Mountaintop Mining Protest

  • One of the organizers of the rally opposing mountaintop removal coal mining scheduled the protest to coincide with the first day of climate talks in Copenhagen. (Photo by Sandra Sleight-Brennan)

World leaders are in Copenhagen,
Denmark where the debate over
what to do about climate change
is getting loud sometimes. But
in West Virginia coal country, the
debate is even louder. Lester
Graham reports:

Transcript

World leaders are in Copenhagen,
Denmark where the debate over
what to do about climate change
is getting loud sometimes. But
in West Virginia coal country, the
debate is even louder. Lester
Graham reports:

When the West Virginia Coal Association heard about plans for a rally to protest mountaintop removal coal mining, it issued an email. The Associaiton wanted supporters of the coal industry to hold a counter protest to the quote, “liberal enviro-whacko’s rally.”

(sound of protest and truck horns)

The coal mining supporters not only showed up, but they brought in some big trucks, horns blaring to try to disrupt the protest speakers at the rally in front of the offices of West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality.

The Coal industry’s message was simple. Coal means jobs. Jobs mean paychecks.

But the protestors against mountaintop removal coal mining say there are more important things.

One of those speakers was Maria Gunnoe. She’s a coal miner’s daughter who’s worked against the environmental damage of blowing off the tops of Appalaichan mountains to get to the coal. The blasted debris has been dumped into valleys, damaging streams and water supplies.

“I challenge you. You think it’s hard to live without a paycheck? Try living with nothing to give your children to drink. Paycheck’s not important when you don’t have water to give your children.”

Maria Gunnoe has been there. She lives in a valley just downhill from a debris fill. She testified against the coal companies in a court case to stop them from dumping debris in streams. Let’s just say she’s not a popular figure among the pro-coal folks.

Bo Webb lives in Coal River Valley. He’s one of the organizers of the rally opposing mountaintop removal coal mining. He scheduled the protest the same day climate talks in Copenhagen started. He’d liked to see the people where he lives get something from those negotiations.

“I’m hoping what comes out of Copenhagen for here would be a message that some of these miners could start understanding and stop manipu- allowing- themselves to be manipulated by a coal industry that’s got one concern, and that’s profits.”

At the counter-rally, many of the coal mining supporters did not want to talk to news people. One guy who would talk is Gary Finley. He’s from Ohio and sells equipment to the coal mining industry.

“You know, this industry is regulated, heavily regulated, now. It has been since, what, 1977? (Yep.) So, you know, we’re doing everything that’s dictated by law in the mining of coal.”

When asked about the future of coal, Finley hesitated.

“Well, (laughs) right now I’m uncertain. I can tell you what I hope it’ll be. I hope it continues. You know, we’ve got a lot of coal in these mountains. I don’t believe the people in this country realize how important coal is to the economy of the eastern United States, people realize when they go into their homes and turn on their light switch and the electric comes on, if we don’t mine coal, that’s gonna be- it’s done.”

The protest was a lot of passionate speakers, a lot of booing, and a lot of truck horns.

But what irritated the coal mining supporters more than anything seemed to be the idea that outsiders were coming to West Virginia to tell them what to do. And the liberal outsider that aggravated them most was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Junior. Kennedy calls fossil fuels a deadly addiction that’s wrecking the country, and says mountaintop removal coal mining is destroying communities.

“And, you know, we need to figure out ways to power our country that don’t compromise the aspirations of future generations, don’t compromise their potential for prosperity, for wholesome, dignified communities.”

In the end, nothing was settled in West Virginia, just as nothing will be settled in Copenhagen.

But at the local level and the international level, people are talking about fossil fuels differently. Some see a bright future in renewable, sustainable energy and preserved forested mountains, while others feel their lives and their livelihoods threatened.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

A Look Into Coal Country

  • The filmmakers want more Americans to understand that when we flick on a light switch – it is not a meaningless act. It takes electricity. And that takes coal. (Photo courtesy of Coal Country)

When the Senate picks up debate
on the climate change bill, it
will be – in part – deciding the
future of coal as an energy source
in the U.S. About half the nation’s
electricity currently comes from
coal. And a lot of it comes from
the Appalachian region. A new
documentary film sets out to show
how mining for coal affects the people
who live in Coal Country. Julie Grant
spoke with the film’s producers:

Transcript

When the Senate picks up debate
on the climate change bill, it
will be – in part – deciding the
future of coal as an energy source
in the U.S. About half the nation’s
electricity currently comes from
coal. And a lot of it comes from
the Appalachian region. A new
documentary film sets out to show
how mining for coal affects the people
who live in Coal Country. Julie Grant
spoke with the film’s producers:

Mari-Lynn Evans and Phylis Geller set out to make the movie Coal Country
because they wanted to show how different people are affected by coal
mining.

They found lots of activists, and regular citizens, who would talk with
them. Plenty of people were willing to show the thick black water in their
toilet tanks. They wanted to show the black soot covering their cars.
They wanted to talk about the health problems they live with. And they all
blamed the coal industry.

Evans also wrote to coal supporters – to get their side of the story on
camera. The answer?

“No. That was their response. I sent out requests to the coal industry,
to coal companies and to suppliers of the coal industry.”

Evans brother is a coal miner. He supports mountain top removal.

(sound of explosions)

As we see in the movie, that’s when coal companies blow off the entire
top of a mountain to get to the coal. Many people consider it the most
polluting and environmentally devastating type of mining.

But Evans says not even her own brother would do an interview about it.

“And when I said, ‘why won’t you talk on camera? You feel so
passionately that coal is wonderful and mountaintop removal is actually for
the environment as well as the economy.’ And his response to me always
was, ‘oh I would never speak on camera without getting permission from
the company I work for.’”

The filmmakers heard that a lot. And no coal miners ever did get
permission to talk on camera.

In the movie, we do hear from Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy. He
spoke at a public hearing about the need to ease environmental restrictions
on coal mining.

“We had nearly 800 employees up ‘til Friday. We had to lay 8 off. I
think that might be just the tip of the iceberg if we don’t our rules
changed how we mine in the state.”

Anti-coal activists at the public hearing explain how the coal companies
use that kind of intimidation to control miners.

“I think people are scared that they will lose their jobs and be flipping
burgers. You look out and that’s all you see. You see mining and
flipping burgers. And, I argue, that the coal companies want it that way.
They want that to be the only option. That’s the only way they could get
support for how they treat their workers and how they treat this land.
This would never happen in a place that wasn’t poor. Never.”

In the movie, some coal miners stand up at the public meeting to defend the
companies they work for. One explains the coal industry has provided him a
good salary.

Miner One: “For the last 14 years, the coal industry has supported myself
and my wife and my 3 children.”

Miner Two: “When the last one of you so-called environmentalists leave
the state, when the rest of us leave for North Carolina, turn out the
lights. Oh, wait a minute, there won’t be no lights. No coal, no
lights.”

(music)

The filmmakers want more Americans to understand that when we flick on a
light switch – it is not a meaningless act. It takes electricity. And
that takes coal.

And, as anti-coal activist Judy Bonds says in the movie, coal is tearing
apart West Virginia.

“It is a civil war; it’s families against families. It’s brother
against brother.”

Or – in the case of filmmaker Mari Lynn-Evans – brother against
sister.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

How the West Was Warned

  • Wen Baldwin, a volunteer with the National Park service, pulls a non-stick teflon frying pan out of Lake Mead, the reservoir of Hoover Dam. Quagga mussels smothered the pan in a matter of weeks. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:

Transcript

A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:

n 2007, biologists declared that quagga mussels had infested infested Lake Mead just outside
Las Vegas.

But years before that, park staff and volunteers like Wen Baldwin told folks how to avoid the
problem.

Baldwin says some people helped – most people told him to just drop it.

“Oh, it won’t happen to us. That’s the American theory – fire, cancer, whatever. Oh, it
won’t happen to me.”

But it did happen, and here’s how it went down.

Baldwin went to this conference out East where biologists explained how quaggas clog pipes at
water treatment centers and power plants.

“There was a presentation about them and I realized, hey, they could get in here and they
could cost me money, you money, everybody money. They could raise havoc as they have in
the Great Lakes.”

Baldwin got worried.

Quagga mussles hitchhike on boats, and Lake Mead is a boating hot spot.

Baldwin warned people – wash down your boat before you put it in the lake!

“I put on a lot of programs trying to get people on board. Just didn’t work that well.”

Now, quagga mussels are making a mess of Lake Mead – and Web Baldwin can show how.

Baldwin tests how well quagga stick to different material.

We’re on this dock one morning, and he pulls a rope out of the water.

The rope’s covered with shells that look like fingernail-sized clams.

Allee: “I reckon you have to be pretty careful with your hands, there.”

