Bathtub staining from mine water pollution in private home

From a News Report by Gareth Evans, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), February 11, 2019

[Wyoming County, WV] In the shadow of some of America’s most controversial coal mines, where companies use huge amounts of explosives to blow the tops off mountains, isolated communities say their water has been poisoned.

Now, they must decide if they will fight back against an industry they have relied upon for generations.

Casey wears a one-dollar wedding ring now. She bought the blue plastic band after her original ring was ruined by the toxic water that has been pumping into her home for more than a decade. “I just needed something there,” she says, as she holds the replacement ring up to the light. “I felt empty without it.” She places her original wedding band, now discoloured and corroded, in her palm. Her skin, especially on her hands, has become coarse and sore.

The taps in her house have been worn down, her washing machine frequently stops working, and her bathroom and kitchen have been stained a deep, bloody orange by the pollutants – iron, sulphur, even arsenic – that have seeped into her home’s water supply.

This is Appalachia – the heart of America’s coal country. It is home to some of the poorest and most isolated communities in the US and the legacy of mining, be it the abandoned processing plants or the scarred landscape, can be seen dotted alongside its vast highways.

Casey, who asked not to be identified by her real name, lives in a small, double-berth structure with a wooden porch in southern West Virginia. It’s a place where mobile phone reception is yet to reach. She pours a glass of water from her kitchen tap and lets it rest on a table. It has a strange smell and a sticky texture and within minutes begins to turn dark orange. A layer of black sediment soon sinks to the bottom of the glass.

“This is what we have to live with,” she says. “We don’t bathe in the water and we don’t cook with it. It stains our fingernails, our knuckles, and our clothes. It’s really, really difficult living like this.”

Casey and her husband Jack (not his real name), have two young children and drive for more than an hour to stock up on bottled water to drink and cook with. So who do they hold responsible?

“I’ve been here all my life, but when the surface [coal] mine came in that’s when the water started changing,” says Jack, who, despite being a miner himself, believes the industry is accountable for the family’s water problems. “I think if they’ve done wrong they should have to fix it.”

At the sprawling mine in the neighbouring valley, millions of pounds of explosives are being detonated on the mountaintops so that coal, buried deep below the surface, can be excavated.

This process is a type of surface mining known as mountaintop removal, and has drawn the ire not only of nearby residents but of environmental groups who say it devastates the landscape and pollutes the waterways.

One study estimates that an area the size of the state of Delaware has been flattened by this type of coal mining since it was first practised in the 1970s.

Another report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that more than 2,000 miles of streams – a distance longer than the Mississippi river – have been buried by the excess rock and soil (known as overburden) that is dumped after the explosions.

And in a part of the world where many people rely on their own wells to get water, rather than a conventional, monitored, pipeline, any pollution from mining waste can have devastating consequences.

These private wells are essentially unregulated, so it is up to people like Casey and Jack to determine whether their water has been contaminated. But the complex nature of water pollution means many people are completely unaware of what’s entering their supply.

“When you dump a lot of overburden into the valley, and start covering up streams, you have water sources that end up travelling through the [waste] material,’ says Professor Michael McCawley, an environmental engineer who has spent time researching the health impacts of mountaintop removal.

“It’s kind of like dumping geological trash,” he explains. “It ends up increasing the concentration of acidic ions and metals [in the water], things like arsenic and nickel.” This pollution, according to his research, has taken a catastrophic toll on the health of those whose water supply lies in its path.

“This population is under assault from both water and air,” Professor McCawley says. “What we’re finding in the water is likely to cause inflammation in the body, which can set off a lot of other chronic diseases. “The big [problems] we have found are certainly cancers. Name a cancer and they’re seeing it here.”

When asked about cancer rates, Casey reels off a list of people living nearby who have been diagnosed in recent month. “Oh Lord everybody has been getting it,” she says. “It’s scary.”

Dr Wesley Lafferty, who is based in nearby Boone County, believes a number of health problems are being exacerbated by mining waste. “We get all kinds of symptoms,” he told Human Rights Watch last year. “Rashes, restrictive airway disease, dermatitis, generic skin disease. I definitely feel there is an environmental component to that.”

In a valley not far from Casey’s home, and sitting within earshot of the same mine that she says has caused her water contamination, Jason Walker is describing many of the same problems.

“My water was drinkable and clear before the mountaintop removal started,” he says. “But then it got worse. It smelt like rotten eggs and the colour of my sinks, faucets, all my laundry, turned orange.” He then had his water tested and was warned that it was so toxic that, if he washed his clothes in it, there was a risk that direct sunlight could set them on fire.

Jason now cooks with bottled water, but he has been collecting water from a nearby stream and treating it with swimming pool chemicals to supply his house. Last winter, after a spell of severe cold weather, he was forced to use an axe to cut through more than five inches of ice to access the stream water. But when the pipes he was using to pump it into his home froze solid he had to go without.

“I’m getting a new well drilled for $4,000 to keep myself from doing that again, even though I don’t know how good the water will be,” he says. “I took a loan out against our property to pay for it. It’s a huge gamble.

“My grandfather was a coal miner, my dad was a coal miner, but if the mines tear something up I think they should replace it. I want more regulations that actually help the little person and not the big person.”

In a telephone interview with the BBC, a spokesman for the company that owns the surface mine in Wyoming County said that it operated under strict state regulations and had a valid permit. “We view ourselves as pretty good neighbours and if somebody has an issue then we would address it,” said the spokesman for CM Energy, which took over the mine in 2017.

But when presented with the complaints of nearby residents, the spokesman declined to take responsibility and said the water contamination could have been caused by a number of different issues. “If we thought we were responsible then we would step up and try and do something about it,” the spokesman said. “If there’s something that our company can do to facilitate working with politicians and the local community then we would participate.”

The mine’s previous owner, Dynamic Energy, is facing a lawsuit from a number of residents – including Casey and Jack – who are seeking compensation for the costs of dealing with their water issues.

It won a similar lawsuit a few years ago, and Jason, who was part of that legal battle, said it left the entire community divided between those who supported the coal industry and those who wanted to fight back.

“There’s a lady down the street here who wouldn’t join the lawsuit,” he says. “She hasn’t spoken to me in almost two years because of it. They were scared it would mean losing jobs.”

