News
The Choice Between Wind and Mountaintop Removal
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
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One Mountain, Two Visions:
a Mountaintop Removal Coal Mine or a Wind Farm?
In September, we wrote to ask for your help in protecting Coal River Mountain in West Virginia — ground zero in the effort to end mountaintop removal coal mining.
The question at hand is whether Coal River Mountain will become a model for a sustainable energy future, through the construction of a clean energy wind farm — or whether the state of West Virginia will follow the policies of the past and allow Massey Energy to destroy Coal River Mountain with a massive mountaintop removal coal mine.
Despite extensive research that has shown that Coal River Mountain has enough wind potential to provide electricity for between 100,000 and 150,000 homes, forever — and despite the public comments of local residents and more than 10,000 supporters of clean energy from across the country — we learned yesterday that the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has approved Massey Energy’s permit to begin blasting the mountain.
We can still save Coal River Mountain — but we need your help right now.
Can you take just a moment to email West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, and ask him to act on his commitment to renewable energy by halting the mountaintop removal operation at Coal River Mountain?
Click here to send an email right now:
http://www.coalriverwind.org/?page_id=119
Governor Manchin can do the right thing, just as other Governors in the South are stepping forward to stop the worst excesses of mountaintop removal coal mining.
Just recently, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen wrote to the EPA to protest the Bush administration’s proposed changes to the stream buffer zone rule.
Governor Bredesen wrote:
[The] OSM has done [a poor job] of protecting streams from the impacts of coal mining and related activities… In the ten years from 1992 to 2002, more than 1200 miles of streams in central Appalachia have been directly impacted by coal mining, either by being mined through or by being buried under spoil disposal piles. That is approximately 2 percent of the streams in the Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia coal fields.
Please, take a moment to tell Governor Manchin to stand with other Governors — and with the people of his state — by leading West Virginia forward into a clean energy future:
http://www.coalriverwind.org/?page_id=119
Thank you for taking action.
Matt Wasson
iLoveMountains.org
