Appalachia is being utterly gutted by Big Coal. The desperate calls for change are coming from the ground up, and our candidates must now come here.

As "The Examiner" notes:

Of the remaining 566 Democratic delegates to be won, 352 will be awarded from Appalachian states. The western parts of Pennsylvania (April 22) and North Carolina (May 6) along with West Virginia (May 13) and Kentucky (May 20) will take on outsized importance in the weeks to come.

The choice is obvious...
A majority of West Virginians oppose mountaintop removal.
A majority of Americans oppose mountaintop removal.

The political will to end mountaintop removal is here.

Presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, should not be equivocating or playing politics with the Appalachian Mountains or headwater streams.

We are talking about one of the worst environmental and human rights tragedies going on in America today – mountaintop removal coal-mining.

Big Coal has dived deep into the soul of Appalachia, in a way that is hard to understand for those outside the region. Every week, big coal is detonating the explosive equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb in the heart of America’s oldest mountains.

Our candidates lack of outright opposition to mountaintop removal has lit a wildfire in the blogosphere and mainstream media, reviving debate over coal and carbon, energy and emissions, and extraction and our environment.

We are seeing candidates take two distinct approaches. Within Senator Obama's plan, we are seeing the seeds of an ambitious approach to tackle the issue of mountaintop removal. But we still have a long way to go with both candidates to encourage them to do the right thing...

Senator Clinton (Ed. note: on West Virginia Public Broadcasting, March 19th 2008.):

I am concerned about it for all the reasons people state, but I think its a difficult question because of the conflict between the economic and environmental trade-off that you have here.
I’m not an expert. I don’t know enough to have an independent opinion, but I sure would like people who could be objective, understanding both the economic necessities and environmental damage to come up with some approach that would enable us to retrieve the coal but would enable us to do it in a way that wouldn’t damage the living standards and the other important qualities associated with people living both under the mountaintop and people who are along the streams.

You know, maybe there is a way to recover those mountaintops once they have been stripped of the coal. You know, I think we’ve got to look at this from a practical perspective.

Senator Obama:

Obama, like many of us, noticed Larry’s dogged persistence: the Presidential candidate invited Larry to speak, saying, “This gentlemen in the green has hand his hand up for a long time.”

Larry stood up and said, “Senator Obama, I appreciate your stand on the war. You mentioned water a while ago. Water is something we all need... We have a House Bill 2169, the Clean Water (Protection) Act...we had a gentleman back here touch on mining. Like I said about the war in Iraq, we’d like you to consider the war we have here in Appalachia, with over 474 mountains blowed up...and it’s the the mining polluting the water...I’d like to know your opinion about it.”

Obama replied, “I want strong enforcement of the Clean Water Act. I will make sure the head of the Environmental Protection Agency believes in the environment and enforces the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

What I want to do is work with experts here in West Virginia to find out what we need to do to protect the waterways here. That’s going to be a primary task of the head of my Environmental Protection Agency.

Larry Gibson, by the way, lives on Kayford Mountain, which is the mountain you see at the top of this post.

Obama's answer is significant. Look at all of the waters that are affected by toxic, heavy-metal laden mountaintop removal waste.

Locally, tap water runs orange and black.

...

So What Is a Good Candidate To Do?

In an earlier post, Obama, Go There, I made the case for both Presidential candidates to focus on Appalachia, because of the potential of the region to swing up to 70 Electoral Votes in the general election (OH, PA, WV, VA, NC, TN, KY). To do this, candidates must focus on ending mountaintop removal coal-mining, and bring new green jobs while making Appalachia the center of the new clean energy economy.

Renowned Appalachiavangelist Jeff Biggers agrees with this sentiment, and has written what I think is a very important piece at Alternet called “How Obama Can Win Appalachia and the Nomination , focusing on the party primaries, mountaintop removal, and renewing the Appalachian economy.

Instead of offering worn out ideas for poverty relief, like Clinton, or succumbing to the anachronistic schemes of the dying coal lobby, Obama should shatter these artificial racial boundaries by proposing a New "Green" Deal to revamp the region...and call for an end to mountaintop removal policies that have led to impoverishment and ruin in the coal fields.

And the thing is, Appalachia and Obama have a lot more in common than you might imagine.

Truth is, Obama has a lot in more common with Appalachia than he knows, nor he is the only groundbreaking African American figure in the region's history. For starters, Black History Month founder Carter Woodson emerged out of the coal fields of West Virginia, as did Booker T. Washington, the most important African American spokesman of the 19th century. Pioneering black abolitionist Martin Delany walked out of West Virginia to alter Pittsburgh's destiny.

Biggers goes on to describe that slavery was indeed legal in Illionis for laborers in the salt wells.

Despite their glorious calls for emancipation, the Illinois legislature committed one of the most egregious acts in American political history: They declared the economic benefits of the salt (and future coal) industry outweighed the acts of inhumanity and destruction that supported this economy.

With all Democratic Party eyes now focused on the Big Coal state of Pennsylvania, Obama would be wise to ponder his state's darker history and its implications today for the Keystone state and its energy policies linked to the divisive coal industry in the wider Appalachian region...

...By the 1920s, plundered for their coal and unable to compete with the non-union labor in Kentucky and West Virginia, the southern Illinois coal towns had turned into deforested and eroded wastelands, and were depicted by one government report as a "picture, almost unrelieved, of utter economic devastation...

...Today, stripmining in the central Appalachia coalfields is producing the same results. More than 470 mountains and their adjacent communities have been leveled, despoiled, and economically ruined since Barack Obama first moved to Illinois. The massive machinery and explosives involved in mountaintop removal and strip-mining have gutted the labor movement and dramatically reduced jobs in West Virginia, Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania.

Instead of falling back on his failed Ohio message for the illusory concept of "clean coal," which offers no real sense of job security or regional understanding of that industry's job-stripping mechanization, Obama needs to recognize that it's indeed time to release Appalachia from its stranglehold by King Coal and the region's default economy of low-paying service jobs. He needs to summon the courage of another Illinois presidential candidate: Abraham Lincoln.

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present," Lincoln told Congress in 1862. "The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

[Obama] needs to call for an end to the destructive policies of mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, demand passage of the Clean Water Protection Act (HR 2169), which has 129 co-sponsors and bi-partisan support across the coal states, and launch a new "Green Deal" to rebuild the region.

This does not mean Obama needs to call for an end to coal, as we know it. He simply needs to stop the scandalous and overwhelmingly unpopular war of mountaintop removal in Appalachia and start the process of replacing an old industry and its displaced workforce with a new one based on renewable sources.

In a Lincoln moment for change, Obama could open up a new chapter for the region, by focusing his technologically savvy movement on developing a constructive Green Deal of renewable energy jobs, education and retraining, sustainable communities and reforestation to make Appalachia a model for the rest of the country.

Obama has an especially long row to hoe in Appalachia, under-performing there by an average of 44% in the Appalachian Congressional districts in TN, VA, and OH. David Roberts at Grist calls Mr. Biggers plan "risky and ambitious." I agree, and would suggest that Mr. Obama has very little to lose in Appalachia, and everything to gain. He already trails Senator Cliton 2-1 in WV. That being said, Obama has very little to lose by proposing to END mountaintop removal in Appalachia, and proposing a new "Green Deal" to bring sustainable green jobs to Appalachia, and create a clean energy economy that will bring our incomes and our local economies to he 21st Century.

Appalachia, on the other hand, has EVERYTHING to lose. Even though 1 million acres of Appalachia have been leveled already, the EPA expects mountaintop removal to double in the next decade.

The political support to stop mountaintop removal is here.

Not only are the people of Appalachia asking for an end to mountaintop removal, the good ol' invisible hand has its fingers around big coal's neck.

Check out the price of central Appalachian coal over the last year!
Central Appalachian coal prices are skyrocketing due to increasing costs of mechanization

We've also seen grassroots pressure on groups like Bank of America, that fund mountaintop removal and big coal. We know that our economy can do better with our wind resources than we have done mountaintop removal. We just need the political leadership.

As we saw last week, mountaintop removal means more poverty...

...and fewer jobs.

Appalachian coal has peaked.
Prices are through the roof.
Jobs are few.
Poverty is widespread.
Our water is being poisoned.

But, above all else...
They're blowing up our damn mountains.

We need a candidate who will allow Appalachia to create America's electricity through clean energy. We need a candidate who will help us celebrate our culture and our mountain heritage by leaving our mountains in tact. We need a candidate who will bring sustainable green jobs into Appalachia. We need a candidate who will demand passage of the Clean Water Protection Act (HR 2169) and reverse the Bush Administration's policy of letting coal companies dump their toxic waste into our headwater streams.

Who will that candidate be?