The Charleston Gazette ran an AP story today about a bill in the Kentucky General Assembly to "encourage" coal companies to plant nectar and pollen-producing trees and plants on strip-mined mountains.

The hope, according to bee-researcher Tammy Horn, is to reduce the harmful impact of mining on state's honey bees. While KFTC has not taken a formal position on the bill, several individual KFTC members have been vocal about the issue.

Clay County KFTC member (and bee-keeper) Randy Wilson told the House committee yesterday:

"You don't have to blow up mountains to have bees. This bill is just window-dressing for the industry."

The story explained the issue this way:

"In mountaintop removal mining, forests are cleared and rock is blasted apart to get to coal buried underneath. The leftover dirt, rock and rubble is dumped into nearby valleys, sometimes covering streams. The practice has for years been a source of contention between coal operators, who say it is the most effective way to get at the coal, and environmentalists, who say it has irreversibly harmed the mountains and streams. Coal companies usually plant grasses on mined land -- not the native sourwoods, tulip poplars, goldenrods, asters and other blooming trees and plants that bees need."

The bill passed unanimously through the committee after its sponsor, Rep. Fitz Steele (D-Hazard) told members that coal companies would not be required to comply with any new rules.

Harlan County KFTC member Carl Shoupe, was also quoted in the AP story. He told the reporter that coal mining hurts creatures large and small and that the mountains would have ample blooming plants for bees if coal companies didn't destroy them. Shoupe said:

"That's what we've been trying to tell everybody. This mountaintop removal is just devastating the whole ecosystem, and no one wants to listen.''

The whole article, written by AP reporter Roger Alford, is a good read. It's too bad that Kentuckians have to go to West Virginia to find a paper willing to cover the story!

The Decline of Appalachian Coal Data compiled by Downstream Strategies in Morgantown, West Virginia, found that coal employment in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia has dropped by about half since 1983.

The Daily Yonder writers looked at actual employment data for Wise County, VA, which was the focus of the Washington Post article. Although Wise County is located in the heart of Virginia's coal fields, mining jobs provided just 11.5% of county employment there in 2004, fewer than the jobs in retail (14.1%) or government (21.7%).

As Bishop and Marema write,

"Coal has been a declining part of the Appalachian employment picture for more than half a century. As the industry mechanized, it needed fewer miners. When more coal was mined from the surface, beginning in the early 1960s, the industry needed fewer miners still...In the last generation, the total coal employment has fallen by half. In the 30 years before that, the decline was steeper."

Their piece ends with a challenge to the popular notion that the coal jobs are falling due to environmental regulations.

"Coal is losing employees in the eastern mountains, but not because of any war. Coal is a shrinking part of the economy in Appalachia, both because the industry is efficient and because reserves are falling. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the (Washington) Post’s story portraying coal’s economic importance in Appalachia fits neatly with the coal industry’s desire to fight regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and mountaintop removal mining."

Rick Handshoe

The movement to end mountaintop removal mining is featured this week in a cover story of the LEO, a free weekly newspaper in Louisville. The article, written by Jonathan Meador, can be found here.

The story features Floyd County KFTC member Rick Handshoe.

“I go down in (that valley) to hunt, and there’s nothing there,” says Handshoe, adding that because of the contaminated runoff generated by local mountaintop removal mining operations, the water line had to be dismantled, and water is now piped in from elsewhere at a greater overall cost. “Some of the people here, they call people from Louisville and Lexington ‘outsiders,’” he says. “But you’ve got a stake in this too. You guys are drinking the water that’s coming from here."

Citizens marching to the Capitol in support of the Stream Saver Bill

It also focuses on the close relationship that Rep. Jim Gooch, chairperson of the House Natural Resources Committee, has to the coal industry, and places responsibility for inaction on the Stream Saver Bill at the feet of Governor Beshear.

"If you wonder why someone in Gooch’s position is allowed to repeatedly kill the routinely unsuccessful Stream Saver Bill — which would significantly reduce the toxic pollution created by surface mining — every time the bill lands in his committee, you don’t have to look much farther than the governor’s mansion."

State Senator Kathy Stein, a key sponsor of the Stream Saver Bill (SB 139), is also quoted:

“They (coalfield legislators) continue to support the coal industry and everything that they say — that coal’s so good for the economy — but if you look at the poverty rates in some of these counties with coal producers, you find it’s not the case. If you’re so damn good for eastern Kentucky, then why does eastern Kentucky end up perpetually one of the poorest regions in the nation?”

Rep. Yarmuth meeting with coalfield resident and member McKinley Sumner

And the story gives a nod to U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, a primary co-sponsor of the Clean Water Protection Act. He refers to a recent study by Downstream Strategies which notes that coal production in central Appalachia is expected to "decrease by as much as 50% over the next decade while becoming increasingly expensive to mine."