Casey understands their concerns. “It’s how people make their living and support their families around here,” she says. “If you don’t work in the coal mines you either flip burgers or you have to move out of state and do something else.”

But her husband Jack says it wasn’t a difficult decision to join the latest legal action – even if he is a coal miner. “The only thing I really care about is getting fresh water the way it was when I was growing up around here,” he says. “I ain’t worried about the money. I just want clean water.”

Mountain Valley Pipeline to use 42” diameter pipe

From an Article by Ken Ward Jr., Staff Writer, Charleston Gazette, April 27, 2018

This article was produced in partnership with the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. ProPublica is supporting seven local and regional newsrooms this year, including the Gazette-Mail, as they work on important investigative projects affecting their communities.

More than 26 years ago, I wrote a story about a woman named Dixie Woolum.

I had been at my paper barely six months. At the time, I thought it would be cool that I’d get a dateline from Woolum’s hometown, Cinderella, W.Va. Little did I know then how much that story’s headline — “Broken promises” — really meant in the long history of West Virginia’s relationship with coal.

Woolum’s husband, Jimmy, was a coal miner who had died years earlier.

“Dixie Woolum packed her husband’s dinner bucket every morning,” I wrote. “Jimmy left early to work in the mines outside Williamson, heart of the billion-dollar coalfield.”

I was hoping to illustrate the financial distress faced at the time by Woolum and by thousands of people like her because of the potential collapse of the United Mine Workers of America’s health care plan for retired miners and their families. Miners like Jimmy Woolum thought they were promised health care for life in a long-ago deal between President Harry Truman and legendary UMWA President John L. Lewis.

In reality, protecting that health care has been an almost constant fight, part of the root of the bitter strikes against Pittston Coal and A.T. Massey Coal, the first two in an avalanche of coal operators who tried to stop funding miner benefits and pensions the union had won in its national contract.

Coal miners and coal communities are pretty used to broken promises by now.

Congress promised in 1969 to eliminate black lung disease. But thousands of miners — including Jimmy Woolum — continued to die from it. Today, though the industry knows how to prevent black lung, there’s a resurgence of the disease among miners in Central Appalachia.

Coalfield residents were promised that strip mines would be reclaimed, but most states haven’t required companies to set aside nearly enough money for cleanups, setting the stage for a financial crisis as the industry’s decline puts more and more companies at risk of failing.

Most of all, coalfield communities were promised prosperity — and today some of the places that have produced the most coal are among the region’s poorest.

How can this be?

It’s a crucial question to ask, especially at this critical time in West Virginia, as the state rushes forward with its new relationship with the natural gas industry.

Coal has done a lot for West Virginia. Generations of miners earned a good living, especially after the state’s coalfields were unionized. As Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., likes to remind people in Washington, coal helped win two world wars and built our nation into a global superpower.

The industry’s downsides are, if not always acknowledged by political leaders, well-documented. The great Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams listed coal’s “repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitation of men and nature, and its seemingly endless series of disasters,” in an often-cited passage from his seminal history of the state.

And now, in the face of a major decline in the coal industry, families and entire communities that depended on it are hurting.

What will coal leave behind? Many in West Virginia are starting to understand the painful answers to that question: Abandoned mine lands, abandoned pension plans, polluted streams, empty government coffers — giant challenges for local communities in supporting schools and other basic needs.

At the same time, political leaders and business boosters are pointing to natural gas as the way out of West Virginia’s downward spiral, as the answer to our state’s economic problems.

But others worry that the state is headed down the same road with natural gas that it’s been on with coal.

We’ve just published a story detailing those similarities. Earlier this year, for example, Gov. Jim Justice proposed and then quickly backed away from a natural gas tax earlier to help fund our state’s schools. Gov. William Marland did the same thing with a proposed coal tax in the 1950s.

And Marland was far from the first to offer warnings about West Virginia’s wealth being dug from the ground and hauled out of state.

As early as 1884, a state Tax Commission report said, “The question is whether this vast wealth shall belong to persons who live here and who are permanently identified with the future of West Virginia, or whether it shall pass into the hands of persons who do not live here and care nothing for our state except to pocket the treasures which lie buried in our hills.”

In this series of stories, with the help of ProPublica, I hope to bring readers here in West Virginia, and those around the country, a clearer view of how history could be repeating itself.

For example, as my first story illustrates, West Virginia lawmakers and regulators have moved quickly to give gas developers broad latitude to operate, weakening environmental and public safety rules that govern the industry. Over the course of the year, I plan to more fully illustrate the ways the gas boom and what it brings with it are changing our communities and our landscape.

I also plan to look at the impact on workers. Are the jobs from the Marcellus Shale gas boom really going to West Virginians, or are companies bringing in seasoned hands from Texas and Oklahoma? Unlike our experience with coal, is West Virginia using the wealth created during this boom to plan and prepare for some day in the future when the gas is gone and we need a more diverse economy?

Who is in the room when decisions about the gas industry are being made? Are our communities empowered, or are government officials and gas lobbyists working out deals behind closed doors?

Hopefully, the stories about this crossroads in our state will shine some light on how West Virginia can learn from our past and the experience of people like Dixie Woolum. Follow along, and please tell us your stories, about your experience with the coal or the natural gas industry in West Virginia.

You can email us at changingwv@wvgazettemail.com or call 304-348-1702. You can also send us regular mail to Ken Ward Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, 1001 Virginia Street, East., Charleston, W.Va., 25301 Plus, we’ll be giving you more information in the days to come about how to take part in this conversation.

Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702, or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.

Most WV residents care about the future

TRUMP vs. EARTH

From the Essay by Amy Davidson, The New Yorker Magazine, April 10, 2017

He said that his order puts “an end to the war on coal.” In reality, it’s a war on basic knowledge of the harm that coal can do.

In late 2006, President George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency argued before the Supreme Court that it did not want to regulate greenhouse gases, and that no one could make it do so. It certainly had no wish to accede to the desires of Massachusetts, which, with eleven other states, had sued the E.P.A. for failing to establish guidelines on emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons. The states pointed to the agency’s charter, under the Clean Air Act, which instructs it to regulate chemicals released into the air “which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” They asked why the E.P.A., which had refused even to consider whether greenhouse gases fell into that category, thought that it could ignore the law.

