SENATE BILL: The Atlasian Mountaintop Removal Ban Act (Law'd)

[tpfkaw]

To quote myself from earlier:

This bill is not only silly but also harmful.  Coal mining is inevitably a process which causes environmental damage, and obviously mining more coal would cause more damage.  However, it is ridiculous to say that coal should only be sourced from many small mines (all of which are environmentally-damaging eyesores), as opposed to a few big mines.  The level of environmental damage is going to inevitably be the same or even higher since only less-efficient methods are allowed to be used.

All this does is raise the price of energy, which will impact low-income individuals the most, and makes our mining industry uncompetitive compared to other countries which do not have these restrictions.  The 'mountaintop removal' will simply travel elsewhere, as well as the blue-collar unionized mining jobs that go with the coal mining industry.

If environmentalists are truly so concerned about this, then they are perfectly free to put their money where their mouth is and purchase said mountaintops from coal mining companies to be made into whatever sort of nature preserve they like.

[tpfkaw]

Regular mining does not result in the damage of approximately 1,200 miles of streams, destroyed forests on some 300 square miles of land, contaminated drinking water, flooded communities, or destroyed wildlife the way mountaintop removal does.  The companies will be allowed to use other methods of mining, but not kinds that are capable of such destruction and environmental harm.

No, regular mining is every bit as environmentally damaging for the amount of coal produced, and more so in the aggregate since it is a less efficient form of coal extraction, and so more mining would be required to produce the same quantity of coal.

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They certainly are, since those places are where the mining industry fuels the local economy and created those communities in the first place.  Attempts such as your own to destroy the only source of prosperity in those communities will cause their unemployment and poverty rates to skyrocket and quality of life to markedly decrease.

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Then sell off state-owned land surrounding mines to private owners who are entitled to sue for property damages.  Bingo, no more externality (which are caused by deficiencies in property rights; negative externalities are the damaging of another's property without consequence).

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No, it's more efficient, so fewer workers are required to produce the same amount of coal.  Your argument is essentially the same as saying that mass production "takes away jobs" because single artisans are uncompetitive with it.  If domestic producers are forced to use inefficient methods of producing coal, they will not be able to compete with foreign producers and they will go out of business, destroying jobs.

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Oh, really?  How do you know?  Are you an expert on this subject?

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Cheaper energy, so that poor people don't have to live in the dark and in the cold, and the quality of life that the mining industry has created in Appalachia, the only reason many Appalachian communities exist in the first place, and that would turn Appalachia into a giant appendage of the Rust Belt if it were to disappear.

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Yeah, how about by environmentalists, who tend to be much wealthier than average and count many prominent celebrities and billionaires in their ranks, who could certainly afford to purchase whatever mountaintops they wish if it were truly so important to them.

And on top of that, residents of the states in which this method is used the most strongly oppose this practice.

I don't think we need to take (multi-state!) push polls from special interest groups all that seriously.

[tpfkaw]

No, wormyguy.  Mountaintop removal is a very different form of mining that is more extreme and does even more damage to mountains than normal mining.  Normal mining does not result in the same amount of damage because it is less severe, even if it is used more frequently.

Since you are so adamant about this, please provide statistics regarding the environmental damage per tonne of coal produced by "normal" mining and MRM.  Mining, no matter what the scale, is essentially the digging of holes and the extraction of desired materials from those holes.  MRM is significantly more efficient than "normal" mining at the extraction of said materials, that is to say significantly more desired material can be extracted compared to the earth excavated, such that it fairly obviously has a lower aggregate environmental impact than "normal" mining.

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I never claimed to be an expert on this, but I do know that my arguments are rooted in fact rather than unsubstantiated statements, most of which are following the Luddite Fallacy.

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The Luddite fallacy strikes again; increases in efficiency due to technological change do not cause economy-wide unemployment or negative growth.  That Ford and GM's mass-production method put Auburn out of business, or that the lightbulb destroyed the gas lamp and candle industries, does not mean that people were worse off from their inventions.  Quite the contrary, people now had automobiles affordable to the middle class and a safe, reliable, bright, and efficient light source, respectively, both of which were great boons to the economy.