Baldwin: “Boy, they’ll cut you to ribbons. I go home looking like my hands went through a
meat grinder.”

At the end of the rope – he’s tied a skillet.

Baldwin: “They’ll stick to teflon.”

Allee: “They’ll stick to teflon. Your eggs won’t stick to teflon all that well, but quagga
mussels will.”

Baldwin: “They will. And anywhere they attach the glue they use will hasten the
deterioration of the surface they attach to.”

A quagga-coated teflon pan is a shocker – but what does a quagga invasion mean?

Well, for one, if you dock your boat at Lake Mead – you’ve gotta scrape it all the time.

Swimmers wear shoes to protect their feet from quagga-coated rocks.

And quagga are getting costly.

Zegers: “We’ve been monitoring water quality in the lake pretty extensively.”

Roefer: “These are the six locations we collect samples at.”

I’m with Ron Zegers and Peggy Roefer. They’re with the Southern Nevada Water System. It
provides water to Las Vegas and other cities.

They walk me through slides divers took near water intake pipes – deep in Lake Mead.

Roefer: “And this is where our intake is, on Saddle Island. This is actually the inside of the
rock structure you can see the quaggas on the inside of that. Quagga mussels were
approximately two inches thick.”

Zegers and Roefer say they’re trying plenty of things to keep quagga out of the water supply.

The first is the old stand-by: chlorine.

But too much chlorine can make people sick.

Zegers: “More of those disenfection byproducts form, which puts us closer to our
regulatory compliance issues, so we also have to be concerned about that also.”

Roefer: “You know we’re watching the alternative control strategies, the bio-bullets and
pseudo-flourence and those kinds of things.”

Allee: “Sounds like an arms race.”

Roefer: “Yeah, who can get there first. The annual for this is one to four million dollars.”

Allee: “One to four million dollars. You know, you could clean a lot of water if you didn’t
have to deal with these critters.”

Zegers: “That’s correct. Now it’s just an anticipated expenditure that certainly wasn’t
budgeted for when they first appeared, and now it’s just gonna be a way of life.”

And it could become a a way of life for more lakes if we don’t stop quaggas from spreading
around.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Fighting Over Oil and Water

  • The richest oil shale deposits lie in the Piceance Basin, which runs northwest of the town of Rifle, Colorado. The bands of dark grey along the edge of this snow- capped ridge are oil shale. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

In the future, keeping your gas tank full could make disputes over water in the American
West a lot worse. It’s because energy companies hope to develop the oil shale industry.
Getting oil from shale requires lots of water, and the richest oil shale deposits happen to be
in the dry state of Colorado. Shawn Allee headed there to see why a fight over water and
oil could be in the works:

Transcript

In the future, keeping your gas tank full could make disputes over water in the American
West a lot worse. It’s because energy companies hope to develop the oil shale industry.
Getting oil from shale requires lots of water, and the richest oil shale deposits happen to be
in the dry state of Colorado. Shawn Allee headed there to see why a fight over water and
oil could be in the works:

Oil companies have their eyes on vast oil shale deposits in western Colorado, Utah and
Wyoming.

The federal government says companies could pull 800 billion barrels of oil out of that shale.

That’s about three times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia.

Oil shale’s an impressive resource but it depends on water and there’s not much available
there.

How much would an oil shale industry need?

Shell Oil PR guy Tracy Boyd says the simple answer is that it will likely take his company
three barrels of water to extract one barrel of oil.

It’s because oil shale doesn’t really have oil in it – it’s got something called kerogen.

“You can heat this kerogen up. If you do it really slow, which we do for about 3.5 –
4 years, by putting heaters down in the rock formation, (you) produce a crude-oil
like material but with a little processing this is the first product we get out of it
which basically transportation fuels.”

Heating the ground require loads of electricity from new power plants and generators, and
they’d be cooled by water.

Oil companies are just experimenting with shale right now, but they’re securing rights to
water just in case.

Shell’s latest water claim is on Colorado’s Yampa River.

When Shell filed its court papers – some town governments warned they might fight the
claim.

One of these towns was Parker – a Denver suburb hundreds of miles east of the oil shale
region.

Frank Jaeger runs Parker’s water district.

Jaeger says, like other Colorado cities, Parker plans to expand.

“We know approximately what our numbers are and it will be somewhere in the
neighborhood of 150,000 people. In order to assure 150,000 people for another
150 years from now, I have to be proactive, I have to be at the front of the line for
the next drop of water available in the State of Colorado.”

