The Bluegrass and Beyond

As world leaders gather Monday in Copenhagen to rewrite energy policies to reduce future carbon emissions, Lexington business leaders have rewritten their energy policy to try to help the coal industry cling to the past.

Commerce Lexington announced a policy revision last week. that dropped a reference to “encourage the production and use of reliable and less carbon-intensive energy fuels, like natural gas” and replaced it with “maintain the production of affordable, reliable energy.” Several direct coal industry endorsements were added, including:

” … the most immediate threat to Kentucky’s business climate is the pending energy legislation and regulatory obstacles that place an undue burden on states like Kentucky that rely heavily on coal-fired generation plants for electricity. … Commerce Lexington opposes any legislation and regulations that would have a significant negative impact” on coal-industry jobs.

Robert Quick, Commerce Lexington’s president, said the business advocacy group has always supported coal and wanted to make that support more explicit. “It’s hypocritical if we advocate for low-cost energy without supporting coal,” he said.

Quick said the rewrite was prompted by a two-day bus tour of Eastern Kentucky by nearly 70 Commerce Lexington members that “opened our eyes.” The trip included tours of showcase coal projects and presentations by industry representatives and coal-friendly public officials, but nothing from coal’s critics in the region.

Quick said the bus tour on Oct. 12-13 wasn’t a coal-industry junket. He emphasized that Commerce Lexington doesn’t deny climate change or the need to transition away from coal as Kentucky’s reserves are depleted.

“We know that there’s climate change,” Quick said. “We have to be looking for alternative fuels. It’s going to be a transition. Change is coming.”

Quick said the policy rewrite was simply intended to acknowledge coal’s role in Kentucky’s economy and to “make a connection” with mountain leaders.

“Nobody from the coal industry or our membership got to us,” he said. “Nobody got us in a head lock.”

Some people may see it that way.

Others will see it this way: The rewrite echoes a publicity campaign being waged for the coal industry by Phil Osborne, a public relations executive who serves on Commerce Lexington’s Executive Committee and played a big role in the bus tour.

Others also will see the policy rewrite as an attempt to pacify powerful pro-coal people in Eastern Kentucky, some of whom have been calling for a boycott of Lexington businesses because all of our public officials and media don’t toe the coal industry line the way theirs do.

Yes, the coal industry produces some good-paying jobs in Eastern Kentucky, although many fewer than in the past. That’s because of controversial, mechanized surface-mining methods that are radically altering the mountain landscape.

While it’s good that Commerce Lexington members spent time in Eastern Kentucky, they could have gotten a more well-rounded education on coal by traveling to the University of Kentucky campus Nov. 5 for the College of Engineering’s excellent coal conference.

In addition to hearing the coal industry’s perspectives, Commerce Lexington members would have heard from Eastern Kentuckians who have had their property, communities, water supplies and health damaged by coal mining. And they would have gotten a more complete — and less rosy — picture of coal’s impact on Kentucky’s economy.

King Coal’s campaign against change reminds me of Big Tobacco’s lobbying efforts three decades ago. Long after others were acknowledging the inevitable, Kentucky leaders kept trying to deny tobacco’s harm.

Coal will be much harder to quit than tobacco. Coal produces half the nation’s electricity and 92 percent of Kentucky’s. Nobody denies the valuable contributions that hard-working coal miners have made. Without coal we wouldn’t have our modern lifestyle.

Coal will continue to be essential to our nation for many years. But the longer we keep mining and burning coal the way we do now, the more dangerous it will be for our economy and our planet.

Coal companies have a long history of fighting change, from mine safety reforms to surface owners’ rights to surface-mine reclamation. They always claim that any new regulation will kill the coal industry. Regulation has never killed the coal industry; but the industry has never changed without regulation.

One startling indicator of change came last week in a commentary written by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who has been one of coal’s strongest allies in Congress for more than five decades.

Byrd wrote bluntly that if the coal industry wants to be a player in helping set future energy policy it must stop scapegoating, stoking fear among its workers, resisting environmental regulation and denying climate change.

Commerce Lexington’s rewritten energy policy may appease some powerful people in Eastern Kentucky, but Lexington business leaders should think about what kind of message it sends to the rest of the nation and world.

Is it smart to go down tobacco road again, to help the coal industry wage a losing battle to cling to the past?

Or would it be smarter to position Lexington as the place where researchers and entrepreneurs should come to solve coal’s problems?

The future will belong to those cities, states and nations that figure out how to mine and use coal in more environmentally responsible ways and develop the energy technologies that must someday replace coal.

