Energy Forum
- Release Date:Friday, January 22, 2010
Polarized speakers address full house; Blankenship calm, Kennedy passionate
By George Hohmann, Charleston Daily Mail Business Editor
Coal baron Don Blankenship and environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought two starkly different views of the future of energy to Charleston on Thursday, eloquently argued their positions but left without apparently changing many minds.
"There's no need for an altar call to recognize conversions tonight," University of Charleston President Ed Welch quipped as he finished moderating the 90-minute verbal slugfest on his school's campus.
Blankenship, the chief executive officer of Massey Energy — the largest coal producer in Appalachia — calmly and repeatedly talked about the jobs and taxes coal generates and the low-cost electricity it produces. "This industry is what made this country great," he said. "If we forget that, we're going to have to learn to speak Chinese."
Kennedy, the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, jabbed his finger in the air as he argued that the coal industry has ruthlessly eliminated jobs as it has shifted to increasingly mechanized operations. He said the amount of explosives the industry uses in a week is the equivalent to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Kennedy said if people could see the devastation he's seen flying over the central Appalachian Mountains, "there would be a revolution."
"I'm advocating that we immediately get rid of mountaintop mining," Kennedy said. "The state needs to begin diversifying or, as Sen. Byrd recently pointed out, the state is going to be left in the 19th century."
Blankenship said, "It's typical of enviros to use sensationalism and rhetoric. The coal industry pays hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll and taxes. This state greatly benefits from the production of coal. Ninety-nine percent of this state's electricity comes from coal. Environmental stewardship here is second to none."
Kennedy argued again and again that the coal industry is indirectly subsidized by society. "Every single waterway in our country is contaminated with mercury," and 70 percent of it is from coal-burning power plants, he said. "Children learn in kindergarten you're supposed to clean up after yourself, but the coal industry hasn't learned that."
Blankenship countered that "1 percent of the mercury in this country is from coal-fired power plants." He said that when the coal industry is being criticized, it's your friends and neighbors who are being criticized.
Kennedy said the Catholic Church and Episcopal bishops have said mountaintop removal mining is a sin because of its impact on human beings and communities.
Blankenship held up a bottle of clear water. He said the water has an iron content that exceeds one part per million and therefore violates the federal Environmental Protection Agency's discharge standard. Regulations like that "or talk about windmills when millions of people are starving, millions are out of work, that's true sin," he said.
The Forum on the Future of Energy was held in front of an audience of almost 950 in Riggleman Hall. It was broadcast to an overflow crowd in the Eddie King Gymnasium and via radio and television to an audience statewide. Security was apparent across the campus.