Oil shale developers and cities across Colorado are set to fight over the water they might
need for the future, but some feel oil companies already have an edge.

“They’re actually one step ahead of the game.”

David Ableson is with Western Resource Advocates, an environmental group.

Ableson says energy companies tried developing oil shale several times in the last century.

They failed, but each time, they bought more water rights – just in case.

Now, they’ve got loads of water rights – and if the industry takes off, they’ll use them.

That could stop cities like Denver and its suburbs from getting water they hoped to have for
new homes and businesses.

Ableson says this isn’t just a Colorado fight, though.

He says some congressmen sell the idea of oil shale as an energy source the whole country
can depend on – even though its future could get tied up in Colorado water courts.

“And so, folks who are looking at this issue who do not live in CO, UT, or WY, need
to understand that when an elected official says, “this can solve our energy woes,”
that it’s actually a far more complicated situation than that and if there are severe
water impacts, that makes it much less likely that you could develop that
resource.”

The energy industry claims the concern over water is overblown – they say they just might
not need all that much water.

Ableson says that’s only true if oil shale fails. But if it succeeds, and we fill up on oil shale
gasoline – he predicts some towns or industries in the West will be left dry.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Getting Water to the Dry, Dry West

  • Colorado Springs pumps water through the Rocky Mountains into town (Photo courtesy of the Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau)

Out West, a lot of cities figure many more people will be moving in over the next few decades. Water engineers wish those people would bring along all the water they’ll need, but of course they won’t. Shawn Allee reports these cities want to pipe more water from far away, and some people think that’s a bad idea:

Transcript

Out West, a lot of cities figure many more people will be moving in over the next few
decades. Water engineers wish those people would bring along all the water they’ll
need, but of course they won’t. Shawn Allee reports these cities want to pipe more
water from far away, and some people think that’s a bad idea:

The air in Colorado Springs is usually so dry it quickly chaps your lips.

What gives? Colorado Springs sounds wet enough.

“There’re really no springs in Colorado Springs, so when you start talking
about water, it’s a divergence between our name and reality. Sounds like we
had a lot, and in reality we didn’t.”

This is Matt Mayberry, Colorado Spring’s historian.

I’ve heard about this massive water pipeline project the town’s cooking up, and I was
curious just how long the city’s worked to quench its thirst.

Mayberry’s got an exhaustive book on that with an exhaustive title.

“Blah, blah, blah … the emergence and appropriation of rights in Colorado
Springs.”

The crib notes version?

Early on, buffalo manure poisoned Colorado Spring’s creek, so people dug wells.

Then, the wells got infested with grasshoppers.

And the town grew, and grew, and grew again.

“Very soon you had to bring water from further away, and ultimately to the
Western Slope which is a couple hours drive of here.”

Today, Colorado Springs pipes water through the Rocky Mountain range.

Doing the extraordinary for water is kinda ordinary for Colorado Springs.

Its latest pipeline project is called the Southern Delivery System, and it’ll pump nearly
80 million gallons into town each year – and it’ll pump that water forty five miles –
completely uphill.

Impressive, but some people are asking tough questions about it.

“Our concern with this project is the greenhouse gas emissions that it would
contribute to.”

Stacy Tellinghuisen is with Western Resource Advocates, a Colorado environmental
group.

She says there’s a connection between pumping water uphill and a large carbon
footprint.

“Water is heavy. Pumping it over a great distance takes a lot of energy, and
in the process it would require something along the lines of 60 MW of power,
which is about a tenth of a power plant.”

And, for the most part, the utility burns natural gas and coal to generate power. Both
emit carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Tellinghuisen says Western cities are considering at least five other water pipeline
projects, some with even larger carbon footprints.

She wants Colorado Springs to set an example by using dedicated low-carbon sources
like wind power for its water pumps.

I ask the Colorado Springs Utilities about that.

Keith Riley helped plan the Southern Delivery System.

“We think there are some ways we can minimize the carbon footprint by
looking at some new technologies.”

Riley says there were lots of environmental regulations to wade through before the
Southern Delivery System got approved.

But a large carbon footprint doesn’t disqualify utility projects.

Riley says, even if carbon were considered, the project might have gone forward
anyway because the city’s expected to grow over the next few decades.

“Water is the essential element for all of us, so when it comes to that level of
sustaining our own lives, then you get to some trade-offs on what we’re
willing to do to keep ourselves alive where we we live, where our cities are.
No matter what happens, we’ve got to move water to Colorado Springs, and
we’re uphill from the river, so we’ve got to get the water uphill one way or
another.”

