Getting coal out of the ground has always been a dangerous way to earn a living in this country. I know other countries do it better and some do it worse but my concern is for this country. I was ranting away to Karen this AM and stopped abruptly saying, "I don't know why coal winds me up so much and so quickly." She said that for me it was about "home" and also the time I spent in college in Kentucky and the AV's.......I knew that but even so, this one gets me faster than anything else.

I guess it is because we knew years ago how dangerous this was and we knew that coal killed all along the line. It kills the land, it kills the people, and it is without a single positive......except that the people who live on that land have had nowhere else to work and/or gave up their mineral rights to that land they thought they owned. It is the dichotomy of coal energy.

All along the usage line of coal, we make trade-offs. Meigs County, Ohio has 4 coal fired plants and the energy companies want to build 3 more. Those plants brought revenue to the county while the citizens of Meigs County are dying from coal related cancers at alarming rates. A few months back, a citizen action group stopped construction of one of the proposed plants. Last year 26 proposed plants were stopped!

We're blowing the hell out of mountains and strip mining still goes on. A great piece of legislation promises to slow them down or stop them altogether but only the naive and young would believe that strip mining is over.

Legislation passed in 2006 should have made this latest accident less probable and more survivable but men are dead. But there other ways to die of course.....Black Lung has certainly not been eradicated. But the miners may well have nowhere else to work.

How long are we going to pay this price? When we were fighting for more money and better working conditions we should have been fighting for more research into alternatives and new types of jobs for the people.

The politics of coal simply add the final touch to this dirty business as the folks vote for lower taxes and more assistance at the expense of expanding the power of the energy companies. Can you blame them though?

This scenario and the dichotomy of coal has been playing so long in the Appalachians and its foothills that it seems the norm..........and it is.


Spaw