With the West Virginia primary tomorrow, and Kentucky next week, coal and coal mining become more visible as issues. I wrote about this in April at Quick Political Note , Coal and the Candidates.
The Sundance Channel is going to premier a blockbuster movie, Burning the Future: Coal in America, tomorrow night. That’s 9:35 PM (Eastern) on May 13. (See the schedule here for the time in your area.) Check out this trailer.
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This documentary is moving, eloquent, visceral. We had the great fortune to have the director, David Novack, in my class on climate change a couple of weeks ago. David is, not surprisingly, not unlike his film: low-key, intelligent and passionate.
He told us about a number of ins and outs, including the linguistic detoxification of fill by the Corps of Engineers that now allows the previously banned practice of using waste to fill in waterways. The mountaintop debris that has been blown away by thousands of pounds of ANFO to expose the coal seams for easy extraction is no longer waste , it’s just earth. “War is Peace” as they might say in 1984. Well, some folks in Congress have noticed this bit of jiggery pokery and have offered the “Clean Water Protection Act” as a remedy. It defines “fill material” to mean “any pollutant that replaces portions of waters of the United States with dry land or that changes the bottom elevation of a water body for any purpose and to exclude any pollutant discharged into the water primarily to dispose of waste.”
We also talked a bit about the fact that, as Big Coal, the magisterial treatise by Jeff Goodell from 2006, points out, West Virginia, just like some other places, Nigeria and the Congo, for instance, is a place where economists have demonstrated a “clear negative relationship between natural-resource based exports” and economic growth. This phenomenon is called the “resource curse.”
As I heard Jeff Goodell say in a video from a discussion of his book in the SF Bay Area, and as David Novack seems to think, it just may be that the coal companies and the utilities see the handwriting on the wall and they know that the era of coal is coming to a close. That may or not be true.
In any event, let’s sincerely hope the pace on fighting MTR mining picks up with the broader release of this great movie. I really hope you get a chance to watch it.