Riley says Colorado Springs Utilities is considering low-carbon renewable power for its
new pipeline.

But it’ll be expensive, and no one’s stepped forward with all the money.

Other Western cities are engineering clever ways of moving loads of water around,
too. And it’ll be a political and financial challenge for them to pay for the carbon
footprint.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Learning to Live With Less Water

  • Ellen Peterson has lived in Florida for many years and this is the first year her well went dry. (Photo by Arthur Cooper)

Droughts are nothing new for the Western US.
But lately, even some parts of the country
surrounded by water have gotten a taste of
droughts. Rebecca Williams reports as our
population grows, some experts say we’re going
to have to learn to live with less water:

Transcript

Droughts are nothing new for the Western US.
But lately, even some parts of the country
surrounded by water have gotten a taste of
droughts. Rebecca Williams reports as our
population grows, some experts say we’re going
to have to learn to live with less water:

(sound of birds)

Even in swampy, muggy Florida, people have been running out of water.

“This is the first time the well has ever gone dry.”

Ellen Peterson remembers water gushing out of her artesian well when she’d hook up the hose. These days she’s stuck with rusty water from her shallow well.

(sound of faucet turning on)

“Now if I let that sit it would settle out orange.”

We visited Peterson at the tail end of this year’s dry season. In the weeks since then, Florida’s been pummeled by major thunderstorms. But Florida water managers say it’s too early to know how much the rain will help.

This was the driest dry season Florida’s felt in more than 75 years. And it’s the third year in a row of serious drought. That’s meant some changes for people who live here.

Many cities put rules in place that limit watering lawns to one or two days a week. One woman actually ended up with a warrant out for her arrest after she watered her lawn on the wrong day and didn’t pay the fine.

Some cities in Florida are talking about adding a drought surcharge to bills for people using the most water.

Ellen Peterson says local water managers have even been capping wells in her area. Peterson may be 85 years old, but that didn’t stop her from telling her local official to back off.

“They told me they were going to cap my well and I threatened the guy with his life if he ever came back. (laughs) It hasn’t happened yet.”

So it’s not such an easy sell to get people to cut back on water.

(sound at a lake)

But that’s Gary Ritter’s job. He’s a water manager in the Lake Okeechobee area. It’s a giant lake – 35 miles wide – and it’s nicknamed the liquid heart of the Everglades. The lake level is 2.5 feet below average.

“For water to get to the Everglades it has to come from Lake Okeechobee. Now we have a juggling act as to how we manage this water in the system you know for multiple users for the water supply and for the ecosystem.”

The lake’s the center of a huge tug of war. Farmers and cities need the water, and the lake’s also a big tourist draw. And the Everglades are in major trouble – mostly because the water flow to this fragile area has been cut off by people.

Some experts say these kinds of conflicts are just going to get worse.

Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute. It’s a nonpartisan group that studies water issues.

“Places we didn’t think were vulnerable to water shortages in the past are now increasingly vulnerable. As our population continues to grow and our water supply doesn’t. As more and more people try to share that fixed resource there’s going to be growing competition for water and more natural and manmade drought.”

And he says we just don’t know what’s in store for us as the climate changes because of global warming. We could get a one-two punch.

First, from weird new weather patterns. And second, from more and more people moving into dry areas.

People have expected these kinds of problems for cities in the desert Southwest. But nobody really saw this coming in the Southeast.

Peter Gleick says even if you live in a place surrounded by water now, you shouldn’t expect to always have plenty of it.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Yucca Mountain: One Man Switches Sides

  • Yucca Mountain is the nation's planned repository for spent nuclear fuel (Photo courtesy of the US Department of Energy)

Politically speaking, America’s nuclear waste storage policy is a mess. Hazardous spent nuclear fuel is supposed to be buried under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, but after two decades – it’s not finished. Congress pushed the project onto Nevada in the 80s by passing what’s known as the “Screw Nevada Bill.” Shawn Allee met a man who regrets helping put nuclear waste at Nevada’s doorstep:

Transcript

Politically speaking, America’s nuclear waste storage policy is a mess. Hazardous spent nuclear fuel is supposed to be buried under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, but after two decades – it’s not finished. Congress pushed the project onto Nevada in the 80s by passing what’s known as the “Screw Nevada Bill.” Shawn Allee met a man who regrets helping put nuclear waste at Nevada’s doorstep:

For twenty years Nevada’s tried to scuttle Yucca Mountain.

