News
Mountaintop removal vs. The Economy
Monday, June 8th, 2009
This just in from our friend DevilsTower over at DailyKos. He just nails the “mountaintop removal vs. the economy” argument with this one:
There’s nothing good about this recession. With millions of people losing their jobs, their homes, their health care, their educational choices… such times are “opportunities” only in the same way that a hard punch to the face is an opportunity to yearn for the time when your nose was still straight.
Still, not everything that results from a disaster is a disaster. People who have held jobs in large companies may become entrepreneurs out of necessity rather than choice — but some portion of them will succeed in ways we can’t yet predict, bringing a new vitality to our economy. Politicians enticed to support massive corporate excess will temporarily display enough sense (or chagrin) to pass regulations that may blunt the next cycle of greed run wild. Natural resources strained by rapid growth may benefit from at least a momentary slow-down in the rapacious “progress.”
When things are going well, it’s hard to stop and ask “are we doing the right thing?” Now that things aren’t going so well, the temptation is to split our time between looking at where we went wrong and scrambling to get things back just the way they were. But there’s a real opportunity here, one that can both create jobs, help the environment, and send a message about corporate responsibility.
We can end mountaintop removal mining. Right now. Immediately.
At first glance, this may seem like the worst possible time to address such a problem. After all, we are talking about people’s jobs — not to mention the half of all electricity in the United States that comes from coal. But the situation isn’t that simple.
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