'War on coal' pits miners against environmentalists
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Miner Jason Hutchinson takes a moment to talk with fellow miners during an overnight shift in the Pinnacle Mine in Wyoming County, W.Va.
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WASHINGTON -- A constellation of 508 red dots stretches across a wall map in the office of Bruce Nilles, one for every power plant now burning coal in the United States. It is his job to make these stars go dark, one by one.
The director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign is a skinny Wisconsinite who bikes to work at the environmental group's warren of offices in adjoining Capitol Hill townhouses. He has no illusions that America can stop burning coal tomorrow, or even 10 years from now, and still generate enough power to function. But the transition, he says, has to start now and to him that means giving no quarter. His group fights every proposed coal plant. They work to shut down the old ones.
"It's such a large source of global warming pollution that if we don't end coal's contribution to global warming in two decades, it's going to be very hard to live on a planet that we recognize," Mr. Nilles said.
A dozen blocks away from Mr. Nilles' office, a strangely glittering hunk of coal holds a place of honor in the memorabilia case at the National Mining Association. When it comes to coal the only ground the association's chief lobbyist, Bruce Watzman, is giving is what can be burned.
"Coal is there," he said. "It has proven itself year after year, year after year, year after year that it is a reliable, essential part of our energy mix. And it has to remain so."
So, in the nation's capital the lines are drawn in a battle likely to affect everything from the price of a kilowatt of electricity to a Greene County miner's ability to pay for it. Income and environment, tradition and climate and two very different cultures are all colliding in Washington's halls of power where decisions, or their absence, will have lasting ramifications.
"I wish more people would come here and see it isn't as bad in the coal fields as they think it is," said Dru Ellis, who machines hydraulic equipment for the mines in southern West Virginia. His brother and friends work underground.
To Keith Eshleman, a professor at the University of Maryland's Appalachian Laboratory, which studies the region's ecosystem, the sense that his promotion of a coal-free energy grid might offend his neighbors is acknowledged.
"I understand that somebody whose job is wedded to the mining industry is not going to be happy with people like myself going around and drawing conclusions about the problems associated with their industry," he said. "If your livelihood's tied to it, I understand that's an issue."
But both sides -- industry and environmentalists -- feel frustration and a hint of fear at Washington's approach to coal in recent years, a sign of the sometimes contradictory policies the Obama administration and Congress have pursued.
President Barack Obama's Environmental Protection Agency, headed by Lisa P. Jackson, a former environmental regulator in New Jersey, has sought to limit mountaintop removal mining at every opportunity. The industry uses the practice, in which the top of a mountain is sheared off to extract the coal within, to reach coal that cannot be reached by ordinary underground mining. Because the waste from the process is dumped in surrounding valleys, the EPA is heavily scrutinizing mountaintop mining for its impact on streams in possible violation of the Clean Water Act.
The EPA also has made moves to more ambitiously regulate coal ash, the toxic material left over after coal is burned for energy.
Most strikingly, the agency in late 2009 issued a finding that greenhouse gases pose a danger to human health -- which could open the door to federal emissions controls.
The attitude of the coal industry to these developments, shared by many who live and work in Appalachia, can be neatly summed up in a billboard erected by the industry group "Friends of Coal" that greets drivers on Interstate 64 in Beckley, W.Va. It states: "Don't let EPA bureaucrats take away our coal jobs."
"What comes next?" Mr. Watzman ventured. "I don't think it's so much a surprise to us as a philosophy of where they're going. I think it's a surprise the speed with which they advanced the regulatory agenda and I think the expansion of the regulatory agenda beyond what has traditionally been a focus on use issues to production issues."
First Published November 22, 2010 12:00 am
