Coal is Dirty - Clean Coal Industry News

Rev. Billy:Let Us CHASE the Devil out of Mountaintop Removal!

Scott Parkin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:07:27 +0000

We’ve got some friends in New York joining the campaign to end mountaintop removal.

Today, I got the following email from Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping:

Our new song “Mountain-top” begins with this re-questioning from Dr. King’s last sermon:

Have we been to the mountain-top?
Did we do all we could do?
JP Morgan rains down rock
Exploding loans from the Devil came due…

We are joining thousands of activist citizens who have opposed the removal of peaks in Appalachia for “dirty coal” mining. In resisting Consumerism, there is always an earth-justice motive, right in front of us. We remember leading Iceland citizens into their own super malls to oppose the big dams and aluminum smelters; and we recall opposing the super ferry in Kauai; and also singing to tree-sitters up in the redwoods.

When you start with such a general plea as “Stop Shopping” – your work can go in so many directions. Now, mountaintop removal, the shopping for energy that murders citizens living on the streams below and poisons the air at great distances – now this must be our cause.

The mountain activists are welcoming us because there is a role for New Yorkers – with JP Morgan Chase headquartered here, the branch bank chain store that kills off our indie shops. We will chase Chase out into the open. We promise our Appalachian friends that this city will not protect the bank that finances most of this violence against the mountains.

-Reverend Billy and the Life After Shopping Church

Sounds like Rev. Billy and crew are joining our crusade to save the mountaintops. You may not live in the coalfields, but as Rev. Billy can attest you can still fight to end mountaintop removal from wherever you are.

Help Sustain Direct Action in the Coalfields of Appalachia

Scott Parkin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:56:31 +0000

Dear Friends,

On June 23, dozens of activists, including myself, organized a daring action to shut down one of Massey Energy’s mountaintop removal sites in West Virginia. That day, fourteen brave activists entered Massey’s mountaintop removal site in Twilight, West Virginia. They risked their lives to shut down a massive, 20-story high earth-destroying piece of mining equipment known as a 'dragline,’ and to protect the families whose lives are harmed every day for this destructive mining practice.

Read more about the dragline action.

The "Dragline 14" needs your support! I need your support. Please donate!

Our subsequent legal costs have totaled over $23,000. Since last September, we have raised over half of it, but we still need to raise another $4,000 by early March.

I have donated to the dragline 14 because I believe that sustaining the critical tradition of non-violent direct action is one of the only ways to ensure that we stop the destruction of eco-systems, the poisoning of communities and the contamination of precious drinking water from mountaintop removal. Together we must make a show of support for true heroes, and ensure that more follow in their footsteps.

Donate to support the Dragline 14

We're mobilizing with house parties and personal appeals to friends and donors, but I need your help as well.

Please donate whatever you can ($5, $50 or $500) to help the "Dragline 14" pay our legal costs.

For the mountains, Scott Parkin

Two Jailed Pro-Mountain Activists Stage Hunger Strike Against Excessive Bail

Scott Parkin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:44:47 +0000

The legal system is loaded against people fighting King Coal in Appalachia. Over the past year, we’ve seen excessive “cash-only” bails for non-violent activists in jail and excessive fines once their legal matters are settled.

Now two of the three activists arrested last week at the Marfork Coal Company’s offices are fighting back against their excessive bails ($5000 for two and $7500 for the third activist, Mike Roselle).

These folks are putting their health and safety on the line in resisting big coal and the corrupt legal systems. Please donate to help Climate Ground Zero fight King Coal in southern West Virginia.

BEAVER, W.Va.—Tom Smyth, and Joe Hamsher, from Charleston, W.Va., began a hunger strike in jail today in protest of the absurdity of their $5,000, cash-only bonds compared to that of violent criminals. Smyth and Hamsher went to jail last Thursday when they chained themselves to office furniture in Massey’s Marfork Mining Co., office in response to mounting permit violations and the continued blasting on Coal River Mountain. They also presented a citizen’s arrest warrant to Marfork president Christopher Blanchard, on charges of attempting to injure by poison, malicious or unlawful assault or assault of a child near a school, and wanton endangerment.

Already this month, a man accused of four sex crimes involving a 13-year-old got out on $15,000 bond. Another man, after stabbing someone five times in the back, was being held on $10,000 bond and his accomplice on $6,000 bond. A 19-year-old Beckley woman was arrested for wanton endangerment after shooting at another woman in a Family Dollar parking lot and was being held on $10,000 bond. None of these articles indicates they were restricted to cash-only, which means they’d only have to put up 10% of their total bond amount.