The Court, in a landmark 5–4 decision, written by Justice John Paul Stevens and issued ten years ago this week, agreed with the states. As a result of that ruling, the E.P.A. began the formal process of looking at the science documenting the risks posed by greenhouse gases, and recognized that those emissions had contributed to a public-safety crisis affecting not just the nation but the planet. The E.P.A.’s resulting “endangerment finding,” as it is known, was issued in 2009, in time for Barack Obama’s Presidency. It became the immediate object of conservative scorn and of furious efforts in Congress and the courts to invalidate it, but it held up, and formed the basis for new standards on auto emissions and for Obama’s Clean Power Plan, issued in 2015. More than that, the finding was an assertion of the principle that politicians cannot entirely ignore either science or the rule of law.

We now have, in Donald J. Trump, a President who shows disdain for both. Trump’s lack of interest in climate change as anything other than fodder for conspiracy theories involving Chinese hoaxers reached its fullest expression last week, in a “Presidential Executive Order on Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth.” The order asks every agency of the federal government to review its rules and to purge them of measures that inconvenience the fossil-fuel and nuclear-power industries. In particular, it directs the E.P.A. to rewrite the Clean Power Plan, which had called for, among other things, the replacement of old and dirty coal-burning plants. The plan would, it was projected, result in eight hundred and seventy million fewer tons of carbon pollution released into the atmosphere, as many as thirty-six hundred fewer premature deaths in the United States between now and 2030, and ninety thousand fewer asthma attacks in children.

President Trump said that his order puts “an end to the war on coal.” In reality, it is a declaration of war on the basic knowledge of the harm that burning coal, and other fossil fuels, can do. Indeed, it tells the government to ignore information. The Obama Administration assembled a working group to determine the “social cost” of each ton of greenhouse-gas emissions. Trump’s executive order disbands that group and tosses out its findings. Scott Pruitt, the new E.P.A. administrator—who, as attorney general of Oklahoma, had joined a lawsuit attempting to undo the endangerment finding—announced that the agency was no longer interested in even collecting data on the quantities of methane that oil and gas companies release.

The order also revokes several of President Obama’s executive orders and memorandums. One of them, “Preparing the United States for the Impact of Climate Change,” sought to remove regulations that deterred private industry from responding to climate change in innovative ways; another asked the military to assess the threats posed by climate-induced upheaval abroad—wars, famines, flows of refugees. Trump further called for a scrubbing of any reports or rules that might have developed in response to those documents, and thus any insights that might have been gleaned from them. He chooses to cast such worries aside at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, even as that property sinks into the rising sea, a process that has begun and, by many scientific estimations, will result in its grounds becoming one with the Atlantic during Barron Trump’s lifetime.

For all the talk of American greatness, Trump’s actions regarding climate change represent a historic abdication of leadership. The Clean Power Plan was important not only for its domestic effects but because it was a down payment on America’s commitments under the Paris climate accords. If fully implemented, the plan would have got the United States about halfway to the goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by a quarter, from their 2005 levels, by 2025. Without the plan, the goal will almost certainly not be reached, despite the pledges of several states and even some large energy concerns to adopt greener technology. Meanwhile, China, in a reversal, is proclaiming itself to be the champion of Paris, if only as a way of enhancing its own world-leader credentials.

Trump says that he is still deciding whether to formally withdraw from Paris, but it is now clear that if he doesn’t it will only be because he can’t be bothered with the paperwork. The United States government’s meaningful participation in the fight against climate change appears, at least for the next few years, to be at an end. The Friday before issuing the order, in what looked like an attempt to cheer up Republicans about their health-care defeat, Trump granted a permit for the completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which the Army Corps of Engineers had earlier blocked.

Much of this will end up in the courts, as yet another set of Trumpian actions that make the expected confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court so consequential (and the abandonment of Merrick Garland so tragic). Gorsuch’s mother was a notably anti-environmentalist head of the E.P.A., under Ronald Reagan, and Gorsuch would take the seat formerly occupied by one of his judicial idols, Antonin Scalia, who was in the minority in Massachusetts v. E.P.A. (In his dissent, Scalia grumpily wondered why the agency couldn’t just say that climate-change science was unsettled, and leave it at that.) The Trump Administration has already proposed defunding the E.P.A. by thirty-one per cent and cutting its staff by twenty per cent, raising questions about how it can fulfill its most basic responsibilities. Soon enough, the Supreme Court may be asked, again, what it means for the E.P.A. to be derelict in its duties, and for America to have a President whose main mode of action is reckless endangerment. ♦

>>> Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.

Help Save Earth: www.350.org

Why don’t people accept global warming?

Essay on Global Warming, S. Tom Bond, March 28, 2017

When 97% of the scientists (that is, the people who have studied the problem with training) agree it is happening and will continue to happen, why do people deny it is going on? As the poet says, “Let me count the ways.”

1.  Many simply follow the news. With its “on the one hand, and then on the other hand” coverage (to avoid driving off advertisers and readers) it is hard to distinguish which approach is correct if you don’t remember and follow up the arguments. The facts are there, melting glaciers, decline of arctic ice, average world temperatures rising year after year, range inhabited by many species moving North, changes in weather, melting permafrost. The mass media rarely shows sufficient evidence to be convincing, and never explains why changes small compared to what our bodies experience are important.

2.  Another common reason is that many people are unwilling to accept new ideas. Many folks don’t have a view that extends beyond their home, job and family. They are reluctant to accept new ideas. They have difficulty accepting a new paradigm, and new framework of understanding. One thinks of the change when the earth was thought flat, then was recognized to be a very large sphere, or when the sun was thought to cross the earth, then it was recognized the earth went around the sun. When new ideas are incorporated into the public discourse, it takes a while for these folks to adapt.

Today there are a few people dedicated to older ideas, such as the earth is cooling, or that a warming earth produces a higher carbon dioxide content in the earth’s atmosphere, rather than the other way around. If someone has ideas based on earlier science, it may be hard to accept global warming.

3.  Some think God wouldn’t allow global warming. It is his creation and it will end in fire when He is good and ready. It doesn’t fit the plan. Don’t argue with them.

4.  This is the simplest to understand and one of the most commonly discussed: cupidity. The petroleum industry is an elite sector because of its wealth, which purchases political power.