Along the way, it’s hired Robert Halstead to create a plan to soften the blow if it loses. He’s an expert on nuclear waste truck and rail transportation.

“My job would be to craft the safest, or least-bad, transportation system so that if Nevada got stuck with a repository they would at least have some control of the transportation system because the activity that most likely to injures people and the environment is transportation.”

Halstead didn’t start his nuclear career on Nevada’s side, though. Thirty years ago, he worked for Wisconsin. He says the federal government wanted states’ help in storing nuclear waste deep underground.

In 1982 Congress came to consensus about how to test sites. He trusted it – and built political support for it.

“There was a clear statement that safety was not enough and economic efficiency was not enough. You also had to deal with regional equity.”

The gist was that there’d be at least two nuclear waste repositories: one in the West, and one in the East.

“We were pretty optimistic. Unfortunately that all began to fall apart very quickly.”

Congressmen and even the public started getting cold feet about the site selection process.

There were rowdy protests, especially in states that may have had the right geology for a repository. That included Wisconsin.

“If there was an objective approach to picking the sites, we knew that we would be in the first tier of the sites that would be evaluated.”

After a few years, Eastern politicians got frantic.

“They asked for a fix.”

Halstead decided to help with this fix, because he’d lost faith in the system, too. He says he helped cut legislative deals to stop the nuclear waste law he’d supported just a few years earlier.

It worked.

In 1987, Congress ended the government’s search for a nuclear waste repository.

Yucca would be the only candidate.

“This law was written very carefully to ensure that Nevada got screwed. And you know what, it chilled my blood.”

Halstead realized he’d passed a law that broke that early consensus about regional equity.

He was disappointed, and nearly dumped nuclear politics, but then he got a call. It was from a chief nuclear official in Nevada.

“He said aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I would really like you to come out here and help us. And I said to him, ‘I’d just got done getting Wisconsin getting off the hook and if I help you get off the hook, I think it’s likely that they’ll have to come back to Wisconsin.’”

But Halstead took the job.

I’ve asked him why several times. Sometimes he’s said guilt. Sometimes, regret. Sometimes, for a job.

Right now, Congress is considering cutting Yucca Mountain’s budget, and President Obama says he’s against the project.

But the law to make Yucca the only choice is still on the books.

I ask Robert Halstead whether that will change. He’s not sure – it’ll be tough to build a new consensus even close to what he saw thirty years ago.

“If nuclear waste disposal in a repository were safe and profitable, someone would have taken it away from Nevada years ago, so there won’t be an amicable ending to this story.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Mountaintop Mining (Part One)

  • In his last days, President Bush changed rules that made it easier to blow off the tops of mountains to mine for coal. (Photo by Sandra Sleight-Brennan)

One of the last things the Bush administration did was change a rule to allow coal mining companies to dump debris into streams. That means one mining company will be able to remove one of the last mountaintops in a West Virginia county. Sandra Sleight-Brennan reports:

Transcript

One of the last things the Bush administration did was change a rule to allow coal mining companies to dump debris into streams. That means one mining company will be able to remove one of the last mountaintops in a West Virginia county. Sandra Sleight-Brennan reports:

Gary Anderson takes me out on his back porch and all you can see is Coal River Mountain. Even on a cold, gray winter day, it’s beautiful.

“All of that mountain range of there, that is Coal River Mountain– that mountain runs for about 3 miles up there.”

When he retired, Gary and his wife Barbara moved from Connecticut back to her family home in Colcord, West Virginia.

“That’s basically what brought us back. Is the mountains and the beauty. We grew up here and we came back to spend the rest of our days here. We thought were coming back to what we remember– the beautiful mountains. And really they just started doing the mountaintop removal over here in the past couple years.”

Other mountains in the area– Cherry Pond Mountinan and Kayford Mountain have been flattened so energy companies could get to the coal inside them.
Over one million acres in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky have already been leveled to mine the thin vein of coal.

The mining companies dynamite the tops off to get to the coal underneath.

“Once in awhile you’ll see a big puff of dust go up in the air like a bomb has been dropped and in awhile it will settle down and then it will happen again the next day.”

Mountains are shorted and flattened–- often by 100’s of feet to get to a 14-inch seam of coal. What the dynamite loosens is dumped in the valleys. Thousands of miles of streams have been covered over and nature destroyed.

It’s pretty simple. They put dynamite in the mountain and blow it up.