“The report kind of validates what a lot of us have already known,” says U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-3. “What peripheral evidence has shown is that coal is something any economy cannot depend on. A third of the number of people in coal mining are employed now (compared to) the peak of production.”

By Roy Silver, Harlan County chapter member

"The biggest thing is our water resource.  Our water is really good now. What’s more important the water or the coal?  This is the best place in the world to live. You're not just taking out the coal, you're destroying generations of people who could live here and raise their families here.”  Bennie Massey, Lynch City Council

Harlan Development/A & G wants to strip mine Black Mountain above Lynch.  It would drain into Looney Creek, which feeds the Lynch Reservoir.

The discharge is a violation of the Kentucky Five-Mile Policy.  It “prohibits discharges into a stream within five miles upstream from any public water supply intake. Looney Creek feeds the head waters of the Cumberland River.  The strip mine could also impact downstream communities. 

This strip mine would place 18 new sediment ponds above the community, set off blasts near homes and historic buildings.

It will encroach on the upper elevations of Black Mountain.  Harlan Counties. The Kentucky Resources Council, KFTC and many others protected in 1999.

  To strip mine this area, the company must get a permit from the US Army Corps of Engineers US EPA.  It will mine through and create a sediment pond at the headwaters of Long Rock Branch, (Magazine Hollow).  This feeds the Lynch Reservoir.  This strip mine could damage four other headwater streams.  

A&G’s Ison Rock Ridge strip mine in Wise County, Va. has been suspended.   It had history of federal violations.  Owners of Harlan Development Corporation owed over $1.5 million in mine safety violations.  Lynch residents are asking that this permit be denied.  They are also asking for a public hearing from the US Army Corps of Engineers. 

Send an email to the US Army Corps of Engineers and EPA asking officials to respect the concerns of Lynch residents, protect their water and community resources.

Submit comments by 4pm on Monday, February 1st.
Click here to go to the KFTC Action Page to send your letter.

Comments will be accepted after the deadline. For more information, contact colleen@kftc.org.

You can also send a letter by fax to:
Nashville District Corps of Engineers, Regulatory Branch
(Attention: Marty Tyree)
3701 Bell Road, Nashville, TN 37214
Fax 615-369-7501

Downstream Strategies, an environmental consulting firm, recently released a report that urges Appalachian states to invest in developing their renewable energy infrastructure. According to an ABC News story the report:

predicts production in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee will fall nearly 50 percent within a decade and urges those states to adopt laws, low-interest loan programs and other measures to support the development of renewable energy sources.

The report goes on to say that this decline will be in part due to competition from cleaner burning natural gas but it also points to a dramatic decrease in easy to recover coal and increasing environmental controls.

Studies have shown that local ownership of renewable energy projects generates greater jobs and local revenues than corporate-owned projects. Therefore, support for local ownership of energy development will help to maximize the potential economic benefit of developing renewables.

Improvements and investment in energy efficiency can also generate new jobs and revenue, while saving businesses and residents money on energy consumption. Supporting measures include: energy efficiency resource standards, expanded demand response initiatives, building energy codes, low-income efficiency programs, and research and development support.

Finally, policy attention must be focused on developing workforce programs that will provide the skills and knowledge required for emerging and potential renewable energy industries, and should be coupled with energy-and investment-related policies aimed at spurring project development. 

According the the Energy Information Administration web site, power plants reduced their coal consumption by ten percent last year and the projections are for demand to continue to be low in 2010.

As Senator Byrd said late last year, "West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it. The time has arrived for the people of the Mountain State to think long and hard about which course they want to choose." (Byrd, 2009)

You can download the report here. And a link to the ABC News story about the release of the report is here.

From Renewable Energy World 
comes this interesting news:

On January 7, 2009, a key legislator in Indiana introduced a proposal to establish a comprehensive system of “feed-in tariffs,” designed to spur the rapid development of jobs and in-state renewable energy generation.

A feed-in tariff is a fancy name for a guaranteed rate that utility companies can be required to pay for approved types of in-state renewable energy generation. This approach has been used successfully in many places to encourage private investment in renewable energy facilities and systems. The costs are covered by a small charge on all utility customers bills.

Sustainable energy legislation, including a proposed feed-in tariff, is expected to be introduced in Kentucky during the 2010 legislative session. More information about the concept of feed-in tariffs is available in this white paper commissioned by the Kentucky Conservation Committee.

The legislation proposed in Indiana has a number of unique features. The bill would provide different rates for renewable energy projects that qualify for federal incentives and those that don’t – a provision that helps non-profits and individuals who can’t benefit from large income tax credits because their incomes aren’t large. It also contains a system of different rates for wind energy that is based on the quality of the wind resource in a particular area. This is intended to spread development of wind turbines across the state and avoid concentrations in only the windiest areas. There is also a special rate for small residential-scale wind turbines. The legislation establishes guaranteed rates for a range of wind, solar, hydro and biomass technologies, excluding biomass from forestry and coal-bed methane gas.

