Footprint Friday–Bellisima Green Challenge 2009: Save Coal Mountain!

This morning when I checked my email, I found the following message and link from one of my Bubble Goddess clients. I’m so grateful to her for passing this along. Since it’s impossible for everyone of us to read about everything that is happening in our country and in our world, it’s so important that we network with each other and pass along information and calls to action to our networks. In this way, the web–not the worldwide web, but the web of green living and earth awareness and protection–can widen and deepen. That web is made up of you and me and everyone we connect with.

Today in gratitude for what my client and friend passed on to me, I now pass the content of this email on to you. I have taken action to let my voice be heard. Please let your voice be heard!

Dear Friend,

I’m writing to ask you to take a quick email action that could help put a stop to a tragedy that is unfolding in West Virginia. A coal company is blowing apart a vital place called Coal River Mountain for mountaintop removal coal mining.

Studies have shown that the ridgelines of Coal River Mountain have Class 7 wind potential – the best there is – and that a wind farm on top of the mountain could generate approximately 1.2% of West Virginia’s total energy needs and create hundreds of permanent jobs in the area, while also generating long-term tax revenue. Each explosion destroys the ridgelines and diminishes the possibility of a clean energy future.

Please take a quick email action to help stop the blasting of Coal River Mountain, and support the communities that live nearby that are promoting a more sustainable development plan with long-term jobs, energy supplies and tax revenues.

I emailed key officials in the Obama Administration to ask them to do everything in their power to stop the destruction of Coal River Mountain.

I hope you can take a minute to send a message to them today.

Please follow this link and send your message!
Click here!

DID YOU KNOW…
*Each day coal companies detonate 2500 tons of explosives – the power of a Hiroshima bomb every week – to blow away Appalachian mountaintops to reach the coal seams beneath.
*According to U.S. E.P.A., the waste from mountaintop removal mines has polluted the region’s groundwater and rivers and rendered 400,000 acres of some of the world’s most biologically rich temperate forests into flat, barren wastelands, “devoid of topography and flowing water.”
*In the 1960s, there were 114,000 unionized mine workers in West Virginia digging coal from tunnels and supporting the families and communities of Appalachia. Today, because of the big machines used in mountain removal, there are less than 11,000 miners in West Virginia taking the same amount of coal and only a fraction of them are unionized.
*A reasonably-sized coal-fired power plant requires about a hundred train cars worth of coal per day.
*In 2001, the following was reported by BNET. “Traditional unit coal trains of the ’70s and ’80s totaled about 14,000 tons carrying 10,000 tons of coal (100 263,000-pound cars each carrying 200,000 pounds of coal, plus five or six locomotives). The latest coal trains out of the Powder River Basin total about 20,000 tons carrying about 16,500 tons of coal (135 286,000-pound cars carrying 244,000 pounds (1) of coal plus three high-adhesion locomotives). Typical trains are now about 18,000 gross tons.”

JUST FOR TODAY…I will continue to read about what is occurring on Coal River Mountain to gain a deeper understanding of the problem and opportunity. I will sign the online petition and send out additional requests to key individuals in the Obama Administration. I will pass along this email and link to friends and family asking them to join in this endeavor.