The Appalachian mountains are already under assault from mountaintop removal mining and other destructive mining practices. In recent decades, at least 1,200 miles of headwater mountain streams have been buried under valley fills caused by surface coal mining and more than 400 individual mountains have been erased. The public outcry against such practices is growing, led by opposition from local community members, students, religious leaders, authors, musicians and many downstream residents. Legislation to prohibit mountaintop removal and valley fills is now under consideration in Congress and statehouses.  According to that National Coal Council, if the US were to replace just 10% of our transportation fuels with liquid coal, coal mining would need to increase by 40%.

Subsidies for coal-to-liquid fuel will increase the pressure to mine in the ecologically sensitive, steep-slope mountains of Kentucky, West Virginia, Southwestern Virginia and Tennessee. At a time when many Americans are realizing the terrible environmental toll of coal-fired electricity, providing massive public subsidies to spur an addiction to coal-fired fuel is a leap in the wrong direction.

Greenhouse Gases

Burning fossil fuels for transportation purposes is the source of 40% of all carbon dioxide (the major contributor to global warming) emissions worldwide. That makes it urgently important to increase the efficiency of our cars, trucks, planes, trains, and boats in order to curb global warming.

But coal-based fuel generates twice as much carbon dioxide as petroleum-based diesel fuel. That’s because so much carbon dioxide is released in during the process of creating the fuel from coal (one ton of carbon pollution for every barrel of fuel produced). Even if the technology someday develops to capture and store carbon dioxide on a commercial scale, using liquid coal would still produce 8% more carbon dioxide than current fuel. But it is important to understand that industry engineers estimate that such technology is at least 25 years away, if it is feasible at all.