Hello.  My name Patrick Dunn.  I am from Berea, Kentucky.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is where they mine coal from the ground by lopping the tops off of mountains and dumping the mining waste in the streams and valleys below.  1.2 million acres of land have been flattened by mountaintop removal – including 500 mountains.

I care about mountaintop removal because it affects so many things.  It creates many environmental problems.  It destroys every living thing in the area and and it will never grow back the way it was before.  In fact, only 4% of MTR sites have been “reclaimed.”

But the real problem is how it affects people like Makayla and her family – and the thousands of others living near mountaintop removal sites. 

It also costs our state more money to give subsidies to coal than what coal gives back to our state.  $115 million a year to be exact.  If we used that money to fund renewable sources we wouldn’t have to have mountaintop removal.

And Kentucky produces today double the amount of coal we produced in 1979 – with only 1/5 of the work force. Mountaintop removal eliminates coal-mining jobs, not create jobs.

And coal is a finite resource anyways – there are other good sources of energy that will give us the power we need.

I wish our candidates would say that they support the Clean Water Protection Act proposed in Congress.  But I haven’t heard them mention it once.

This bill would protect communities and water quality by outlawing the dumping of mining waste into streams.  It is a common sense bill – a simple way to protect our water.  You don’t dump stuff into our water.  If its not clean, its dirty.  Period.