Today is our opportunity to speak directly to President Obama's team before he heads to the Copenhagen climate negotiations next week! Young leaders from across the movement have gathered in Washington DC, and we will spend the day preparing to tell EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis that we need bold, just and immediate action on climate and energy.

We need your voices in the room. You can join the forum today from 4pm - 7pm EST by watching the LIVE webcast at www.whitehouse.gov/LIVE or by providing comments and questions on the LIVE Facebook Chat at http://apps.facebook.com/whitehouselive/.  Remember to write blog posts and tweet them to @PowerShift09 with the Youth Clean Energy Forum's official hashtag: #YCEF. You can also watch a live feed of the twitter conversation at www.powershift09.org.

Congratulations on this big day for the youth climate movement and please join us this afternoon!

Whit Jones
Acting Field Director
Energy Action Coalition

Energy Action Coalition is a youth-led coalition of 50 organizations working together to fight for a clean, just and renewable energy future. Join the new Local Community and get your neighborhood involved in the national push for a future powered by clean energy and not by dirty politics.

For a list of Energy Action Coalition partners, please visit our Energy Action Partners page.

On Thursday November 5, KFTC members Vanessa Hall and Suzanne Tallichet participated in A Forum on Coal in Kentucky. The daylong event hosted by the University of Kentucky Department of Mining Engineering and the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments sponsored the event as “a balanced discussion regarding the past, present and future impacts of coal on our state’s economy and environment.”

Set up as a debate between those supporting the coal industry and environmentalists against coal, the “discussion” was presented through four daytime sessions, Economics and Coal in Kentucky, People and Coal in Kentucky, Aspects of Coal in Kentucky, Environment and Coal in Kentucky and the evening session, Impact of Coal, Today and Tomorrow.

Along side the presentations of the experts in economic, science and research was the highly charged political views of coal, which often crept over as in the case of Kentucky Historian Ron Bryant, “Pollution, land destruction, that can be studied; I want you to think positively about coal and the future of Kentucky.” In presenting the history of coal in Kentucky, Bryant failed to mention the effects of the broadform deed or the citizen led movement residing in a constitutional amendment abolishing it.

Leading coal politicians such as former Governor Paul Patton, Pike Co. Judge Executive Wayne B. Rutherford and House Majority Leader Rocky Adkins played to the majority of the 300 attendees supporting the industry, painting the industry as the object of a vast conspiracy plotting its downfall. “Coal is not the villain, coal should be the hero of this country,” railed Rutherford, “We have to give coal the credit it deserves!” Governor Patton pronounced, “Coal is the favorite whipping boy of the media,” adding that Kentucky’s, “central location, hard-working people, and cheap electricity makes Kentucky attractive to economic activity”, alleging that the states in the northeast of the country want to destroy Kentucky and West Virginia’s economic edge.

Jason Bailey of MACED, Suzanne Tallichet and Vanessa Hall brought compelling and often unwelcome reasons to the audience for Kentucky to question many assumptions about coal and Kentucky’s economic future

The PowerPoint presentations of the various research and economic experts can be seen at www.coalinkentucky.com. The speeches of Patton, Rutherford and Adkins are unavailable.

The outspoken head of Duke Energy, Jim Rogers, is at it again. Rogers is known for publicly acknowledging reality (like climate change) before many of his peers in the utility industry. Now he has expressed doubt about the feasibility of capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. He also suggested that coal may not play a role in America's energy portfolio by 2050.

His comments are reported in this column by journalist Kate Shepherd.

The Governor's Conference on Energy and the Environment will take place at the Lexington Convention Center on Wednesday, September 30th and Thursday, October 1st.  There is a charge for attending, but scholarships are still available (see the link below). 

According to the information page, this year's agenda will address the following topics:

• How do we achieve energy security in a carbon-constrained world?
• How do we develop our biomass resources?
• What opportunities do we have to increase our renewable energy portfolio?
• How can smart grid technologies help us achieve our energy efficiency objectives?
• How are actions at the federal level going to affect Kentucky's energy landscape?

The agenda includes a session presented by state and federal elected officials about Kentucky's energy landscape and a session that will discuss "new opportunities" in that landscape for our state.  The decisions our state must make around questions of energy and the environment at this critical moment will steer the use of taxpayer money well into the future. 

The questions covered on the agenda point to even bigger questions for KFTC. What do we want Kentucky's energy landscape to look like in the coming years?  What direction will we head as a state in terms of both energy reliance and our economic future?  How can we facilitate a clean, sustainable, just transition in our communities?  This conference is a chance to hear the answers the Governor and policymakers are offering to these important questions and to voice your feedback about those suggestions.