The protesters “cash-only” bonds mean the entire bond amount must be paid in cash, and they cannot use a bail bondsman to pay only 10% of the amount. “There is something broken in a judicial system that responds more harshly to nonviolent protesters than violent criminals, not to mention allowing Massey’s crimes to go on unpunished,” tree sitter Amber Nitchman said. Smyth and Hamsher say they will continue their hunger strike until their bonds are reduced to a reasonable amount.

Internet to Chase: Stop Destroying the Mountains!

Scott Parkin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:00:46 +0000

JP Morgan Chase is the biggest U.S. financier of mountaintop removal.

They have financial relationships with the poster child of mountaintop removal, Massey Energy. That means their money is funds sludge impoundments like Brushy Fork which is currently holding 7 billion gallons of coal waste above the Coal River Valley. Their money funds the dragline that 14 of my friends shut down in Twilight last June that scrapes away house size chunks of earth after the mountain has been blasted. Their money funds the security guards and noise machines that harassed and abused 3 tree-sitters last month defending Coal River Mountain with non-violent direct action. Their money funds Don Blankenship’s helicopters, mansion and corrupt junkets to Spain with WV Supreme Court Justices .

Chase has hired PR firms to re-brand themselves on the internet as “charitable” and “benevolent” through their “Chase Community Giving sites and Facebook Fan Pages (even though they disallowed “political” groups from participating in any fundraising). Chase touts themselves as a green environmentally friendly bank. Their greenwashing, social media branding and high powered PR firms can’t hide the truth about what Chase really does. They are complicit in destroying Appalachia’s mountains, poisoning it’s communities with dirty water and ruining it’s economy by creating conditions that lead to the worst poverty in the country.

Today, we’re exposing that truth using tools on the internet that will concentrate tens of thousands of people on Chase brand they’ve spent so much money perfecting. It’s time we amp up the pressure on Chase and take their money out of the coal industry.

Please join us for a social media day of action. We are using our Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and blogs to hold JP Morgan Chase accountable for financing this despicable practice. Follow this link to take social media action and tell JP Morgan Chase to stop destroying Appalachia’s mountains.

Some ways to take action:

Update your facebook status with this message: “Chase is bankrolling the destruction of American mountains for coal. End mountaintop removal and PUT CHASE ON THE RUN. Take action today at DirtyMoney.org."
Upload this Chase brand jam image to your Facebook picture (picture found here)”
Brand jam Chase’s Facebook page “Chase Community Giving.” Go this link for details
Tweet this message: #Chase is bankrolling the destruction of American mountains. Take action at http://www.DirtyMoney.org. #coal #mtr #RAN Please RT.
Upload the Chase brand jam image to Flickr (image found here)
Blog the social media day of action

Seattle Loves Mountains (Not King Coal or His Dirty Bankers at Chase)

Scott Parkin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:08:03 +0000

This weekend, Seattle activists tired of watching big banks ruin the global economy and the planet had an action at a Chase branch in Seattle.

Chase is currently the biggest U.S. funder of mountaintop removal.

Here’s a reportback from activist Duff Badgley:

CHASE BANK UNDER SIEGE—THE FIGHT CONTINUES

We’ve joined the Rainforest Action Network national campaign against arch climate criminal Chase Bank’s funding of mountaintop removal.

And, to celebrate, we held a Seattle branch of Chase under siege yesterday, February 13. Squad car lights flashed as cops, security guards and multiple bank managers defended the right of Chase to ruin our planet.

We protesters returned to the scene of the N30 crime where I was arrested after chaining myself to the front door of Chase at Westlake Plaza. I’m under court order to not enter this Chase branch until after July 6, 2010.

We badly scared Chase on N30. A Chase rep at their corporate headquarters in New York City said Seattle protesters had “defaced” a branch of Chase and were facing “federal charges”. They’ve gotta be scared of us if they distort the truth so badly. My co-arrestee and I were completely nonviolent on N30 and were each charged only with violating local trespass law.

So, we went back yesterday to keep the siege of Chase Bank going.

It’s important to remember who is the criminal here.

The criminal on N30 was Chase Bank for a laundry list of climate crimes including heavily financing coal, oil and gas industries. The criminal now is still Chase Bank for being the largest financier of mountaintop removal.

MTR is the practice of blowing off the tops of mountains in Appalachia to extract coal. MTR literally reduces whole mountains—472 so far—to rubble as it detonates the explosive equivalent of one Hiroshima atom bomb each week in the country’s oldest mountains. MTR poisons waterways across thousands of square miles. MTR releases toxic dust across the same range. MTR violently destroys forest and wildlife habitat, turning lush woodland into mangled moonscapes of bare rock.

All this criminal behavior is funded by Chase more than any other bank. All this criminal behavior comes to extract coal, our dirtiest fossil fuel and our worst aggravator of climate change.