I'll take the next section somewhat out of order.

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What has been the major change in the coal mining industry since the 1960s?  It isn't MRM; that was around back then, too.  It has been the introduction of wide-ranging environmental regulations that have significantly increased the costs of mining in this country such that it is no longer nearly as competitive on the world market as it once was.  In the regulatory environment of the 1960s, both "normal" mines and mountaintop removal mines in the US were cost-competitive on the world market.  With the massive barriers to entry imposed by newer, far-reaching environmental regulations, only MRM remains cost-competitive compared to coal extraction in other countries.  If MRM is banned in addition to existing regulations, that will surely be the final death-knell for the Atlasian mining industry.

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Plenty of that wealth is paid to employees, who in turn invest it in their communities.  Not only that, but to mine on land in a free market system a mining company has to purchase said land in the first place for its discounted potential value (the market value of the resources it contains minus the cost of extracting those resources plus an allowance for some profit).  In addition, the low-cost coal that Appalachia produces allows for increased efficiency and competitiveness in the American economy and the world economy at large, ultimately decreasing costs for Appalachian consumers when they purchase products and services.  You're essentially subscribing to the protectionist fallacy here (or, rather, it's equally silly* opposite, that exports are bad).

*Actually somewhat more silly, since net exports are a component of GDP.

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See above.

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No, it has not.  These communities exist in the first place because the mining industry makes them economically viable.

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If such sources were so inexpensive, then people would already be using them instead.  Rather, even with massive government subsidy, they are still not nearly cost-competitive with coal.  People who do not need to worry about their electricity costs can have such flights of fancy all they want, but a significant increase in electricity costs has a disproportionate impact on those poorest among us.

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I see no reason why the taxpayer should have to foot the bill for the mining companies' costs of doing business.  Rather, they should have to pay for themselves.

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Once again, people should be allowed to sue for damage to their property caused by MRM or anything else.  Ironically, environmental regulations work both ways in a sense.  As long as a company is in compliance with them, then people whose health or property was negatively impacted by their emissions/runoff etc. are not entitled to legal recourse.  Allowing property-owners, as was the legal regime 100 years ago before environmental regulations were first created for the benefit of corporations, to either charge for the use of their property or sue for damages if they are not paid, would prove a far better deterrent than any government action.

A good example of this would be with elephants, back in the 1970s in both Kenya and what was then Rhodesia.  In 1978, Kenya banned the hunting of elephants and instituted heavy penalties for doing so, which was followed only by even more depletion of the elephant population (previously, commercial elephant hunters abided by government restrictions on the number of elephants that could be hunted, whereas poachers had no such qualms).  One year later, in 1979, Rhodesia made elephants the property of whomever's land they were on.  The result was that they soon found themselves with too many elephants.

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See above.

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Regarding said poll, it's by a fly-by-night operation I've never heard of, commissioned by a special interest group (making it an internal poll), asked biased push-poll-style questions, and is of several states without breaking it down by state (much like those useless "Romney leads Obama in Florida, Ohio, and Indiana" polls).  It's practically the definition of a junk poll.

[tpfkaw]

I'm going to follow your method of just responding to you as a block, since you've gotten somewhat repetitive.

It is clear that you have little understanding of traditional mining, which is an extremely water-intensive process that produces a great deal of runoff, as well as generating an enormous amount of coal dust both inside and outside of the mine shaft, to which miners are directly exposed in closed quarters and which has contributed to an epidemic of Black Lung Disease among former miners.  MRM is mostly an open-air process in which human exposure to coal dust is significantly less than in traditional mining situations.  Furthermore, I have no duty to prove a negative; you have made the assertion that MRM produces more pollution per unit of coal produced.  Since you are so confident in that assertion, I asked you to provide statistical proof.  You have not.

