Southerners claim to know all about resistance. After all, they resisted the incursion of a foreign empire in the War of Northern Aggression. All that racist Jim Crow stuff? Just good people resisting the federal government. Lynching? That was a defense of law, order, and white female chastity. The south had the best motives to close public schools rather than integrate them. Really! So when Kentucky State Representative Jim Gooch says that “secession is an option” for Kentucky to resist new mining regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, I’m sure he means it well. And he’s the Democrat here:
The Republican’s point person on energy and the environment in the Senate told me he can understand Gooch’s frustration. Sen Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, an eastern Kentucky oil company manager, said he shares concerns over EPA actions that have delayed permits — saying they are threatening coal industry jobs, and manufacturing jobs that depend on relatively cheap electricity from coal.
The feds should only be able to go so far into the state’s business, and they are going too far now, he said. (Emphasis mine)
Louisville Courier-Journal reporter James Bruggers has enough sense of irony to note the death toll of the Civil War. But the greater irony is in the Tenth Amendment argument. Kentucky is in the coal business, ergo the federal government has no business regulating mining in Kentucky — even though the water is being poisoned and a native Kentucky way of life destroyed.
That is Kentucky’s job, you see. A bipartisan consensus in Frankfort insists the federal government has no business in their business, despite the way federal law (appropriately named SMCRA, for Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act) doesn’t actually put the federal government in Kentucky’s business. Wiki:
Like most environmental statutes passed in the 1960s and 1970s, SMCRA uses a cooperative federalism approach under which states are expected to take the lead in regulation while the federal government oversees their efforts. Under SMCRA, the federal government can approve a program, which gives the state the authority to regulate mining operations, if the state demonstrates that it has a law that is at least as strict as SMCRA, and that they have a regulatory agency with the wherewithal to operate the program. Currently, most coal-mining states have approved programs. Those states issue their own permits, inspect their mines, and take enforcement action themselves when necessary.
So Kentucky actually is in charge of the strip-mining that is killing Kentucky, which it cannot stop because of coal jobs that kill Kentucky. Never mind that federal regulations have a 120-year history of making up for the inadequacies of state regulation; Kentucky should be free to do this because it’s constitutional and it has the word “jobs” in it. See how that works?
Mountaintop removal mining is only profitable because it takes just a couple of dozen men and some large machines to turn mountains into moonscape; when the coal is all extracted, there will be no jobs and no economy left in Appalachia. Don’t let anyone fool you — the region is already past peak production.
An entire industry once existed to convince us that tobacco smoke — another Kentucky product of note — was not killing us. Then as now, “jobs” was the rallying call and denial the order of the day. A coal-funded “movement” protects “jobs” already in decline: in Kentucky, all “Friends Of Coal” know that “coal keeps the lights on,” industry propagandists remind us we are “the Saudi Arabia of coal,” and in West Virginia Ted Nugent can perform on a stage provided by Don Blankenship.
Therein lies another irony. For a mountaintop removal site is lifeless moonscape, hardly the place to hunt any sort of game. No cable hunting show will ever be filmed where Big Coal has been. The “reclamation” in SMCRA is a cruel joke; natural streams and springs are destroyed, mining waste spoils the streams and valleys where the coal companies dump it, and the coal companies “reclaim” dead soil with spray-on grass seed.
Nugent is also typical of southern cultural resistance framed as armed resistance. His presence at the “Friends Of America” rally was a deliberately provocative and militant choice. Appalachia Rising, on the other hand, is a human rights movement using nonviolent resistance to end the destruction of a region. Many of the movement’s leaders are from Kentucky; their resistance is the more courageous, as they are armed only with truth and hope.
