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?