Joe Lovett is the Executive Director of the Appalachian Center on the Economy and the Environment. He’s been fighting mountaintop removal for the past 10 years.

It’s like a layer cake. The mountain is like a layer cake and that coal is the icing. The dirt and rock in between is the cake. There is a lot more dirt and rock and mining waste than there is coal. And when they blow up the mountain the dirt and rock swell. So they have even a bigger problem because they have more material than they know what to do with. So, as they blow the mountain up they need to find something to do with the dirt and rock and they dump it into the streams and the valleys.

Dumping into streams was stopped. The Surface Mining Act’s Stream Buffer rule protected the streams. But the new Bush administration rule changes that.

Joe Lovett says that Coal River Mountain fair game for Massey Energy to blow the top off and fill the valleys.

“We have always believed that the rule prevented these fills, that and I guess so did the coal industry and the Office of Surface Mining because this has been the main thing that the coal industry has wanted from the Bush administration for a long time is that change in this rule.”

Lovett says its not good for the environment and it’s not good for the local economy.

“We are taking mountains that could support sustainable timber jobs for generations and, in a few short years, destroying them forever and mining them in such a way that those forests will never come back.”

The mining industry argues that we need this inexpensive energy source in order to be energy independent. But, says Lovett and other environmentalists, if valley fills were outlawed tomorrow the cost of coal for our electric rates would only go up by pennies.

I’ll also talk to an official of the mining industry about why this type of mining needs to continue. The fact it provides American energy and jobs and that West Virginia’s economy depends upon it.

Back at Gary Anderson’s home, he wonders how it came to this.

Who gave them the right to blow the tops of mountains off to get the coal? I mean, that’s what gets me. Where, back in time, did they get the permission to come in and just below the mountains up? It’s really unbelievable. You can’t go back and reconstruct a mountain that’s been here for hundreds of millions of years. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

But, the mining companies now have the legal right to level the top of Coal River Mountain and fill up the valleys and streams above Anderson’s home.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sandra Sleight-Brennan.

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Mountaintop Mining (Part Two)

  • Gary Anderson in Front of Coal River Mountain (Photo by Sandra Sleight-Brennan)

Mountaintop removal coal mining blows off the tops of mountains to get to a thin layer of coal. Environmentalists say there’s a better way to extract energy from mountain tops. They want to put up wind turbines. Sandra Sleight-Brennan reports they believe it will mean more energy in the long term and less environmental destruction:

Transcript

Mountaintop removal coal mining blows off the tops of mountains to get to a thin layer of coal. Environmentalists say there’s a better way to extract energy from mountain tops. They want to put up wind turbines. Sandra Sleight-Brennan reports they believe it will mean more energy in the long term and less environmental destruction:

Coal River Mountain is one of the last in Raleigh County West Virginia, and it’s next in line for mountaintop removal mining. A local group, the Coal River Wind Project, wants to build a wind farm along the mountain’s ridges.

Lorelei Scarbro has lived most of her life in the West Virginia coal fields. She’s the daughter, granddaughter and widow of coal miners. She knows her opposition to coal mining is seen by her neighbors as a direct threat to their jobs.

“It has been difficult. But people begin to understand that we’re not trying to take something away from them. You’re trying to add something to the area.”

She says mountaintop removal coal mining is short-term gain with long-term damage.

“The pace we’re going; it will be nothing left. I have a five-year-old granddaughter, and I can’t imagine what the air and water will be like when she is at childbearing age if we continue at this pace, because they’re covering headwaters streams, they’re starving off the water supply, they are destroying the air.”

And the next mountain in Scarbro’s home area to be mined is likely Coal River Mountain.

That’s why Coal River Wind Project commissioned a study to see if wind turbines would work. It turns out, the mountain has industrial strength wind. Enough to power 164 turbines. The project would create 200 local jobs during construction, and 40 permanent jobs. Rory McIlmoir is the project coordinator.

“The wind farm would generate an average of $1.74 million a year for the first 20 years. In year one it would generate over three million dollars. That’s the property tax. Blowing up the mountain for coal, on the other hand, would only bring $36,000 back to the county.”

That’s just the property taxes. The wind farm would make about $1.75 million dollars a year in revenue according to the study.

But the wind project has hit a stumbling block. A recent Bush administration rule change allows mining waste to be dumped into streams. That’s cleared the way for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to approve a permit for Massey Energy to do mountaintop removal mining here. If the mining occurs, the mountains would be lowered by several hundred feet. That would scrap the wind turbine project.