The cops and security guards and bank managers behaved yesterday as if reading from our script. The managers recognized us on the sidewalk outside Chase from N30. They promptly summoned security and police. Two police cruisers plus bicycle cops responded. The cops stationed themselves outside the bank on the sidewalk, while bank employees stared at us from inside. One cop placed himself between us and the bank front door. Chase customers had to walk a gauntlet past the flashing lights, the cops and our big CHASE BANK CLIMATE CRIMINALS banner to get into the bank.

Kristen, one of our protesters, entered the bank to withdraw all her money and close her account—a hugely powerful act. She reported back the bank employees inside “were all scared”. Chase was under siege!!

RAN has fellow protesters against Chase in the streets of Chicago and New York. In Seattle, we plan regular protests at this Chase branch or others in our city—until they stop their climate crimes.

Join us! Tell friends who bank at Chase to withdraw their money. Let’s spark a national boycott of Chase. Make Chase Bank stop hurting Our Shared Planet.

Duff Badgley, Feb. 14, 2010

Chicago Loves Mountains (not King Coal or his Wall Street bankers at Chase)

Scott Parkin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:39:28 +0000

Activists with RAN Chicago attached a banner to Chase's HQ in downtown Chicago. This was part of an escalating campaign in the Windy City to expose Chase's financing of destructive mountaintop coal mining in central Appalachia.

Activists thus far have been using culture jamming and street protest to educate and raise awareness of Chase's financial dealings. Today’s banner hang adds just one more action to RAN’s broader campaign to raise public awareness and pressure Chase to cease funding mountaintop removal. The ongoing campaign includes delivering letters to Chase branches throughout Chicagoland, educating Chase customers and employees, distributing stickers, and writing chalk messages on sidewalks and other publicly visible areas.

Chase has a pervasive presence in Chicago, second only to New York, and offices some of Chase's heavy hitters including William Daley (former Commerce Secretary under Clinton, brother to Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and son to former Chicago mayor Richard P. Daley).

Actions of this nature have begun to receive increased amounts of attention. A Climate Action march and rally this past October and a demonstration against the Chicago Climate Exchange in November also put a focus on supporting truly clean energy.

Letter from a West Virginia Jail

Scott Parkin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:48:08 +0000

Last week, Eric Blevins came down from a nine day tree-sit on Coal River Mountain. He then spent a couple of days in jail. While in jail, he wrote this letter to the Register-Herald in Beckley, WV and then dictated it over the phone to a support person at Climate Ground Zero.

This week, we commemorated the 50 year anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins that were an integral part of the civil disobedience phase of the civil rights movement. Many of the students that participated in those sit-ins were trained at the Highlander School in Tennessee near Coal River Mountain tree-sitter Eric Blevin’s home.

As we ponder our next steps in the climate action and climate justice movements, we need to remember that this sort of large scale change requires sacrifice. With sacrifice, we need support. The civil rights activists risked their lives fighting segregation in the south. Many spent long periods of time in jail. During the Greensboro sit-ins, violence and harassment of protesters often escalated.

So far, the coal industry and their political allies, inside and out of Appalachia, are fighting the anti-mountaintop removal legally (both criminal and civil), often resulting in jail time and fines. There have also been threats and acts of violence directed at community members, organizers and activists in the coalfields. Eric and his fellow tree-sitters sat in 60 ft. trees for over a week while coal company employees harassed and abused them with constant noise, bright lights, tree shaking and threats of spraying them down with fire hoses. At the end of their tree-sit, Massey Energy has sued them for $75,000 and filed for a temporary restraining order in federal court.

To me, there are a number of obvious parallels to the Greensboro sit-ins and the Coal River tree-sits. Like our predecessors in the civil rights movement, the anti-mountaintop removal movement has drawn a line in the sand to end the “pervasive and irreversible impacts” of mountaintop removal and can’t give up.

Here’s Eric’s letter from a jail in southern West Virginia:

This is in response to the article in Saturday’s paper about Amber and I coming down from our tree sit and the letter about paid, outsider environmentalists who support the EPA, which I read while sitting in the Southern Regional Jail.

I am not an outsider. I am an Appalachian. Virginia-based Massey Energy is an outsider. The people who live in the mountains and work on the mine sites work harder, longer hours and make less money than those who work at Massey’s headquarters in Richmond. All the people here should control how the land around them is used and they should profit the most from it, not people in an office far away who aren’t as impacted by the decisions they make that destroy our mountains.

I and most activists I know are not paid. We are volunteers. Groups like Mountain Justice and Climate Ground Zero help raise funds for legal fees and action supplies, but don’t pay people. Their money is donated by people who support the abolishment of mountaintop removal. They have budgets of just a few thousand dollars each. Massey has billions of dollars. They recently laid off workers and raised CEO Don Blankenship’s salary.

I and most activists I know do not support the EPA. They are not doing enough to stop the destruction of our mountains. While they review permits, the explosions are still going off in our home every day.

