Famed climate scientist Dr. James E. Hansen, actress Daryl Hannah and Rainforest Alliance Network Executive Director Michael Brune, along with several local residents were arrested on Tuesday while protesting mountaintop removal in Southern West Virginia.

The protesters were outside the gates of a Massey Energy plant in Raleigh County, where they sat down and blocked a roadway. Thirty-one protesters were arrested for obstructing traffic and police officers, according to the Charleston Gazette.

The protesters chose the site because Massey has a slurry (wet waste from coal operations) impoundment that sits near an elementary school.

Mountaintop removal is blamed for degrading soil and waters across Appalachia as coal extraction waste contaminates rivers and upsets ecosystems. Spills of waste impoundment facilities have left a toxic residue in several Appalachian towns.  Yet it remains a legal practice in the US.

Hansen, known for sounding an early alarm about climate change two decades ago, considers coal combustion and mountaintop removal to be key contributors to global warming and has even registered opposition to the Waxman-Markey Clean Energy bill pending in Congress because it will allow new coal plants.

Dr. Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

A son of Appalachia and its coalfields, Arnold “Bud” Fultz has not forgotten his hometown of Wallins Creek, Kentucky. After 25 years as an airline exec with now-defunct Pan American World Airways, he felt compelled to speak out about what the coal industry was doing to the part of the country he calls home. In his book Fixing the Ungodly Mess: A Pathway to Change (AuthorHouse, 2008), Fultz takes aim at mountaintop removal mining, a technique of withdrawing coal from the mountains by removing up to 1,000 feet of a mountain’s summit.

“My heart never left the area and I still had relatives there.. In July 1999, I was watching Nightline. The camera was panning over my old town. It was a piece about a seventh grade class that was taking on the coal industry. “

Between 1985 and 2002, Fultz says, mountain-top removal mining destroyed seven percent of the forests in Appalachia and buried or polluted about 1,200 miles of streams.

“I drove up there and visited the teacher who said I was one of the first ones to notice. It was then that I was introduced to some of the community rabble rousers or activists. The teacher, Judy Hensley, encouraged me to dig deeper into the story.

“I started out to write a series of articles. By this point I had left the airlines and had started three assisted-living facilities with my wife and was living in Tampa. I wanted to get back in touch with the people of Kentucky and West Virginia.

As Fultz began to research , he was surprised to find how damaging the coal industry was to its neighboring communities. He reports in his book that there are more deaths from breathing coal pollution than the number of employed miners in Appalachia (about 30,000).

In addition, he says there are coal-related medical expenses. Small particulate matter from coal combustion crosses from the lungs into the bloodstream, increasing the chance for cardiac disease, heart attacks and premature deaths. Coal burning for electricity emits 96,000 pounds of mercury each year, says Fultz. A 2004 EPA report stated that one in six women of childbearing age in the United States has enough mercury concentration in her blood to risk brain damage to her newborn.

The series of articles became chapters, which eventually became a book.

While Fultz is encouraged that President Elect Obama says mountain top removal is an issue he wants addressed by his administration, Fultz does have concerns about how this will be accomplished. “Our new Energy Secretary, [Nobel Prize winning physicist] Steven Chu, has indicated that clean coal will play a part in the country’s energy needs.” (Many environmentalists consider “clean coal” to be an oxymoron; it refers to  unproven, expensive carbon capture and sequestration techniques.)

“All the clean coal in the world will not stop the environmental abuses that now exist,” says Fultz. ”Look at some of our rivers in coal country. They are dying. There are no fish and the water is filthy.”

In addition, he says, clean coal won’t address the fact that between 1,500 and 2,000 miners die each year from black lung disease from mining coal. And clean coal won’t end the intergenerational poverty that is the direct result of the coal industry’s relationship with the government, which has often argued “without mining, the coal region would be nothing.”

To fix “the ungodly mess” as his title indicates, Fultz says visionary leadership is needed, with particular attention on three fronts: Renewable energy technology; affordable and accessible health care
and a re-vitalized education system

“My passionate objective is for citizens, both in the Appalachian coalfields and across the country…to rock the hell out of the boat – to reverse ungodly policies, to regain our country’s greatness.”

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