There is extensive information on situations where the business elite has interests that gives them an advantage that is contrary to the long-term interest of the society. The business elite persists until the society no longer has some resource it needs to continue, so it crashes. One of the most famous of these is the deforestation of Easter Island, which caused a population crash and an abrupt change in culture.

Of course, training in a science does little to help in business.. So this peculiarity of omission of understanding of other areas is not one sided. My point is that all of us need to recognize our limitations and trust experts. It must be a much greater temptation for a businessman with millions at his disposal to ignore or deny science that will hinder his success than for a scientist with almost no disposable wealth to ignore business ideas opposed to his success.

But the future of the earth depends on future climate, not someone’s ego or financial success. That future should be determined by those with data and training who take time to think about it.

5.  Finally, there is another reason that is a bit abstruse, but vital. This is the separation of modern man from the biological world of which he is a part. Primitive man was close to his environment. Getting food was a daily preoccupation. If times were good, this took two or three hours a day. If times were bad, 24 hours weren’t enough. He/she was subject to danger from animals, floods, droughts, disease, the next village over and much other uncertainty. Everything including trees, rocks, or storms had a spirit. Many of these had to be appeased. But this religion was his connection to survival.

Domination of earth and nature became a way of life. Increasingly, urban man became separated from the biological world from which he came. Dominion over others became increasingly important. And man was dominant over things, apparently supreme. That included the biological world, reverence for which was eliminated from his culture and religion.

Now the whole earth is occupied, and our industry is so linkd together and powerful it is possible to destroy civilization. The supremacist attitude toward the biological world, our environment is not viable. There is no “other” to avoid destruction of global warming or atomic warfare or over population or resource exhaustion.

We need rational understanding of our world and rational control if civilization, and perhaps human life in any form, is to continue.

>>> Tom Bond is a retired chemistry professor & teacher, now a resident farmer in Lewis County, WV

James Hansen, Ph.D., in his Study

Will We Miss Our Last Chance to Survive Climate Change?

From an Article by Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, December 22, 2016

In the late 1980s, James Hansen became the first scientist to offer unassailable evidence that burning fossil fuels is heating up the planet. In the decades since, as the world has warmed, the ice has melted and the wildfires have spread, he has published papers on everything from the risks of rapid sea-level rise to the role of soot in global temperature changes – all of it highlighting, methodically and verifiably, that our fossil-fuel-powered civilization is a suicide machine.

And unlike some scientists, Hansen was never content to hide in his office at NASA, where he was head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York for nearly 35 years. He has testified before Congress, marched in rallies and participated in protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline and Big Coal. When I ran into him at an anti-coal rally in Washington, D.C., in 2009, he was wearing a trench coat and a floppy boater hat. I asked him, “Are you ready to get arrested?” He looked a bit uneasy, but then smiled and said, “If that’s what it takes.”

The enormity of Hansen’s insights, and the need to take immediate action, have never been clearer. In November, temperatures in the Arctic, where ice coverage is already at historic lows, hit 36 degrees above average – a spike that freaked out even the most jaded climate scientists. At the same time, alarming new evidence suggests the giant ice sheets of West Antarctica are growing increasingly unstable, elevating the risk of rapid sea-level rise that could have catastrophic consequences for cities around the world.

Not to mention that in September, average values of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a record 400 parts per million. And of course, at precisely this crucial moment – a moment when the leaders of the world’s biggest economies had just signed a new treaty to cut carbon pollution in the coming decades – the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet elected a president who thinks climate change is a hoax cooked up by the Chinese.

Hansen, 75, retired from NASA in 2013, but he remains as active and outspoken as ever. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, he argues, sweeping changes in energy and politics are needed, including investments in new nuclear technology, a carbon tax on fossil fuels, and perhaps a new political party that is free of corporate interests.

He is also deeply involved in a lawsuit against the federal government, brought by 21 kids under the age of 21 (including Hansen’s granddaughter), which argues that politicians knowingly allowed big polluters to wreck the Earth’s atmosphere and imperil the future well-being of young people in America. A few weeks ago, a federal district judge in Oregon delivered an opinion that found a stable climate is indeed a fundamental right, clearing the way for the case to go to trial in 2017. Hansen, who believes that the American political system is too corrupt to deal with climate change through traditional legislation, was hopeful. “It could be as important for climate as the Civil Rights Act was for discrimination,” he told me.

Last fall, I visited Hansen at his old stone farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At times he seemed downright cranky, as if he were losing patience with the world’s collective failure to deal with the looming catastrophe that he has articulated for the past 30 years. “It’s getting really more and more urgent,” Hansen told me. “Our Founding Fathers believed you need a revolution every now and then to shake things up – we have certainly reached that time.”

>>> You’ve arguably done more than anyone to raise awareness of the risks of climate change – what does Trump’s election say about the progress of the climate fight?

Well, this is not a whole lot different than it was during the second Bush administration, where we had basically two oil men running the country. And President Bush largely delegated the energy and climate issue to Vice President Cheney, who was particularly in favor of expanding by hundreds the number of coal-fired power plants. Over the course of that administration, the reaction to their proposals was so strong, and from so many different angles – even the vice president’s own energy and climate task force – that the direction did not go as badly as it could have.

In fact, if you make a graph of emissions, including a graph of how the GDP has changed, there’s really not much difference between Democratic and Republican administrations. The curve has stayed the same, and now under Obama it has started down modestly. In fact, if we can put pressure on this government via the courts and otherwise, it’s plausible that Trump would be receptive to a rising carbon fee or carbon tax. In some ways it’s more plausible under a conservative government [when Republicans might be less intent on obstructing legislation] than under a liberal government.

Trump’s Cabinet nominees are virtually all climate deniers, including the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt. Are Trump’s appointments a sign that climate denialism has gone mainstream?

Climate denialism never died. My climate program at NASA was zeroed out in 1981 when the administration appointed a hatchet man to manage the program at Department of Energy. Denialism was still very strong in 2005-2006 when the White House ordered NASA to curtail my speaking. When I objected to this censorship, using the first line of the NASA Mission Statement ["to understand and protect our home planet"], the NASA administrator, who was an adamant climate denier, eliminated that line from the NASA Mission Statement. Denialism is no more mainstream today than it was in those years.

>>> How much damage can a guy like Pruitt do to our chances of solving the climate crisis?

The EPA is not the issue. They have been attacked several times by an incoming administration since I got into this business – but they always survive without much damage. EPA cannot solve the climate problem, which is a political issue.

>>> If President-elect Trump called you and asked for advice on climate policy, what would you tell him?

What we need is a policy that honestly addresses the fundamentals. We must make the price of fossil fuels honest by including a carbon fee – that is, a straight forward tax on fossil fuels when they come out of the ground, and which is returned directly to people as a kind of yearly dividend or payment. Perhaps someone will explain to President-elect Trump that a carbon fee brings back jobs to the U.S. much more effectively than jawboning manufacturers – it will also drive the U.S. to become a leader in clean-energy technology, which also helps our exports. The rest of the world believes in climate change, even if the Trump administration doesn’t.

So he wants to save the jobs of coal miners and fossil-fuel workers and make the U.S. energy-independent, but he also wants to invest in infrastructure, which will make the U.S. economically strong in the long run, and you can easily prove that investing in coal and tar-sands pipelines is exactly the wrong thing to do.

China and India, most of their energy is coming from coal-burning. And you’re not going to replace that with solar panels. As you can see from the panels on my barn, I’m all for solar power. Here on the farm, we generate more energy than we use. Because we have a lot of solar panels. It cost me $75,000. That’s good, but it’s not enough. The world needs energy. We’ve got to develop a new generation of nuclear-power plants, which use thorium-fueled molten salt reactors [an alternative nuclear technology] that fundamentally cannot have a meltdown. These types of reactors also reduce nuclear waste to a very small fraction of what it is now.

>>> If the Trump administration pushes fossil fuels for the next four years, what are the climate implications?

Well, it has enormous implications, especially if it results in the building of infrastructure like the Keystone Pipeline, which then opens up more unconventional fossil fuels, which are particularly heavy in their carbon footprint because of the energy that it takes to get them out of the ground and process them. But I don’t think that could happen quickly, and there’s going to be tremendous resistance by environmentalists, both on the ground and through the courts. Also, the fossil-fuel industry has made a huge investment in fracking over the past 20 years or so, and they now have created enough of a bubble in gas that it really makes no economic sense to reopen coal-fired power plants when gas is so much cheaper. So I don’t think Trump can easily reverse the trend away from coal on the time scale of four years.

>>> How would you judge President Obama’s legacy on climate change?

I would give him a D. You know, he’s saying the right words, but he had a golden opportunity. When he had control of both houses of Congress and a 70 percent approval rating, he could have done something strong on climate in the first term – but he would have had to be a different personality than he is.

You know, the approach of subsidizing solar panels and windmills gets you a few percent of the energy, but it doesn’t phase you off fossil fuels, and it never will.

Climate change hardly came up during the election, except when Al Gore campaigned with Hillary Clinton. Do you think Gore has been an effective climate advocate?

I’m sorely distressed by his most recent TED talk [which was optimistic in outlook], where Gore made it sound like we solved the climate problem. Bullshit. We are at the point now where if you want to stabilize the Earth’s energy balance, which is nominally what you would need to do to stabilize climate, you would need to reduce emissions several percent a year, and you would need to suck 100 gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, which is more than you could get from reforestation and improved agricultural practices.

>>> You’ve described the impacts of climate change as “young people’s burden.” What do you mean by that?

Well, we know from the Earth’s history that the climate system’s response to today’s CO2 levels will include changes that are really unacceptable. Several meters of sea-level rise would mean most coastal cities – including Miami and Norfolk and Boston – would be dysfunctional, even if parts of them were still sticking out of the water. It’s just an issue of how long that would take.

Right now, the Earth’s temperature is already well into the range that existed during the Eemian period, 120,000 years ago, which was the last time the Earth was warmer than it is now. And that was a time when sea level was 20 to 30 feet higher than it is now. So that’s what we could expect if we just leave things the way they are. And we’ve got more warming in the pipeline, so we’re going to the top of and even outside of the Eemian range if we don’t do something. And that something is that we have to move to clean energy as quickly as possible.

If we burn all the fossil fuels, then we will melt all the ice on the planet eventually, and that would raise the seas by about 250 feet. So we can’t do that. But if we just stay on this path, then it’s the CO2 that we’re putting up there that is a burden for young people because they’re going to have to figure out how to get it out of the atmosphere. Or figure out how to live on a radically different planet.

>>> Trump has talked about pulling out of the Paris Agreement. How do you feel about what was achieved in Paris?

You know, the fundamental idea that we have a climate problem and we’re gonna need to limit global warming to avoid dangerous changes was agreed in 1992 [at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change]. This new agreement doesn’t really change anything. It just reaffirms that. That’s not to say there’s nothing useful accomplished in Paris. The most useful thing is probably the encouragement of investment into carbon-free energies. But it’s not really there yet. I mean, the U.S. should double or triple its investment in energy. The investment in research and development on clean energies is actually very small. There are these big, undefined subsidies, like renewable portfolio standards, that states place on their electricity generation, which can help them get 20 or 30 percent of their power from renewables. But we’re not actually making the investments in advanced energy systems, which we should be doing. There were agreements to do that in Paris. They have to be implemented – somebody’s gotta actually provide the money.

I think that our government has become sufficiently cumbersome in its support of R&D that I’d place more hope in the private sector. But in order to spur the private sector, you’ve got to provide the incentive. And that’s why I’m a big supporter of a carbon fee.

>>> Is the target of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius, which is the centerpiece of the Paris Agreement, still achievable?

It’s possible, but barely. If global emissions rates fell at a rate of even two or three percent a year, you could achieve the two-degree target. People say we’re already past that, because they’re just assuming we won’t be able to reduce missions that quickly. What I argue, however, is that two degrees is dangerous. Two degrees is a little warmer than the period when sea levels were 20 to 30 feet higher. So it’s not a good target. It never had a good scientific basis.

>>> In Paris, negotiators settled in an “aspirational” target of 1.5C.

Yes. But that would require a six-percent-a-year reduction in emissions, which may be implausible without a large amount of negative emissions – that is, developing some technology to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

>>> Let’s talk more about policy. You’re a big believer in a revenue-neutral carbon fee. Explain how that would work, and why you’re such a big supporter of it.