I climbed a tree to defend God’s beautiful divine creations: the people who live below the Brushy Fork sludge impoundment being threatened with imminent death by the blasting, the plants and animals being slaughtered, Coal River Mountain, our air and our water. The actions of my friends and I were nonviolent and defensive. Massey’s actions are violent and offensive. They blasted air horns and sirens at us in the trees almost nonstop for days on end. They have said that 998 people will die if the dam there fails, yet they set off explosives near it. It is an unlined earthen dam and those fail, like the one operated by TVA near my home in Tennessee that spilled 1.6 billion gallons of coal waste just over a year ago, practically destroying an entire community. Brush Fork holds back over 7 billion gallons, for now. It may not hold it back much longer if we don’t stop the blasting.

Eric Blevins

King Coal’s Top Lobbyist to Meet Obama

Scott Parkin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:49:56 +0000

The coal industry's top lobbyist, WV Gov. Joe Manchin, is scheduled to meet President Obama and Vice-President Biden with ten other governors on the issue of energy.

Manchin has been a major obstacle in ending mountaintop removal (MTR) in West Virginia and rails publicly against Obama's Environmental Protection Agency taking stronger action to regulate and ban the practice.

Manchin's fortunes are tied directly to King Coal. He has stated publicly that West Virginia is an extraction state. Just this week, he remarked "just cutting out coal is not feasible, it's not going to happen."

As opposition to mountaintop removal grows locally, regionally and nationally, the backlash will escalate. Violence and tension run rampant in the coalfields. Coal front groups lobby and run ads promoting coal to politicians and the general public. And of course they are deploying their biggest assets, WV Gov. Joe Manchin, to take their message to the highest levels. Manchin is currently vice-chair of the National Governor's Association, and is scheduled to become chairman in July.

To counter the pressure of big money, lobbyists and compromised politicians, we need to grow our movements and push the envelope with tactics and strategies that stop the destruction as well as nationalize the issue.

King Coal Sues Coal River MountainTree-Sitters in Federal Court

Scott Parkin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:50:30 +0000

The nine day Coal River Mountain tree-sit that ended on Friday has entered a new phase. Mining giant Massey Energy has filed for a temporary restraining order (TRO) in federal court and sued five activists that were part of the action for $75,000 in damages. Ken Ward from the WV Gazette posted the opinion here.

For the past year, Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice activists have utilized direct action tactics on Massey and other mining company property to stop the destruction of Appalachia’s mountains. Massey has frequently responded to actions in court seeking financial damages and with restraining orders.

Activists will most likely be undeterred by Massey’s legal actions.

Please donate to support the ongoing legal battles here.

Nine-Day Tree Sit Ends at Coal River Mountain

Scott Parkin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:36:38 +0000

After enduring over a week of ice and rain, mind-numbing noise abuse and harassment by Massey security, Eric and Amber came down today. The Climate Ground Zero tree sitters vowed that the fight to save Coal River Mountain and stop mountaintop removal is far from over.

Yesterday after meeting with coalfield activists, WV Gov. Joe issued a moratorium on Massey’s use of sound machines and asked the WV state police and Raleigh County prosecutors to investigate whether Massey was endangering the sitters lives with their noise abuse.

Nine-Day Tree Sit Ends, Sitters Vow Not Over Until Blasting Stops
January 29, 2010

PETTUS, WVa—After blocking Massey Energy’s operations on the Bee Tree Permit for nine days, Amber Nitchman, 19, and Eric Blevins, 28 descended from their respective trees. They had occupied the two oak trees—originally accompanied by a third tree sitter, David Aaron Smith, 23—to protest mountaintop removal and the blasting of Coal River Mountain. Upon descent, they were immediately arrested by West Virginia State Troopers. The sitters’ decision to leave the trees was made in light of the recent drop in temperature.

After a week of Massey security harassing the sitters with deafening sirens and air horns, a call-in pressure campaign was launched by Climate Ground Zero, Mountain Justice and other anti-mountaintop removal groups. The receipt of hundreds of calls from around the country led to an emergency meeting with Climate Ground Zero volunteers, the Raleigh County prosecutor and Governor Manchin. The meeting resulted in the moratorium and a call for an investigation of the abuse. The tree sit represents Climate Ground Zero’s most sustained intervention in mountaintop removal mining operations since its campaign of nonviolent direct action began last February. Volunteers know that the fight is far from over and expect work to commence on the Bee Tree site immediately. However, they see this tree sit as a victory. “It halted blasting for nine days. I think they’ve wildly succeeded with their goals,” said Climate Ground Zero volunteer Mike Bowersox. In a final communication from her perch, Nitchman captured the group’s resolve. “Its not over until the blasting is stopped,” she said.

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