Your home's connection to mountaintop coal removal

Coal is great stuff- it provides fifty percent of all electric power in the USA.

And it is 100 percent natural too.

What a troll.

Quote: "And it is 100 percent natural too." Well, not really.

What's so natural about decimating the landscape, habitats, and local communities while polluting the air and contributing to global warming? Disease and famine are "natural", are they "great stuff" too? You probably DON'T live next to a coal-fired power plant or you might feel differently.

On the other hand... wind or solar or tidal power can provide clean energy without destroying our planet (aka "home").

Great article by the Globe. We all can benefit from a better understanding of the connection between the light switch we flip and what the actual impacts are on the ground - sometimes VERY far away from where we live. Many utilities offer a choice of where you get your electric from, including Boston, but you have to ask.

Renewable energy is the future, coal's days are numbered.

what is wrong with you environmental wackos?

have you nothing better to do?

Anyone who believes renewable energy is the “future,” and coal’s day’s are “numbered” is delusional. Renewable energy currently supplies less than 2 percent of the Nation’s power. That figure will not change anytime soon, if ever.

Greenies have no idea just how dependent we all are on fossil fuels.

Generally speaking, all Greenies are fools.

Grinch, apparently _we_ have nothing better to do than to write into blogs complaining...oh, wait a minute, thats what you are doing too! Guess nobody has anything better to do. :)

Coal has its place for the next 100 years. Solar will win out eventually unless we all die out and turn into more coal, so we might as well start adapting to it as soon as possible, while we still have plenty of coal. The alternative is to wait until coal is scarce, which admittedly will be a long time, and then try to adapt. Unfortunately that is the mentality in America these days. Instead of being proactive, we are reactive. Case in point, taker a look at what happens when oil spikes to 150 / barrel. We are completely unprepared. We should be more prepared next time.

There's no perfect environmental solution for energy, except for renwables(albeit).
Coal we don't pay into the terrosim stream of support!

There's no reason that coal can't be mined in a fashion that doens't destroy the environment or allow it to be restored. Reasonable compromises can be reached. The land the stream is on may belong to the mining company - but it runs downstream into the water supplies for millions of people. Business does not have a right to destroy any resource they want in order to increase their bottom line.

None of the Rush fans posting here have the intelligence to understand that the environment belongs to all of us - not the corporations. They've all been brainwashed by the neo-con machine into believing that any regulation is bad regulation. Well, brain washed may be an overstatement - most of them appear to only have needed a light rinse.

As for the current change - "with 100 feet of a stream" is already a bare minimum to keep a stream clean. I wonder how all those Rushies will feel when it's their water supply that's no longer fit to drink because all the environmental regulation have been decimated. It looks like lawsuits will be the only way to stop Bush/Cheney from trying to sneak through thousands of regulation and agency changes designed to benefit thier neo-con friends.

designed to

By filling in streams with mining waste, you directly poison the water of the folks who live downstream. In Appalachia, these are some of the poorest people in the country who are stuck in the awful position of depending on coal mining for their livelihood while watching their surroundings (and bodies) being poisoned by the mine waste. If the Clean Water Act was enforced, this type of mining would be more expensive, and the mining companies would look elsewhere, and the already poor mining towns would lose more jobs. The real solution is to enforce existing laws and provide new job oppurtunities to these desparate small towns.

Thanks for this article. I lived in Kentucky in the 1970s and 1980s. I didn't live in the mountains, but often passed through them traveling back to New England to visit family. These mountains are so beautiful and they are being destroyed and the water is being poisoned. There is not such thing as clean coal. We have to develop other technologies and we have to learn to conserve energy,.