Speaking as personified wisdom, Solomon wrote: “Receive my instruction, and not silver, and knowledge rather than choice gold; for wisdom is better than rubies, and all the things one may desire cannot be compared with her.”

Proverbs 8:10-11

Lloyd Blankfein is doing the work of God. The God of mammon. The God of rebellion. The God of perdition. The God of the flesh. The God of the Beast of Babylon’s snare.

I think the companies are just making a quick profit, paying a small group very well, and poisoning peoples water and permanently impoverishing Appalachian communities in the process.

Coal miners deserve safe, good paying jobs, and coalfield communities deserve clean drinking water and a prosperous future. In the long term, mountaintop removal coal mining and its associated valley fills certainly do not provide these things.

Lets work TOGETHER for a clean, safe, and prosperous future for Appalachian people!

“Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them: and thou shalt rejoice in the Lord, and shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel. When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will NOT forsake them. I will open rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys: I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the shittah tree, and the myrtle, and the oil tree; I will set in the desert the fir tree, and the pine, and the box tree together: that they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the Lord hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it.”
[Isaiah 41:14-20]

In West Virginia, the coal industry is really good at one thing: intimidating people. They say they have jobs, jobs, jobs. The truth is, MTR coal mining employs only a tiny fraction of underground mining, and the numbers of jobs are inflated by the coal lobby to exaggerate their numbers. Coal miners are encouraged to be angry (and thus irrational) about regulation, which they get uber-emotional about, and are encouraged by their bosses to think of as an attempt to starve their family. The companies even pay miners to show up at hearings in their reflective uniforms, like the Army Corps of Engineers hearing in Charleston in October, and threaten death to those who have legitimate anti-coal statements. They tend to forget that their larger community has been wiped out by the boom-bust cycles of coal, and the coal companies are responsible for the bad shape of their own hometown. They don’t have options. Because they are one of the lucky few who may have a fairly decent job (if you can stand your body wasting away), they are desperate to hold on to it because there are so few options. The coal companies really benefit from the sheer desperation that they themselves have created. They have a clear incentive to keep creating that desperation - if you were a smart business person, wouldn’t you notice and enjoy this position of advantage? The coal companies are shrewd, savvy business people who very deliberately create this situation. But so are we. This must change. They can’t keep doing this to our communities.

I believe in Appalachia, and I believe in the people of Appalachia overcoming their fear of these blatant intimidation/control tactics, and beating this sickly situation.

This is why solar panels shall prevail! And conserve… get energy-efficient applicances, retrofit your home, doors, windows, etc, and CONSERVE. We must squash the argument “Coal, it keeps the lights on…” well it only takes a small community-owned wind turbine to heat and light a holler of energy-efficient homes! So let’s move on the next thing and defeat the coal industry’s dirty tactics. I just want you to know… I just turned my lights off, man!

I am a Mining Engineering student at The University of Kentucky. I have news for the environmentalist that think coal will disappear in the next decade or so; Your Wrong. Coal is here for the long haul, If cap and trade passes, guess who will pay the bill, you the final consumer. The company burning the fuel will be the one who will be charged the tax, in turn they will charge three or four times what they do now per kw-hour. So your electric bill will triple.

As we move into the future there are many things that need to be discussed in order to improve our overall economic and energy situation. We need to look into renewable resources, at the time there are multiple clean uses for coal; coal liquification and gasification can be improved to burn cleaner and offer independance from the middle east oil companies. Carbon capture technology is here and available in the future, projects to build the future power plants are already in the works. These uses for coal will reduce pollutantant emissions and would bennefit our nation by making us more energy independant and create jobs here at home.

And just what type of life do you imagine for your children, eve? Does it include the possibily of birth defects, and a polluted environment to grow up in?

Indeed, plenty of people lose jobs and have to move, or learn new skills everyday. Thats LIFE.

That may not be fair, but it’s not fair for the rest of the population to have to suffer the consequences -the destruction, pollution, or poisoning- due to the dirty coal industry, either.

We are moving into cleaner, sustainable energy to preserve the very land that sustains the people. It’s not going to be easy for those who are stuck in the old ways. But everyone will have to adapt and grow with it. The only way to go now, is forward.

be an eviromentalist, in whatever form. But don’t sit there and stratch your head, wandering why someone who stands to lose so much would disagree with you. At least have the ability to put yourself in someone elses shoes.