It’s very simple. You collect it at the small number of sources, the domestic mines and the ports of entry, from fossil-fuel companies. And you can distribute it back to people. The simplest way to distribute it and encourage the actions that are needed to move us to clean energy is to just give an equal amount to all legal residents. So the person who does better than average in limiting his carbon footprint will make money. And it doesn’t really require you to calculate carbon footprint.

So this would provide the incentive for entrepreneurs and businesses to develop carbon-free products and carbon-free energies. And those countries that are early adopters would benefit because they would tend to develop the products that the rest of the world would need also, so it makes sense to do it. But it’s just not the way our politics tend to work; they tend to favor special interests. And even the environmentalists will decide what they want to favor and say, “Oh, we should subsidize this.” I don’t think we should subsidize anything. We should let the market decide.

Photo: Hansen being arrested at a White House protest in 2011. “We have to move to clean energy,” he says. “If we burn all the fossil fuels, then we will melt all the ice on the planet, and that would raise the seas by about 250 feet.” 

>>> Of course, the problem with getting carbon-fee legislation passed is that Congress is run by people who don’t even acknowledge that climate change is a problem.

We need a revolutionary third party that takes no money from lobbyists. Look at Obama and Bernie Sanders: Their campaigns initially were funded by small donors. They didn’t have to take lobbyist money. The public is not into the details of what’s going on, but it knows that it’s become a rotten system.

>>> I agree that a carbon fee could be an effective tool to cut emissions, but how do you get the politics right to get it done? I mean, it’s one thing to…

Well, you have to make it simple. You can’t do this 3,000-page crap, like they did with cap-and-trade in 2009. You gotta simplify it down to the absolute basics, and you do it in a way that the public will not let you change it. If the public is getting this dividend, they won’t let you change it.

>>> A lot of people say you are a great scientist, but when it comes to policy, that’s a whole other thing – and something you should leave to politicians.

Bullshit. What scientists do is analyze problems, including energy aspects of the problem. I got started thinking about energy way back in 1981, when I published a paper that concluded that you can’t burn all the coal, otherwise you end up with a different planet. There’s nothing wrong with scientists thinking about energy policy, in my opinion. In fact, if you have some scientific insights into the implications of different policies, you should say them. It’s the politicians who try to stop you. And that includes people who ran NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where I worked for 33 years. Before I would go to Washington to testify, I’d sometimes get a call from the director of the center – somebody who I respect a lot and is a very good scientist and engineer. But he would tell me, “Just be sure to only talk about science, not policy.”

>>> Do you ever feel a sense of futility about the situation we’re in – the essential insanity of continuing to emit carbon pollution, given what we know about the future consequences.

It’s not at all surprising, because it’s related to the desire of people to raise their standard of living out of poverty levels. That’s what we did in the West. We discovered fossil fuels, which allowed us to replace slavery with fossil fuels. That’s what China and India and other countries want to do now. But if they do it the way we did, then we’re all going down together. If we go over there and say, “You guys do it differently. Use solar panels” [laughs], that’s stupid. We have to work together in a way that will actually work. And they understand the risks, too.

There is a lot of talk about the rise of China as a military power. Well, they’re not gonna bomb their customers. The bigger threat is this climate threat. That’s what could destroy civilization as we know it.

Only one major political party in the world denies climate change, and it’s in charge of the most important political body in the world. 

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

WV Rivers in Trouble

Join WV Rivers Coalition, Advocates for a Safe Water System, OVEC, WV Citizen Action Group, and WV Environmental Council at the WV Capitol Building as we remember the Elk River chemical leak on the 3-year anniversary of the #wvwatercrisis.

WV Rivers and Advocates are co-hosting a press conference with three experts who have been working on safe water since the January 9, 2014 chemical leak, which contaminated the drinking water of over 300,000 West Virginians.

We need you to come out and show your support for our water! The media will be there, and our elected officials will be watching. We need to send a strong message that we, the people of West Virginia, are paying attention and demand safe water! Join the event on Facebook and invite others.

What: Press Conference – Three Years After the Water Crisis: Where Are We Now?

When: 11 am Monday, January 9, 2017

Where: Lower Rotunda, State Capitol Building, Charleston

Yours for the environment, WV Environmental Council,

http://wvecouncil.org, info@wvecouncil.org

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Greenbrier River Watershed Association year-end letter

Thanks for your support of the Greenbrier River Watershed Association over the past year, and for some of you, for many years. Our email newsletters come out about twice a month. They contain information which we hope you have found useful.  Also, if you have not recently been to the website, www.greenbrier.org, please visit us there.  It has undergone changes that you will like.  We are also on Facebook at Greenbrier Watershed. 

This past year has brought many challenges and many rewards. Of course, we were struck to our core by the June flooding which affected so many of our families, communities, parks, forests and the river itself and her tributaries. Who could forget the scenes of tragedy that kept unfolding? Many of our members pitched in to help neighbors and are still working to rebuild our communities. Proceeds from our annual Watershed Celebration at Lost World were earmarked for repair of the damaged Greenbrier River Trail. Huge thanks to all who continue to volunteer!

We continue to support clean water in every way we can. We think it is our right as citizens to have clean drinking water and clean streams in which to recreate. Our deep concern about the potential for environmental harm from proposed pipelines, and the lack of oversight by agencies tasked with regulating them, has not abated. It is still hard to believe that our remote river is slated for two crossings by huge industrial projects whose purpose is not bringing energy to our state, but rather exporting it overseas. 

On a happier note, we were recognized as Watershed of the Year by the West Virginia Watershed Network. The main reason was our successful work to get conservation easements on 250 acres along the River and Trail in Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties. This acreage overlooks Spice Run Wilderness and will be forever protected from development.

Another of our projects which received statewide attention was our collaboration with the US Forest Service on construction of a new boat launch at Anthony. Our new coordinator, Jennifer Baker, traveled to Charleston recently for that award.  The project will receive Transportation Enhancement Funds. We know your time and funds are limited, but we want to let you know that we appreciate your generous support, and hope that as you look at year-end giving, you will be able to include your local water protectors on the “nice” list.

Sincerely, John Walkup, President; Greenbrier River Watershed Association, P.O. Box 1419, Lewisburg, WV 24901
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See also: “West Virginia Streams are in Trouble”

http://www.appalmad.org/slider/west-virginias-streams-are-in-trouble/

Caring! Morality! Education! Action!