Frankly, Scott, the facts do prove my claim about increases in efficiency.  If MRM were not more efficient, then nobody would be doing it.  The Luddite Fallacy is the assertion that increases in efficiency cause unemployment because they reduce the labor cost per output, and it's a fallacy because, well, it's wrong.  Correlation does not imply causation.  Take, for example, Detroit.  Detroit is an extremely poor city with very high crime and unemployment.  In fact, even in the heyday of the auto industry during the 1960s, Detroit was still one of the poorest and highest-crime cities in America.  However, it would be absurd to claim that the auto industry, it's major economic driver, ever made Detroit worse off.  If the auto industry were to disappear, quite obviously, Detroit would be even worse-off than it is now.  In fact, without the auto industry, it's almost certain that Detroit would never have been a major city in the first place.  Without the auto industry as a major investor and employer, it never would have been economically viable as a major city (which is what I mean by "economically viable").  Likewise, many parts of Appalachia and mining.

On a related note, the use of robots in automobile assembly lines began in the 1970s, the same decade that Detroit and the auto industry began declining.  It's also true that robots replaced human workers.  But the increased efficiency from automated assembly made auto manufacturing more profitable than it otherwise would have been, letting the American auto manufacturers be better off than they otherwise would have been, retaining more of their workforce than they otherwise would have.  It's true that Detroit and the auto industry declined as robots on assembly lines became more prevalent, but that is correlation and not causation, and it's the Luddite Fallacy to claim otherwise.  The decline of the auto industry and of the city of Detroit depended on other factors (respectively, the oil shocks and stagflation, from which the Big 3 never fully recovered, and white flight caused by the 1967 riots and the disastrous mayorality of Coleman Young combined with the aforementioned decline of the auto industry).

Of course, all of this would only be relevant if there really were correlation that you could imply is causation, but there isn't.  MRM has been around since the 1960s, like I said ("Mountaintop removal began in the 1960s, but has gradually become more popular").  Not only that, but as MRM has become more prevalent, mining has experienced a rennaissance of sorts in Appalachia, as for the first time in many years mining companies have begun opening new mines and hiring new workers, so the correlation actually runs in quite the opposite direction and appears quite causal.

What did come about around the time Appalachian mining went into decline were a plethora of new regulations - Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, OSHA etc. that made the costs of doing business in mining much higher and rendered traditional mining in Appalachia increasingly uncompetitive with both foreign and other domestic (Wyoming, etc.) coal suppliers.  This isn't my evil right-wing position, it's common sense.  Even quite leftist Keynesian economists will agree that increases in productive efficiency are helpful to an industry while increases in regulation harm it.  These are broadly-accepted, self-evident economic facts.

And yes, allowing landowners to sue for damages to their property is an effective deterrent.  If a business can expect to have to face a lawsuit for engaging in a certain activity, it will be [strongly] discouraged from engaging in that activity in the first place.  Businesses are not moustache-twirling Captain Planet villains, they're profit-seeking entities that will avoid possible loss (such as loss from lawsuits) like the plague.

Regarding your poll, I fail to see how your link increases its credibility.  It says that it weighted its sample such that 42% of its sample was from Virginia and 29% from Tennessee, while only 21% was from Kentucky and 8%(!) from West Virginia, the latter two having expressed much higher support for all mining-related activities asked about in the poll than the former two (although their samples were too small to produce any statistically-valid results).

Not only that, but the survey broke its samples in half and asked each half a different question, the first half was asked a neutral question about their opinions of MRM yielding 24% in favor, 38% opposed, and 38% don't know.  The other half was asked an a loaded question describing the perceived environmental impact of MRM yielding 20% in favor, 57% opposed, and 23% don't know.  The neutral question received a fairly neutral/unfamiliar response, indicating a lack of familiarity with the matter (unsurprising, "mountaintop removal mining" is a technical term), while the loaded question received a strongly negative response, as one might expect from a push poll, which this one was by definition.  You would get the opposite response if you had a survey question asking people if they'd support banning MRM even if it might cost jobs.  This is probably the worst survey I've ever seen a member of this site insist was genuine.

[tpfkaw]

Scott, I have asked you twice now to provide me hard statistics showing that MRM produces more pollution per unit of coal produced compared to traditional mining.  You have not done so and have responded only with a series of anecdotes (all of which are equally true of traditional mining) and hysterical appeals to emotion.  I can only conclude that there is, in fact, no hard evidence for your position, which makes sense, as more efficient methods of production almost universally produce less pollution per unit.