If your honestly too selfish to understand why people who live in a mining community aren’t overjoyed with the idea of having to find a new job where they would be the lowest paid, bottom of the ladder after years of building a career in a certain industry, and possibly having to pick up and move away for said crappy job….then you just need to keep your mouth shut.

“You can say that this kind of mining is keeping food on your table, but that’s just whiny. Plenty of people lose jobs and have to move or learn new skills every day. That’s capitalism.” (John Fisher)

So I guess that Appalachians must not be human, and therefore do not deserve places to live, jobs, warmth and security close to a worksite. Wow, what a hypocritical peice of selfish, arrogant shit you are. What Micheal was trying to say, Larry, is that people from all over this country have mined thier land, destroyed thier natural beauty, and built and developed upon the aftermath. Now they come to us, telling us how we’re too stupid to know what’s good for us and we’re just being lied to by “King Coal”. We must be brainwashed, that’s it!! It’s repulsive, to be honest with you.

And for John Fisher:

I’m not the type of person that wishes for bad things to happen to people, but for you I’ll make an exception.

The day that someone threatens to take not only your livelyhood but the livelyhood of everyone around you, I hope they tell you to quit your whining. The day that your heart drops in your stomach, because you don’t think your going to be able to give your child the life you imagened, I hope someone tells you that your just being a baby. I hope that a day comes when people (who think your less than dirt anyway) try to take everything you’ve worked for from you. That’s life, sorry. My college professor said it so it must be so. You’re just too subhuman to know what’s good for you anyway…….haha stupid rednecks.

You guys seem to live in some sort of fairy tale were jobs come easy, and the mountain behind your house is more important that the lives of thousands of people. Oh sure, all of those surface miners will have a job just waiting for them at some other company where they have zero training/experience when they’re 56 years old! There’s no problem!! La la la le la di doo!

Some of you want to stick our miners back underground. You can blow your statistics out your ass, anyone who lives here knows that underground miners have one of the hardest, unhealthy, and most dangerous jobs on the planet.

There’s nothing wrong with being an enviromentalist. There’s nothing wrong with people working with the mining industry to try to find ways of better protecting the enviroment. There’s nothing wrong with promoting awareness of the impact of MTR. T
There’s something wrong with being a selfish, unsympathetic half ass enviromentalist who’s main contribution is to troll on the internet and upset other people who REALLY have something to lose. Do you understand what I mean? You have an opinion, an agenda. That’s not a whole lot of stake compared to your opposition; people who stand to lose a lot more than a belief….DO YOU GET IT?

But you have your job, warmth and security don’t you? If it’s not happening to you, then why should you care about anyone else?

I know many people from West Virginia because of pitching horseshoes with them both in WV and PA. Years of visiting the state and meeting with many residents and driving through and still no clue about MTR! I admit I am not much of a detective but it seems to me that you are seriously in need of public exposure if you ever want that tragic rape of your land to stop. And it must stop. From what I have read today both here and other websites, it is obvious that this has the potential to spread like a cancer througout the entire Appalachia range and even farther.

This is an election year. It’s a perfect time to make noise about this and make it a campaign issue in every contested race from local to state to national. Speak out now or forever regret the loss. The vast majority of people in America will understand that this practice exists only because of greed and corruption and that the mountains, valleys, streams and people are far more important than a few dollars in some corporate bottom line and in the pockets of some corrupt bottom feeding pubic servants. Let the people know and the polititians will have to respond or lose their jobs.

I’d love to show my students. (When I first saw the cartoon bug on TV I thought I was hallucinating at first).

Thanks,
Nancy Manring

my e-mail is my_shelby_mustang_gt@yahoo.com
anybody can send me something.i’m listed as Matt Oltray just for protection against hackars. Thanks!

One thing about it, the USA can do just about anything. We put a man on the moon so if we want to elimanate MTR or even drastically reduce coal fired electricity pollutants, we can do it. Just be prepared to pay 10 or 20 times your current electric bill. Wind, solar, nuclear all have many years of research before they are viable so don’t even think that will solve your problems in our lifetime. Just pay up and we can do it. Be glad to.

One final thought; do you know what the number one producer of mercury emissions is? Note how all the green websites always use the term industry for noting that coal fired electricity generation produces mercury emissions. Forest fires produce far more mercury emissions so maybe we should cut down all the trees????