CHARLESTON --
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The reason West Virginia’s economy isn’t more diverse, according to Don Blankenship, is that coal revenues lull politicians to sleep.
“They think because they have all of this revenue off of coal that they don’t have to worry about the future.”
The Massey Energy chairman and CEO made this statement at the Jan. 21 “Forum on the Future of Energy” debate with environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the University of Charleston.
Neither side convinced the other but the issues were fully aired.
Blankenship began broadly: the mission statement for coal is prosperity and security for this country.
“To do that we have to produce a lot of energy in this country, and we have to do it at a low cost, and we have to do it with the environment in mind and we have to manage the resources we have to get the maximum use out of them,” he said.
Kennedy began, rather, with a personal history, invoking the launch of his uncle John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign for president in the very same UC auditorium and recalling his own father, Robert F. Kennedy, wondering how a state among the richest in natural resources also had the among the poorest people.
The coal industry has mechanized ruthlessly, Kennedy said, mining with fewer and fewer people while destroying the environment and sending the profits out of state.
Blankenship disagreed. In his mind, coal provides good jobs and pays needed severance taxes to the state. It is, rather, a bad business environment that prevents supporting businesses from locating in the state and forces coal companies to make their large purchases elsewhere.
Where Kennedy cited West Virginia University Professor Michael Hendryx’s research showing that people living near coal mines are sicker, Blankenship pointed to communities around the world without electricity, where life expectancy and other health measures fall far below West Virginians’.
Where Blankenship maintained that coal built this country and is making China and other countries prosperous now, Kennedy countered with studies about wind and solar power facilities that could replace coal-fired power more cleanly and with a better return — only to have Blankenship ask, “Then why aren’t they being built?”
Kennedy argued primarily throughout the debate for an end to mountaintop mining, asserting that the same coal mined underground would provide more jobs and preserve the health of ecosystems and human communities.
He finished by pointing out Massey’s own reports of 12,900 violations of the federal Clean Water Act in a single year, and asked, “Is it possible to do mountaintop removal mining without violating the Clean Water Act?”
“The (Environmental Protection Agency) rules are unreasonable, enforcement is unreasonable, in many cases the safety enforcement is unreasonable,” Blankenship said, “and it is causing this country to be non-competitive, it’s costing us our jobs, it will cost the teachers their pension plans if we don’t begin to have a little bit of common sense.”
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