As you can see, nearly all job losses in West Virginia coal mining occured well before the invention of MRM (and your figure of 150,000 for the 1960s is wildly inaccurate).  I am also correct in saying that since the 1990s, when MRM became prevalent, employment has begun to increase again.  Furthermore, there is another large decrease following the passage of of several far-reaching regulatory bills within a 1-year period; OSHA (1976), the Clean Air and Water acts of 1977, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, and the creation of the Department of Energy (1977).  While economists do disagree as to the effect of certain regulations on the overall economy, you won't find any who will say that regulations *on the coal mining industry* are helpful *to the coal mining industry,* which was my point.

Furthermore, you are mistaken in your assumption that property damage due to pollution is illegal.  Provided that the polluter complies with federal regulations, property-owners are not entitled to sue for damages due to said pollution.  This is why big business advocated for the creation of environmental regulations in the first place.

If changing the question from a neutral statement to a "descriptive" one causes such a large change in results, it is by definition a push poll question.  If you do not see how that is, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn and a poll showing that 85% of New Englanders oppose partial-birth abortion to sell you.  I'm not going to argue with you further about a push poll commissioned by special-interest groups conducted by fly-by-night operations of a sample that is almost entirely outside the area of interest.

[tpfkaw]

Scott - I've asked you, three times now, to provide actual, numerical evidence that MRM produces more pollution per unit of coal mined than "traditional" mining.  You still have not done so, which seems to indicate that, of course, there is no such data.

Here is a picture of Linfen, China:



That's not fog or even smog, that's coal dust.  Coal dust produced from large-scale traditional mining.  There is absolutely nothing about traditional mining that makes it an even relatively environmentally-safe process.  To claim that archaic methods of coal mining as practiced in Linfen are superior to more efficient, modern methods, where one cannot even tell a mine existed once it is depleted and the land reclaimed, is ridiculous.  Coal mining is not an environmentally-friendly activity by any means but its environmental impact has never been lower relative to the amount produced.

I'm failing to see the point of the graph you posted.  Here is a different graph:



As you can see, in manufacturing in general, production has tended to increase while employment has tended to decrease - this is because of improved efficiency due to increases in technology.  There would surely be full employment in West Virginia if the government were to import a group of North Korean commissars and have the local population mine coal with shovels and pickaxes, but people would most certainly not be better off.  In fact, the reason North Korean commissars would be required is because if the government banned mining except with shovels and pickaxes, then no private mining would occur whatsoever because it would not be worth the investment.  Mining with shovels and pickaxes was rendered obsolete by the ages of steam and the internal combustion engine.  Once those cats were let out of the bag, they could not be let back in - and that was a good thing, because they enabled vast increases in productive efficiency and therefore national prosperity.  Likewise, manufacturing jobs have not been lost because of increases in productive efficiency, which have helped to preserve jobs by keeping US manufacturers in business, they have been lost despite increases in productive efficiency.  MRM is actually such an increase in productive efficiency that Appalachian mining employment has indeed once again started inching upwards, though of course a full recovery to 1940s or even 1970s employment levels is unlikely.

Speaking of those levels:



As you can see, I am once again in fact correct in saying that mining employment in West Virginia started its decline, sharply and immediately, after the passage of several wide-ranging environmental regulation laws in 1977.  While correlation does not imply causation, like I said, the popularizing of MRM correlates with a partial reversal in the downwards job trend while the introduction of said environmental regulations correlates with a sudden and sharp trend downwards that persisted into the 1990s and destroyed almost all remaining coal-mining jobs.

Your push poll, which I will quote myself in describing

commissioned by special-interest groups conducted by fly-by-night operations of a sample that is almost entirely outside the area of interest.

presents "both sides of the argument" only after pre-biasing the sample by presenting one side of the argument first.  This is a standard method used to establish that push polls are in fact "unbiased."  I'm not sure why you continue to insist on arguing about that, since there's nobody on this site unsophisticated enough about such matters they'd take a poll like yours seriously.

[tpfkaw]

Nay.  The assault on poor people continues.