West Virginia
Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining
Coal mining is a major contributor to climate change but the areas where the coal is mined from is very much affected by global warming. I wanted to add this stop on this VFT because it is a global warming hot spot and because this is where I live. This MTR site is about 10 miles from my home in Clay County, WV.
Over half of our electrical power, in the US, comes from coal and a large
percentage of that coal comes from West Virginia. Of the nearly 150 million
tons of coal extracted each year from the state's mines, an increasing amount comes from surface mining and mountaintop removal.
Mountaintop removal can have serious impacts on the health of local people. The pollution of groundwater by mine runoff and exposure to airborne toxins
and dust, and on the environment, through permanent loss of critical
ecosystems, destruction of forests and loss of streams. Scientific evidence
suggests that these impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that efforts to
reclaim the disturbed land can't make up for the impacts felt by the mining
process (wvpublic.org).
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