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Don Blankenship Wants Coal for Christmas
By My Wild Irish Prose | December 24, 2008
And if the Greeniacs and Commies don’t stop mountaintop mining, then God will surely deliver it
Important update: as the Editorial Board and our copy elves prepare this Christmas greeting, 1 billion gallons of spilled coal sludge have created yet another environmental disaster in Tennessee and the TVA is doing its best to keep journalists out of the area (what! you somehow missed the fleeting mention in the mainstream media between football games!!!???)…just like in the year 2000, when Blankenship’s Massey Energy (below) blocked the press from a 300,000 gallon spill. [Story and depressing aerial video at pharyngula].
How God supports coal mining
In order to discuss Mr. Blankenship’s soul further, we will need to pretend for a brief moment that we believe public utilities are really going to build pollution free coal burning plants. All that lobbying notwithstanding, the legend of clean burning coal doesn’t even remotely address the true evil of mountain top removal mining methods, which have been devastating
Mountaintop removal does exactly what it says, scraping away or blowing apart mountain tops, and in the process destroying the forests and wildlife that previously occupied them. As horrible as these gashes in the earth appear, the true damage is done to the living beings, wildlife and human, who dare to inhabit the land the coal companies covet.
The toxic “overburden” left over is dumped into the valleys, creating rubble hills up to 1,000 feet heigh, burying some streams and rivers, polluting those that are left. Slurry ponds of dubious durability – full of arsenic, cyanide, chromium, zinc and sulfur - now dot a landscape once filled with rivers and streams.
Mountaintop removal has already devastated hundreds of square miles of
What kind of person is able to initiate this heartbreaking process and profit from it? Well, Don Blankenship’s name comes to mind. For an exercise in mind numbing socio-pathic reasoning, please watch this video of a Nov 20, 2008 speech.
If you can, watch it all the way through (he seems almost sane at the beginning, and his little drawl is deceptively non-threatening).
Highlights:
- Don doesn’t believe in climate change.
- Don says the greeniacs are taking over the world.
- Don says his critics are communists and atheists.
- Don says further environmental restrictions will increase pollution
- Don says Nancy Pelosi is crazy.
Well, someone is.
Below is a poem written by a mountain top mining victim, posted on the ilovemountains.org website:
MY PAIN begins early with thunderous noise from big machines.
MY PAIN gets worse as the day continues
As my insides are blown apart and
MY PAIN grows as the big machines move
Scooping up my insides and dumping
Them over what is left of me.
I can only silently watch as I’m being destroyed
And with the silent cries of MY PAIN
I realize I am dying.
I scream for them to stop but they do not hear.
I give them hints of MY PAIN and death
But the mudslides and dried-up streams go un-noticed.
I hear the men laughing and their jokes about how much of me
They’ve moved and shoved today and as to how much of my insides they
have hauled away. I CRY…
Are atheists the problems here Don? Maybe you should read that poem for Christmas. Maybe it was written by a Christian, who knows?
Topics: Don Blankenship, Massey Energy, TVA, fly ash, i love mountains.org, mountain top removal mining, overburden, pharyngula, slurry ponds, toxic slurry tennesee | No Comments »