What’s one of the most insidious myths we’ve bought into, when it comes to climate change?

It has nothing to do with the science: It’s the simple idea that we have to be a certain type of person to care about climate change.

If I’m a liberal, if I bike to work and call myself a “tree-hugger,” then of course I care about climate change. But what if I’m conservative, I drive a car or I worry about the economy—does agreeing with the science of climate change mean I have to change who I am?

When I moved to Texas 10 years ago, I didn’t know what to expect. I study climate change, one of the most politicized issues in the entire U.S. If we’re serious about it, we have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. That’s not a popular message in a state best known for its oil and gas.

But Texas surprised me. It surprised me by how many different kinds of people, from oilfield engineers to Christian college students, want to talk about why climate change matters—to us and to everyone else on this planet. I’ve also been surprised by the questions I get—some about the science, sure; but even more about politics, faith, and other topics near and dear to our hearts.

To answer these questions, I’ve teamed up with our local West Texas PBS station to produce a new PBS Digital Studios web series, Global Weirding: Climate, Politics, and Religion. Every other Wednesday, we roll out a new video exploring climate change and what it means to all of us.

This episode tackles the identity myth, head-on. Climate change is not some distant issue that only matters to the polar bears. It’s affecting our lives right now, in the places that we live. And if we’re a human living on planet Earth, then we already have every value we need to care about a changing climate.

We all depend on this planet for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the places we live. Unless we’ve signed up for the next trip to Mars, this planet is the only one we have. It just makes sense to take care of it: to ensure that it will continue to support us in the years to come. It’s the sensible, fiscally responsible, and most conservative thing to do, in the truest sense of the word.

There’s more to it than pure self-interest, though. When I was nine years old, my family moved to Colombia—not British Columbia, but Colombia, South America. There, I learned an even more important life lesson: that there are plenty of people on this planet far less fortunate than I am, and many of those people cannot count on having clean water to drink, or safe places to live.

This hard truth has always stuck with me and it’s one of the main reasons I’m motivated to study climate science: because it affects all of us, but most of all the poor the world over—those who already lack sufficient food, who are already at risk for diseases that no one should be dying from in the twenty first century, and who—when disaster strikes—have no choice other than to leave behind their homes and flee.

Climate change isn’t a niche issue that only matters to people who think or act or vote a certain way. Each of us, exactly who we are, with exactly the values we already have, already have every reason we need to care.

So what’s our job, as people who care about climate? Our job is this: connect the dots between what some have called the longest distance in the world, from our heads to our hearts.

Tune in to our live chat every other Thursday at 8E/7C on Facebook and Twitter, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and if you like what you hear—please share!

This essay originally appeared at The Equation, a blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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Date:    January 4, 2017

Source:  University of Alabama — Huntsville

Summary:

Globally, 2016 edged out 1998 by +0.02 C to become the warmest year in the 38-year satellite temperature record, according to scientists. Because the margin of error is about 0.10 C, this would technically be a statistical tie, with a higher probability that 2016 was warmer than 1998. The main difference was the extra warmth in the Northern Hemisphere in 2016 compared to 1998.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Former Senator John D. Rockefeller IV

Building a Resilient WV by Taking Control of the Mountain State’s Future

Article by Duane Nichols, FrackCheckWV.net, April 9, 2016

On April 8^th, the WVU Center for Energy and Sustainable Development in the College of Law sponsored their “National Energy Conference 2016.”  These conferences are video recorded and made available on the world-wide-web. Program information is available at: http://energy.law.wvu.edu/conference2016

The “keynote speaker” was former US Senator and former Governor John D. Rockefeller, IV, who came to WV as a VISTA Volunteer in 1964. Senator Rockefeller described his optimism and hope for the economy and well being of the residents of the State.  He continues to work to advance the health and welfare of everyone.  And, education is an essential component of this.

Samuel Petsonk, Attorney with Mountain State Justice, spoke on “Current Federal Policy Proposals for Coal-Reliant Community Support.”  He summarized the POWER + Plan now underway in West Virginia.  This program is administered under the WV Hub organization.

What is the Hub?

The WV Hub is a statewide, non-profit organization that helps communities come together to set goals for their future and connects them to the rich network of resources they need to meet those goals. In our network there are resources for:

Convening community conversations, Training community leaders, Recruiting volunteers, Building infrastructure, Reclaiming abandoned buildings, Sustaining healthy food production, Teaching political action, Developing small businesses, Adopting healthy lifestyles, Finding funding for projects, Fostering community life …

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What is POWER +?

POWER + is the second phase of the POWER Initiative.

POWER (Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization), is a coordinated effort among multiple federal agencies to provide coordinated investments in communities negatively impacted by changes in the coal industry and power sector.

POWER + will provide investments in communities impacted by changes in the power sector and coal industry, through a competitively awarded series of grants. These funds will help communities to: diversify their economies; create good jobs in existing or new industries; attract new sources of job-creating investment; and provide reemployment services and job training to dislocated workers in order to connect them to high-quality, in-demand jobs.

For West Virginia, POWER + represents a significant opportunity for collaboration amongst regions, sectors and organizations to secure federal funding support for integrated economic development plans and projects.

KEY POINTS:

### The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) will provide $50 million this fiscal year for projects that will help rebuild the economies of Appalachian communities suffering from the decline of the coal industry.

### The U.S. Economic Development Administration will have an additional $15 million available for coal-impacted communities across the nation.

### Other federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture will also award funds through POWER +.

### It is anticipated the ARC will have an additional $50 million to help rebuild Appalachian communities in FY 2017.

### ARC funding will support a range of economic development planning and implementation activities, including developing entrepreneurial ecosystems, facilitating access to capital investments and new markets, and addressing barriers related to adequate water, sewer, and telecommunication infrastructure.

### Preference will be given to applications that involve regional collaborations and strategic partnerships.

Beginning in 2015, The Hub has served the pivotal role of convening potential applicants and facilitating collaboration between the various agencies, organizations and individuals with a vested interest in diversifying the economy of West Virginia’s coalfields.

That collaboration is actively encouraged by the funding organizations, and will be essential to West Virginia being able to attract the greatest possible share of the available funds, for the greatest impact.

Anyone interested in POWER + funding opportunities is urged to contact The Hub’s Executive Director.