  Click here to link to the state information page about the conference, which includes registration and scholarship information.

The following is an except from an article in KFTC's most recent newsletter, Balancing the Scales. Go here to read the entire article bts article: Appalachian Transition

The conversation is changing

At the East Kentucky Leadership Conference in April, Dr. Ron Eller, recently retired professor of Appalachian History at the University of Kentucky, threw down the gauntlet to the political leadership of eastern Kentucky, "We must look beyond an extractive based economy to one that values and enhances the landscape and the resources that it holds, to one that connects our own sustainability and future to that of the mountains themselves," Eller said.

Though elected officials have generally supported the idea of a more diversified economy, few have had the courage or foresight to talk about the coming day when coal will not dominate the economy or the politics of the region.

That conversation is now changing, thanks to Eller's challenge, the work of KFTC members, and the realities of the coal-based economy that continues to discard workers.

"Elected leaders from my region, as well as throughout this state and nation, need to be visionaries. They cannot continue to dance to the beat of the same fossil fuel drummer," said Mickey McCoy, a Martin County member, "A transition to renewable energy must begin. The same great workforce in Appalachia which now supplies the power plants with coal to burn can be used in the green industry."

Rep. Greg Stumbo responded defensively to Eller's challenge but nonetheless said, "The debate should be about what happens in the end, when in fact, there is perhaps no more surface mining, or the coal runs out or whatever happens."

The coal industry is already in transition

For decades the coal industry has sought ways to stay profitable, and high on the list has been to become more automated. Even as production has remained constant, coal employment continues its long historic decline due to ongoing mechanization of the industry. Coal employment in Kentucky is only about a third of what it was 30 years ago.

Kentucky's economic development, energy and tax policies all focus on continuing to prop up the coal industry, even as it sheds jobs in a job-starved region. A recent MACED report estimated that in 2006, Kentucky provided a net subsidy of nearly $115 million to the coal industry."

Now is the Time - Creating new jobs along side the old jobs

"We have a narrow window of opportunity in Appalachia today, global warming, the financial crisis, international recession and world terrorism create an opportunity for change, if we can seize the moment," Eller said. Clean energy jobs are the logical place to start and twenty years is considered a reasonable timeframe because it allows existing coal related workers to remain working and provides training for the next generation to become a green workforce.

According to an Apollo Alliance report, investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy could affect Kentucky's economy over 10 years with an additional 44,783 new jobs.

Based on those figures, if Kentucky were to invest $43 million per year (half of what coal industry is getting now) over the next 20 years, the state could transition the 18,000 coal-mining and 52,000 coal-related jobs into other employment.

Recent Appalachian Regional Commission studies concluded that a set of energy efficiency policies in the Appalachian region would save consumers almost $10 billion annually on their energy bills by 2020 and create more than 37,000 jobs.

But KFTC members know that the transition of the Appalachian economy is not just from one job to a different job, it is about a fundamental restructuring of the economy.

While many of the jobs associated with renewable energy and especially energy efficiency are not income equivalent with some mining jobs, they represent jobs for the many people who are unemployed or under-employed and new jobs to rebuild a skilled workforce in the region.

MACED has identified other new or expandable sources of good jobs, they include:

• Enhancing the quality and value of the region's forests and creating a sustainable forest products economy;
• Expanding a sustainable local food system;
• Restoring the land from the effects of past abusive mining practices;
• Providing residents access to clean drinking water and basic wastewater systems;
• Cleaning up illegal open dumps and abandoned landfills;
• Repairing and building parks and trails and promoting eco- and outdoor tourism;
• Restoring the region's watersheds.

It will not be easy, it takes real leadership

"We have to be honest about the challenges we face in creating a new economy. It will not be easy," points out Roy Silver, a KFTC member in Harlan County. "This is particularly challenging in light of the fact that coal-mining jobs [can] pay about $60,000 a year. We need to work with people on creating alternatives that pay a family living wage."

Ken Ward, a reporter for the Charleston Gazette, wrote, "Everyone should stop trying to make it sound easy, and explain that it's hard. REAL political leadership tells the public that something is hard, but that we're up to it and are going to work together until we succeed."

From KFTC's blog comes this post by "Todd," a Kentucky miner. "The only hope for eastern Kentucky is through a diversified economy. In which, I believe, coal should play a vital part. We, the citizens and taxpayers, need to have a much louder voice in the path for our state and country. I truly believe, with good, intense discussion from all sides (miners, environmentalists, etc...) we can come up with some solutions."

All indications are that a successful economic transition in Appalachia, and consequently Kentucky, is possible; but it won't be easy and Appalachia cannot do it alone.

Read Dr. Ron Eller's speech.

Read MACED's Economics of Coal and The Impact of Coal on the Budget