Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

A new pro-coal piece of propaganda wonders why coal mines aren’t allowed to take the tops of mountains as easily as women can take off their shirts. Seriously.

A poster making the rounds protests against Appalachian native Ashley Judd, who opposes mountaintop removal coal mining. It asks, “Ashley Judd makes a living taking off her top. Why can’t coal miners?”

Why? For one thing, Ashley Judd knows how to put her top back on. The coal mining companies don’t put the tops back on mountains. They just blow the mountains up and dump the debris into mountain streams.

Secondly, when Ashley Judd takes her top off, she doesn’t dump huge amounts of toxic heavy metals like arsenic into the local drinking water supply. Mountaintop removal coal mining does involve such toxic dumping.

Do these big coal companies truly not understand the difference? Anyone who has flown over the Appalachians recently, and seen the great scars on our nation created by mountaintop removal coal mining gets it.

Weird headline of the day comes from Jake Blumgart of the Philadephia Inquirer, writing that U.S. owes dead coal miners real change.

Of debt and death: How can the U.S. government owe change to dead people? What are the dead people going to with change?

The article’s right that the U.S. government owes it to some people to force the lazy coal industry to operate safer mines. However, the people who deserve change are the people that change can actually help: The coal miners who are still alive.

The big coal industry is busy putting a lot of advertisements on TV telling us how great clean coal is. Why, you’d think you could use it to wipe your kitchen countertops with, it’s so clean.

And then, reality intervenes, like an explosion… or as an actual explosion. In Turkey, 13 coal miners were killed this week when methane leaking into their coal mine exploded. Many other coal miners were sent to the hospital with severe injuries.

Is that coal that they brought out of the ground along with their blood clean?

Barack Obama angered many environmentalists this week when he promised to promote the coal industry fraud of clean coal. Why would he do such a thing, when there’s never been a single viable commercial use of supposedly clean coal technology, when the technology doesn’t even really eliminate most of the pollution and waste from the process of gaining energy from coal anyway?

Well, there’s a lot of money in that coal. One of the coal giants, Alliance Resource Partners, just announced record profits for 2009. What did they do with all that money? $12,500 of it went to the Central Executive Committee of the Kentucky Democratic Party.

And what did Kentucky’s representatives in Congress do this week? They joined together to reconstitute the Congressional Coal Caucus, which includes Nick Rahall, the Democratic Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee.

Coal dust is settling all over the Democratic Party these days.

Let’s put this plainly: Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius has saved a huge part of the United States from filth.

The air that blows across Kansas eventually blows over most of the continental United States. If Kansas keeps that air clean, then the millions of Americans who live downwind from Kansas. If Kansas spews filth into the air, then the millions of Americans who live downwind from Kansas will breathe that filth.

On Friday, Governor Sebelius vetoed legislation that would have allowed the spewing of filth into America’s air, and into America’s lungs, from new dirty coal-fired power plants that would have been built in Kansas.

Thank you, on behalf of downwind America, to Kathleen Sebelius, for protecting us from this filth.