know so much more. Creating and running a coal mine destroys vegetation, soil, and groundwater; displaces and destroys wildlife and habitat; degrades air quality with ash and dust; and permanently scars the landscape, especially in the case of mountaintop removal mining. Mines produce tons of waste like ash and sludge that contains mercury, uranium, arsenic, and other heavy metals. The December 2008 tragedy in which a billion gallons of toxic sludge burst out of a holding pond into the rivers, towns, and land of Roane County, Tennessee, is just the latest in a litany of disasters associated with coal mines.133
Meanwhile, burning coal constitutes the largest human-generated contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide and is a major source of methane; both gases are proven causes of climate change and global warming. In his book Big Coal, Jeff Goodell notes that “between 1975 and 2001, the annual releases of toxic metals from coal plants nearly doubled, from about 350 tons to 700 tons... Toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants account for over 40 percent of all air toxins reported to the EPA.”134 And there are many more ecological impacts of burning coal that I don’t have room to cover in a short section devoted to its extraction.
Of all the impacts from coal mining, blowing the tops off mountains, the method prevalent in Appalachia, takes the prize for most vile. Coal mining companies started this practice when there were no more veins of coal near the surface and using tunnels and shafts became prohibitively expensive. The crazy thing is that even deep in those mountains there’s not that much coal—there’s just enough profit in it for the mining companies to do it, and only because they don’t have to pay anything for the ecological damage and havoc they’re wreaking.
Plus, there’s actually much more accessible coal in states like Montana and Wyoming.135 So why are we even mining for it in Appalachia? The mining companies there—and the local residents who’ve bought into the story—claim that the region will collapse without those mining jobs. But the truth is otherwise. For example, despite 13 billion tons of coal being pulled out of West Virginia in the past 150 years, West Virginians have the lowest median household income in the country, with the literacy rate in the southern coalfield region about that of Kabul, Afghanistan.136
I wanted to investigate any links between my own lightbulbs and blowing the tops off of mountains in Appalachia, so I went to the www.ilovemountains.org website, which allows anyone in the United States to type in a zip code and see which mountains were destroyed for your power. My search showed two power plants serving my area that purchase coal from companies blowing up mountains in Appalachia. Also on that site, I visited the powerful National Memorial for the Mountains, which identifies more than 470 destroyed mountains.137 The combined horror of mountaintop removal and massive climate disruption inspired me to put solar panels on my own house, so I can rest assured that no more mountains are destroyed to power my home.
Unfortunately, we don’t have time for every household to install solar panels and, even if we did, that doesn’t address the massive coal used to fuel industrial uses. The extraction and burning of coal is so devastating that there’s really only one solution: keep the coal in the hole. Leave it there. There’s a growing global consensus that the climate simply can’t sustain coal-fired power plants.
Some economists and social scientists say the resource curse is caused when a country or region blessed with valuable resources