Daryl Hannah

via Daryl Hannah: Why I Was Arrested in Coal River, West Virginia.

When politicians, Obama included, talk of “clean coal” they are not speaking of any new processes invented to finally make coal healthy. What they, these politicians and their echo network, are doing is whitewashing a serious ecological and human health catastrophe caused by coal mining.

It is a trick perfected by the right-wing. They come up with a two or three word phrase that strikes a chord with voters to promote their agenda and keep us from looking behind the curtain at what is really happening. This very effective trick is called framing. The frame clean coal is one of many piles of wool the right wing has pulled over our eyes during the Bush administration and is continuing today with Obama’s continued use of the phrase.

Another famous frame was stay the course. You know where that got us.

Hannah and others were arrested last week protesting the continued use of the method of mining called Mountain Top Removal (MTR). Hannah explains why in her own words:

Mountain Top Removal is a devastatingly destructive form of mining and has already destroyed 2,000,000 acres in the Appalachian Mountains.

Coal companies have literally blown up over 500 mountain tops to access the coal seams and then dumped the refuse into the valleys below, killing over 3000 miles of headwater streams. The EPA just gave the go ahead for an additional 42 mountaintops to be blown off with another 6 permits pending.

Mountain Top Removal leaves behind a virtual hideous moonscape of devastated earth, billions of gallons of poisonous toxic sludge, and boarded up towns with dramatically high rates of cancer.

Mountain Top Removal uses explosives to loosen the mountain top, then machines scrape the dirt off the coal vein and dump the spoil into the valleys and intermittent streams. Entire ecological systems are destroyed in the process.

Some photos of Mountain Top Removal:

The aftermath of mountaintop removal.

If you want to see a real good close-up of the damage done by MTR go here.

What’s worse than this utter destruction of our precious and beautiful America is the toll this mining takes on human health. The part of Hannah’s saga having the most impact is her sharing of personal stories sent from Appalachian residents who have to breathe the sulfur packed air and drink the mercury and other carcinogens from the polluted water.

From the article:

(Hannah) Today I received this from a man in Raleigh County, West Virginia:

(Man from WV) West Virginia. It is hell.
Every morning a 6 am my cat starts coughing. My eyes burn, my nose burns (sometimes bleeds), I get ill, and my health continues to fall apart. I got two forms of cancer, I can’t drink the water… and we are 15 miles from Marsha Fork where they are making (was supposed to be shut down) a cyanide based pesticide that in an accident killed 1800 people in India. My kid is lead poisoned, my wife is- and in a mile radius 10 people have had heart attacks or died from whatever is here. The dust is full of arsenic and the Massey power plants create a blue haze which is really sulfuric acid. EPA won’t come near this place. It is owned by the coal industry. Thousands, who live here and are dying from 100 miles of rivers under coal sludge, Do the earth a favor and check on this and if you feel like improving our life send us a ticket out of here. I am sending you a picture of my son. He is being poisoned here. It breaks my heart. We cannot even get workman’s comp and have huge families. We are the poor of southern West Virginia..

Don’t listen to anyone who promotes the frame “clean coal”. It is a lie. The reason it resonates is that the power companies that dump billions of tons of CO2 into our atmosphere have changed the color of the smoke from their chimneys making the gases emitted appear clean.

All they have done is remove the ash, which is toxic by the way, and dump it by the ton into small ponds called impoundments. The ponds are not lined and mercury, arsenic, and other toxins leech into the West Virginia and Kentucky drinking water. They might as well have done nothing. They cannot capture the CO2 (greenhouse gas) because they do not have the technology as of now.

But there is invisible smoke now, so the uninformed think coal must be clean.

The frame “clean coal” exists and satisfies the right-wing mouth-breathers’ need for an excuse to keep the status quo.

Real clean coal, though, does not exist. It is just another right-wing lie.