Not That Big Coal and Its Pet Politicians Care About Science, But ....

The evidence is in, and the facts are irrefutable:

Scientific evidence that mountaintop-removal coal mining destroys streams and threatens human health is so strong that government should stop granting new permits for it, a group of 12 environmental scientists report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The consequences of this mining in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and southwestern Virginia are "pervasive and irreversible," the article finds. Companies are required by law to take steps to reduce the damages, but their efforts don't compensate for lost streams nor do they prevent lasting water pollution, it says.

The article is a summary of recent scientific studies of the consequences of blasting the tops off mountains to obtain coal and dumping the excess rock into streams in valleys. The authors also studied new water-quality data from West Virginia streams and found that mining polluted them, reducing their biological health and diversity.

SNIP

The Science article cites a number of potential health risks from removing mountaintops and filling in valleys, including contaminated well water, toxic dust and fish that are tainted with the chemical selenium. It also looked at environmental damage to the mining and fill areas and to streams below them.

"The reason we're willing to make a policy recommendation is that the evidence is so clear-cut," said Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland, the lead author of the Science study and a specialist on the ecology of streams.

Read the whole thing.

None of this is news. Anyone who lives in the shadow of mountaintop removal eats, drinks and breathes this truth every day.

But in Kentucky - and most of Appalachian coal country for that matter - neither science nor facts can prevail where schools replace microscopes with bibles, and enriching alien corporations is more important than protecting at-risk children, and the only laws that rule are those in leviticus.