The latest information about POWER +, including the ARC’s funding criteria and call for applications documents, will be made public as soon as they are available.

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Appointment of Stephanie Tyree Marks Beginning of New Era at The Hub

From an Article by Hub Staff, www.hub.org, April 8, 2016

Stephanie Tyree was instrumental in organizing the regional POWER information meeting at Hawk’s Nest in 2015.

It gives us tremendous pleasure to announce that Stephanie Tyree is the new Executive Director of the WV Community Development Hub.

Stephanie is a superb choice. She understands and embraces the collaborative culture we have created at The Hub.

We conducted a nationwide search and received dozens of applications from highly qualified and experienced individuals in West Virginia and 13 other states. We were impressed with the diversity of the applicants and appreciative of their interest in and knowledge of The Hub. A number of the out-of-state applicants were hoping that securing this position would give them an opportunity to return to their home state.

The Hub has always embraced change, and continued evolution is necessary for our work to succeed.

The transition of The Hub’s leadership to Stephanie Tyree will officially begin at Hubapalooza, our annual community development network event, on April 28. We encourage each of you to join us there in welcoming her to this new role. Stephanie will move into the role of Executive Director on June 1.

"To Make Dream Homes Come True" Rockwell Kent (1945) Bituminous Coal Institute

Business Leaders Urge West Virginia to Look Beyond Coal

From an Article by Andrew Brown, Charleston Gazette Mail, April 7, 2016

Brad Smith, a Marshall University graduate and the CEO of Intuit, spoke at the Techconnect West Virginia event Wednesday. The Kenova native expressed the need for the state to invest in education, infrastructure and local entrepreneurs if the state is going to diversify its economy.

State leaders and some big names from outside West Virginia had a frank conversation Wednesday as they discussed what the state needs in order to diversify its economy, attract growing industries and foster small businesses in the Mountain State.

The speakers at the event, which was sponsored by Techconnect West Virginia and held at the Bridge Valley Community & Technical College in South Charleston, included gubernatorial candidate Bill Cole, Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette, leaders from West Virginia University and Marshall University and the CEOs of major information technology companies.

There was one basic message throughout the entire event: West Virginia needs to make public and private investments in order to be successful in moving forward.

“I know we have challenges. I know there are struggles. I know there is a transition underway,” said Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit. “But for us to get there, we are going to have to embrace change. We are going to have to lean into the unknown.”

Smith, a native of Kenova, is a Marshall University graduate and CEO of a major company that manages financial software like Turbo Tax. On Wednesday, the successful business executive told the crowd that there were three things West Virginia needs: investment in education, modern infrastructure and local entrepreneurs.

Even Cole, whose party has led the campaign against President Barack Obama’s regulations on carbon emissions, suggested that it was time for West Virginia to seriously look for other business opportunities.

The legislative and political debate in the state has continued to center around somehow resurrecting coal markets that most economists believe will never return to full strength, especially in southern West Virginia where seams of coal have been mined for more than 100 years.

In contrast, all of the panel discussions Wednesday remained focused on finding a path forward by building the workforce and infrastructure needed to attract and grow businesses that are expected to expand in the coming decades, namely technology companies.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Wet Gas is mainly west of I-79 (Weston - Clarksburg - Morgantown - Waynesburg - PIttsburgh - Erie)

Editorial Title:  “Marcellus Boom”

Charleston WV Gazette Newspaper Editorial, Sunday, November 16, 2014

Last week — on the same day that Alpha Natural Resources announced closure of another southern West Virginia coal mine and the loss of 36 more miner jobs — news reports said a Texas gas firm will pay $100 million in up-front bonuses to some Northern Panhandle landowners for their Marcellus Shale drilling rights, and their future royalties could climb $500 million more.

That’s a thumbnail glimpse of what’s happening to West Virginia’s economy. Southern coalfields are fading as rich seams become exhausted and cheap natural gas grabs markets. Northern gas fields are blossoming, opening a bright promise of energy and chemical jobs.

Moundsville lawyer Jonathan Turak represents a coalition of 500 families in Marshall and Ohio counties. He helped negotiate a deal in which Tug Hill Operating of Fort Worth will pay the landowners $100 million immediately for a five-year option to drill deep horizontal wells that employ “fracking” to release gas pockets. If wells are drilled, Turak said, future royalties to the property owners could add $400 million to $500 million more.

“I think that our community has not yet come to grips with the enormity of what’s likely to occur here,” the lawyer said. “It’s a wave that is growing, and it is far from having crested, and it’s going to sweep through the Ohio Valley like no other wave that has ever descended down through our valley.”

The snowballing gas boom will spur jobs of all sorts — accountants, insurance agents, doctors, restaurants, hotels, etc. — he exuberated. “There is so much opportunity. … I think it’s going to transform this community.”

Tug Hill already has drilled 750 Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia since 2007.

A major offshoot of Marcellus drilling is the prospect that chemical plants will sprout around northern West Virginia to turn gas derivatives into plastics. Although modern, automated plants need fewer workers, the job potential remains large.

We hope the Marcellus boom sweeps West Virginia toward hopeful times, but there are some cautionary notes.

Some experts warn that Marcellus wells will deplete fairly quickly, so benefits may not be as long-lasting as boosters promise. Also, state regulators must guard against pollution and damage that accompany industrial extraction, a lesson West Virginia should have learned well by now.

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Commentary – Notice this last sentence, the lesson WV should have learned by now. Actually, it is primarily the Governor and Legislature that should have already seen the land disturbances, water pollution, stream siltation and sedimentation, hillside subsidence, public noise, plus air pollution from vents, leaks, flares, fires and explosions. The trucks are destroying the roads, creating traffic delays and accidents, polluting neighborhoods, and transporting hazardous and toxic materials.

After studying these serious impacts, one finds public health issues and worker health issues. The oil and gas industry is now recognized as the most dangerous major industry in the US.

The loopholes granted to the oil and gas industry during the Bush/Cheney administration still stand in spite of all the issues these loopholes present. Shouldn’t there be a federal ban on drilling and fracking until these loopholes are closed? That would be only the fair and reasonable thing to do, if there was any fairness and reasonableness to be had? The Gazette editorial is caught up in euphoria with only a dangling sentence, to hold regulators responsible for what is the responsibility of the US Congress as well as the WV Governor and WV Legislature! DGN