Do you love the mountains? Look what GREED is doing to them! Picture.....
The comments are unbelievable. Let's have a little rational discourse about strip mining.First let's discuss the notion that there are some evil people all sitting around cackling evil plans to destroy the environment. Where are these people? I've never met one, and yet there seems to be this widely held belief that we do things simply because these people are so over-shadowed by greed that they intentionally choose the worse possible way to get the coal.
Has it occured to anyone that if there was a cheap, easy, and less destructive way to get it out of the ground they would? I wager if there was an option even close, the miners would go with that just to be spared the drivel from the environmentalist (we'll leave them for a future post). Nobody picks the option that creates such heavy backlash without a good reason.
So why do they do it? Spending two seconds on wikipedia (I know it's not a reputable source, but it's quick, easy, relatively accurate, we all know to take it with a grain of salt; all of which makes it better to use than randomenergysite.com, about whom we know nothing.) reveals this is a common process when the coal is very deep beneath the earth.
In other words, the safest and best way to extract deep coal is by blowing off the top layers. Is it pretty? No. However, it is important to remember this whole situation is of our own making. We are the managers of America, and as business school 101 taught me, problems are always managements fault (also for a future article).
As Americans we have not allowed new nuclear plants to be built in decades (management). The cheapest, safest, most environmental friendly energy source ever known to man, and we chose to opt-out. We also use more power every year than we ever have before. It has got to come from somewhere. Guess where the majority of our power comes from? (hint: it isn't magical fairies from Disney World)
So we are demanding more power than ever, which leads to the need to dig deeper than ever to get it. Yet we refuse to adopt new technologies, and then complain about how we make it.
I have trouble seeing how this catch-22 is the coal miners fault. They are producing electricity in the only way current technology and management allows.
Second the concern that this makes a "desert", or unuseable land. I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but humans don't make much use of tall mountains. We tend to clear areas for housing, commerce, roads, and agriculture. As our population grows so does our need for flat land. So mowing that mountain flat may actually have unintended benefits for us.
We require (by law) companies that do use this method of mining to do reclamation once complete. In other words, they blow the mountain flat, strip out the resources we want, then have to return the land to something that can be used either by us, or nature. What is so unreasonable about that?
This argument is always followed by the statement that the coal companies are not performing this reclamation to the standards we would like, or at all. Well whose fault is that? Do we tell people to not commit murder, and then just take it on faith they will not? No, we set up a system to enforce the laws. If we are not enforcing our reclamation laws then it is our (managements) fault again.
When you sit there using your computer you are creating the demand for this. When you vote and picket to keep nuclear power away, you are creating the demand for this. As Americans we are so used to getting what we want when we want it, we tend to forget that everything has a price. You use electricity everyday, and it has to come from somewhere.
