Articles by Jeff Biggers

I'd Rather Go Naked Than Burn MTR Coal

It is time to abolish mountaintop removal mining, not regulate it. That is the fervent message being spread from community to community, and state to state, now that scores of […]

Dear Nancy Sutley: Get it right on mountaintop removal

As a new round of explosives shattered the ridges across mountaintop removal mines in Boone and Raleigh counties in West Virginia yesterday, unleashed by a recent U.S. Fourth Circuit Court […]

Knock out calls for anti-mountaintop removal bills

Ain’t no mountain high enough: King Coal is on the ropes. Across the nation, anti-mountaintop removal bills are quickly being moved across Capitol Hill and numerous legislatures this week to […]

Power Past Coal communities host anti-coal events during first 100 days of Obama administration

Appalachia needs no defense: It needs more defenders.

Check out the footage of the bright blast that greeted Bo Webb, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and his community last night and today in Clay's Branch, Peachtree, W. Va. A shower of rock dust mixed with a toxic brew of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate explosives swept down their hollow, as the Richmond-based Massey Energy behemoth detonated another round of explosives in their haste to bring down the mountain for a thin seam of coal. Nearby, children attended the Marsh Fork Elementary School, the blasting in the distance like a harbinger of Massey's brutal force -- the company is now infamously embroiled in a U.S. Supreme Court case for compromising judicial neutrality in their efforts to contribute their way into the good graces of West Virginia judges -- as 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge held back by a 385-foot-high earthen dam hover a few football fields above the school like an accident waiting to happen.

Good morning, Appalachia!

Just another day of mountaintop removal; that process of wiping out America's natural landmarks, dumping the waste into waterways and valleys, and effectively removing historic communities from their homeplaces through a campaign of horrific blasting, dusting, poisoning, and harassment.

We've reached a new landmark in the central Appalachian coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and southwest Virginia: Over 500 mountains in one of the most diverse forests in the Americas -- the same kind of mountains that garner protection and preservation status in a blink of an eye in other regions -- -have now been eliminated from our American maps.

Five hundred mountains are gone. For what? Less than 5 percent of our nation's supply of coal, while 50 million tons of West Virginia coal are annually exported to CO2-spewing plants in countries like China.

As a new report [PDF] by Quentin Gee, Nicholas Allen and their colleagues at the Associated Students Environmental Affairs Board of UC Santa Barbara recently found, the overlooked external costs of coal further debunk the black diamond's image as a "clean" and "cheap" source of energy.

Gee and Allen write: