from Democracy Now!

MIKE ROSELLE: Well, the best way to maintain coal jobs in West Virginia is to end mountaintop removal immediately, because it employs a lot less people than underground mining. Underground mining is a lot less destructive to the environment, and it could be even less so if more regulations were enforced and new ones put in place.

But the blasting of the mountains removes any hope for any jobs in the future. And some of these mountains are very good sites for wind farms, and we’ve done studies on Coal River Mountain to show that it would actually produce more jobs if they were to develop the wind resources.

So this is not a jobs issue at all. This is an issue about an out-of-state company coming into West Virginia and extracting the coal, with the most profits, with the least amount of expenses, and then getting out of there. And it’s a cut-and-run operation. So, the forests are removed, the streams are buried. They’re just—plant these mountaintops, which is just basically gravel with a little bit of grass seed, and take a picture when it greens up, and then they leave. So it is really not about coal mining. This is about a company that has been exempt from the law. It’s about a state where federal laws don’t apply. And it’s about the Environmental Protection Agency, which has looked the other way because of the powerful politicians on the sides of the coal companies.

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