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OPINIONS
Bo Webb: Company officials spin, distort the truth about mining
For more than a decade, West Virginians have debated the advantages and disadvantages of mountaintop removal mining.
Purchase this photoI find it rather disturbing that the executive director of the King Coal Highway Authority is writing letters to all the major newspapers in West Virginia in which he glorifies the coal industry with claims that are in reality more spin than truth. Let's take them one at a time.
Mike Mitchem claims that mountaintop removal and valley fills can serve as effective development tools. The truth is, fewer than 3 percent of mountain top removal sites have been reclaimed, let alone developed. There is a huge difference between bulldozing the top of a hill to level it for housing or a mall than there is blowing it up, rummaging through it for coal and then dumping the remains into the nearby valley, covering and poisoning our valuable mountain streams.
Mitchem brags that the King Coal Highway is being built on post-mined land, saving West Virginia millions of dollars, and claims this will lead to economic benefits for the southern end of the state. The truth is the coal company that leveled those mountains for the King Coal Highway got a free pass from the Department of Environmental Protection to do whatever it wanted without a permit and the coal that was removed from those mountains was not taxed.
That highway is being built for the benefit of the coal industry to haul their coal to their customers on a road that provides them the most direct travel. Ultimately, West Virginia citizens will pay for this highway with their tax dollars going to construction and maintenance. Some will also pay with their lives due to heavy coal truck traffic, diesel fumes and coal dust that will fill their homes. In reality, this highway is nothing more than corporate welfare trickery for the coal industry.
Mitchem further boasts about tax revenue benefits that coal brings to the state and the many jobs it creates. Here is the real skinny. The state charges 5 cents severance tax per ton of coal produced, but -- and this is a big "but" -- if the coal seam is less than 18 inches, the state actually gives the coal company 2 cents back by charging only 3 cents per ton for those thin seams, and a fuzzy math formula allows them to mine a certain tonnage of thin seam coal before they pay any tax at all.
This despicable piece of legislation actually provides the coal companies with the incentive to blast our mountains away to the tune of nearly 4 million pounds of explosives per day.
Mitchem goes on to brag about the 40,000 jobs that coal creates. This is the most laughable of his claims. Here is the truth.
Today, there are approximately 16,000 actual coal mining jobs in our state, so Mitchem must be claiming that every mining job creates an additional 2.5 jobs. The fact is that in 1980, there were 55,000 coal miners in West Virginia. Those must have also created at least those 2.5 additional jobs, so there had to be at least 137,500 mining and mining-related jobs in West Virginia in 1980.
Mitchem's math tells me that the coal industry, driven by cheap mountain top removal operations costs, is directly responsible for the loss of at least 97,500 jobs over the past 27 years. The prosperity and tax revenue that would have been generated from those lost jobs would have been of tremendous benefit to our state, but the southern coal-producing counties of West Virginia today remain among the poorest counties in the United States.
Mitchem's math also tells us that the coal industry mission of maximizing profit at all cost is the reason for mountaintop removal. Simply put, more coal is mined today than in 1980 with 3 1/2 times fewer workers.
Mitchem is an educated man, but like the coal baron he displays a plantation mentality. He seems to think the common West Virginia citizen is a stupid hillbilly, easily conned, and may even be so ignorant as to actually kiss and thank him as our mountains, our culture, our money and our children's future are stolen from us.
This ain't Mingo County 1920. Stop the deceiving bull and spin.
Bo Webb is a resident of Naoma, W.Va. He is a retired business owner and former president of the Coal River Mountain Watch board of directors.