Activist Lorelei Scarbro thinks the wind project is the one thing that can stop the destruction of Coal River Mountain and others targeted for mountain top removal coal mining.

“It will save the mountains, it will save the wildlife and the hardwood forests and the vegetation and the water. It’s something that is desperately needed. Of course, our biggest obstacle is the fact that that the land is leased to the coal company.”

But the people who own the land say, if coal mining were stopped by the government, they’d consider the wind farm. The wind farm project coordinator, Rory McIlmoir, says they’d benefit for a lot longer if they did.

“Because, if they can make a few million each year from royalties then they’re interested in that. But, the choice right now is easily coal.”

The Coal River Wind Project has presented the study to West Virginia’s Governor. And 10,000 people signed a petition asking the state to think beyond coal and think about the future of energy, the economy, the mountains and the people.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sandra Sleight-Brennan.

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Orphaned Bear Cubs Find Refuge

  • Sally Maughan and her assistant John Knight (Photo by Sadie Babits)

Many state wildlife agencies can’t
or won’t take in injured or abandoned
critters. They rely on a lot of volunteers
to do the job. One woman in Idaho has made
it her life’s work to give orphaned bear
cubs throughout the West a second chance.
Sadie Babits brings us this profile:

Transcript

Many state wildlife agencies can’t
or won’t take in injured or abandoned
critters. They rely on a lot of volunteers
to do the job. One woman in Idaho has made
it her life’s work to give orphaned bear
cubs throughout the West a second chance.
Sadie Babits brings us this profile:

Sally Maughan used to be known as the “squirrel lady.” As a wildlife
rehabilitator, she took in weasels, foxes, raccoons and a lot of
squirrels.

She had no intention of working with bears until one day the
Idaho Fish and Game Department called.

“And they kept calling because nobody else had an enclosure that could hold a bear.”

Maughan named that first bear cub Ruggles. That was twenty
years ago.

So far, she’s helped 189 orphaned bear cubs from around the
West. She runs a non-profit in Boise called the Idaho Black Bear
Rehabilitation Program.

(sound of outdoors and cars passing)

It’s a chilly afternoon but it’s sunny. So Maughan, her helper John Knight
and I sit outside on her front steps. It’s hard to ignore the smell as
we talk. You know that musty smell of animals and straw and well, bears. It’s kind of an
animal barnyard smell out here.

This place used to be surrounded
by pasture. Not any more. On one side there’s an upscale subdivision.
And on the other side, there’s another large subdivision. Maughan says
her neighbors don’t mind the bears and sometimes she’ll let them come
visit.

“We don’t want bears seeing people any more than they need to.
John just comes in and feeds and comes back out. And I do the bottle
feeding which is when they really attach so once they are weaned he
pretty much takes over from there.”

(sound of gate opening)

Sadie: “So who’s that?”

John: “That is one of the Oregon bears.”

The cub makes a bee line for his house the minute he spots us. Maughan’s
assistant John Knight explains this bear and two others are the only
ones here at the center.

The bear pokes his head out then ducks right
back inside as I check out the roomy enclosure. There are logs to play
on and green apples to eat.

John: “That’s their swim tub.”

Sadie: “They have a swim tub.”

John: “Yep. They like to break it often.”

Sadie: “Will they get in there during the winter?”

John: Yeah. Some bears do. It’s odd. One bear last year was in it everyday. It was
snowing – 30 degrees. He was in it.”

These cubs are orphans. We don’t really know what happened to their
mothers. They may have been killed by licensed hunters or even illegally killed.

Each year more orphaned cubs show up at Maughan’s place. She’s one of only
a few bear rehabilitators in the West.

Jon Rachael works for the Idaho Fish and Game as a wildlife manager. He says they have
to turn to people like Maughan.

“We simply don’t have the personnel or resources to handle all
of that.”

Just in the last year, Sally Maughan took in 53 bears. It was a bad
year
for berries and there were a lot of wildfires around
the West.

“What are you going to do? Say, ‘I’m sorry I can’t take you – just die?’ Uh-uh. Can’t do
that. So, hopefully, eventually, there’ll be some more rehab-ers
for bears. It’s a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of energy.”

The World Society for the Protection of Animals covers most of Maughan’s
expenses. She relies heavily though on donations. It’s still not enough.

Anything left from her paycheck as a travel agent goes back to the bears.
She’s even wiped out her retirement just to get these black bears back
into the wild where they belong.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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