The Global Damage From 200 Years Of Coal Use Will Endure For 10s Of Thousands Of Years
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Neece bought the mountain in 2013 as an investment in coal, just before the bottom fell out of the Eastern Kentucky coal industry in 2015. His tenant left behind nearly two miles of unstable rock-faced cliffs that Neece estimates are as high as 250 feet tall. By law, mining companies are supposed to ameliorate the damage they cause, a process known as contemporaneous reclamation. Slopes are supposed to be stabilized and returned to their approximate original contour; rainfall needs to be managed; grasses or trees must be planted.
None of that happened. Now, Neece said, the property is both unsafe and basically worthless, because he isn’t sure if or when, or even how, it will ever be reclaimed. “They never did nothing,” Neece said angrily of the now-bankrupt coal companies that sheared off the sides of his mountain. “You can’t use it for nothing.” His experience is emblematic of coal’s accelerating demise in the United States and the environmental devastation its use has left behind. One environmental scientist, Emily Bernhardt of Duke University, said the damage would last “millennia.” A law professor in West Virginia, Pat McGinley, said there are coal areas in his state where “everything is contaminated, environments are wrecked and there’s no responsibility or no consequences.”
In Pennsylvania, underground mine fires burn and iron-laden, acidic water pours into rivers from abandoned mine shafts. In New Hampshire, the iconic sugar maple is threatened by soil damage lingering from coal-induced acid rain. In Florida, a young mother obsesses over air and water pollution from a vast pile of coal ash stored by her local utility. And in Kentucky, the multi-billion dollar cost of reclaiming abandoned mines like Neece’s far exceeds the amount of surety bonds left behind by an increasing number of bankrupt coal companies.
Across Appalachia, mountaintop removal and other forms of surface mining have scarred an area of more than 2,300 square miles in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee. Nationwide, over a million acres of land used by still operating, idle or abandoned mines need to be cleaned up and reclaimed—a job President Biden’s new $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill can only begin to address. “The size of this problem is absolutely massive,” said Eric Dixon, a researcher who has studied abandoned mine lands nationally.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12122021/coal-powered-the-industrial-revolution-it-left-behind-an-absolutely-massive-environmental-catastrophe/