To paraphrase the old Harlan County coal camp song, Commerce Lexington should think about which side of inevitable change it wants to be on.

As I drove to Frankfort early Tuesday, punching the buttons on my car radio, I came across one of those feel-good spots from the Kentucky coal industry. It ended with this line: “Never underestimate the power of coal.”

That’s been good advice in this state for more than a century. And never more true than inside the marble walls of the building where I was headed.

I came to the state Capitol on this sunny day to witness a different kind of power — the growing public sentiment against coal-mining methods that blast away mountains and fill headwater streams with the debris.

More than 500 Kentuckians — from toddlers on their parents’ shoulders to seniors in their 80s — marched up Capitol Avenue and gathered on the Capitol steps for the annual I Love Mountains Rally. The citizens group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth organized the rally to push for legislation that would ban the burying of headwater streams with mining waste.

The marchers carried signs proclaiming “topless mountains are obscene” and urging “not one more mile” of streams be destroyed. They lacked the coal industry’s economic or political power. Instead, they sought to harness moral power.

Ashley Judd added glamour to the event. The Kentucky actress, famous for reciting other people’s words in movies, gave a 20-minute speech of her own that was passionate and eloquent. It was no celebrity puff piece, but a sharp critique of mountaintop-removal mining, the coal industry and the endless cycle of poverty she said coal has brought to Appalachia.

“There is no doubt that there is a crisis in Eastern Kentucky,” Judd said. “The crises are systemic, and the system at the root of our 100-year-long crisis is the unchecked power of the coal companies.

“They assured us that each reform … would be the end, the death of the coal industry,” Judd said. “Well, by golly, what do you know. Here the coal companies still are — bigger, and badder and richer than ever. … Make no mistake about it: The coal companies are thriving. Even in this bleak economy, they are thriving. What is dying is our mountains. And they are dying so fast, my friends, so shockingly fast.”

U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville pledged to fight mountaintop-removal mining through federal clean-water legislation. That may be necessary. The state “stream saver” bill, sponsored by Sen. Kathy Stein of Lexington and Rep. Don Pasley of Winchester, is getting the usual cold shoulder from legislative leaders with close ties to the coal industry.

Silas House, a best-selling author from Eastern Kentucky, said he was disappointed Gov. Steve Beshear declined to attend the rally, even though it was just a few steps from his office.

“I think Gov. Beshear is a good man and I don’t understand why he won’t come out and listen to us,” House said, noting that many of his neighbors also are afraid to cross King Coal. “We’ve had a hundred years of being told not to speak out against the coal industry. It’s hard to break out of that culture. We’ve been taught to feel powerless.”

Mickey McCoy, a high school teacher from Inez in coal-rich Martin County, agreed: “It’s a terrible thing when you can’t get a single senator or representative from the coalfield counties to represent anything but the coal industry.”

Beshear’s spokesman, Jay Blanton, said the governor was in an important economic development meeting that had been scheduled weeks earlier, but left it to meet with Judd and a small group of KFTC members after the rally. Blanton said Judd spent Monday night at the governor’s mansion where she and Beshear “talked at some length about these issues.”

KFTC said nearly 500 Kentucky mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining. It cited figures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that more than 1,400 miles of headwater streams in the state have been buried or damaged by mining since 1981.

The coal industry, which says it provides 17,000 jobs in Kentucky, argues that the “stream saver” legislation would virtually halt surface mining in Eastern Kentucky. And it notes that coal provides more than 90 percent of Kentucky’s electricity at some of the nation’s cheapest prices.

There’s no doubt Kentucky needs coal — at least until we can develop alternative energy sources, hopefully before all of the coal runs out. But that doesn’t mean coal must be mined by the most environmentally destructive methods. Electricity is cheap only if you don’t include all of the hidden costs to Kentucky’s land, water and people.

In the short run, economic arguments always seem to trump moral arguments, even when people know in their hearts what is right. In the long run, though, moral arguments usually prevail.

A few decades ago, it was blasphemy to speak out against the health dangers of smoking, because tobacco was so important to Kentucky’s economy. A century and a half ago, many people argued that the economy couldn’t survive without slavery.

“The environment is not a place where we go hiking; it’s a place where we live,” said Sam Avery, who came to the rally from Hart County, where he lives in a solar-powered home.

“When you grind up a mountain just for the coal, you destroy the trees, the animals, the insects, the water supply. The living world is that much smaller,” Avery said. “From a Biblical perspective, it’s an abomination to the creator.”

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