Long ago, the states of Kentucky and West Virginia entered into an economic suicide pact with Big Coal. The bill for this grim Faustian bargain has finally come due with chronic unemployment, busted unions, poisoned water, pulverized mountains, rampant environmental illnesses and chronic privation. Yet, all Clinton had to offer this desolate region was a vow to fund clean coal technologies. Clean coal is the biggest con job since energy deregulation, another fraudulent scheme unleashed in Clinton time. Low-sulfur coal isn’t clean and the latest method for extracting those black seams constitutes the most devastating form of mining yet invented: mountaintop removal. Using this barbaric method, Big Coal is steadily decapitating Appalachia and burying its valleys and hollows under mounds of toxic detritus. Communities and watersheds be damned.
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