We’ve just learned that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has sent a very legalistic letter to Marfork Coal Company, the Massey Energy subsidiary that is blasting on Coal River Mountain. The letter follows up on an EPA site visit to Coal River Mountain earlier this month, and notes with concern that the company appears to be operating without the required permit under the Clean Water Act. It calls for Marfork to answer a series of tough questions about its operations within 30 days.

Whether this will be enough for Marfork/Massey to stop the blasting and preserve Coal River Mountain is not yet clear, but what is clear is that the EPA is using its legal and regulatory authority to intervene in the operation of the Bee Tree mine on Coal River Mountain, which is just what we’ve been calling on them to do.

Good news! We’ll post more updates as we learn more.

In both, Klein talks about how anti-establishment direct action movement are preparing to “throw down” around climate change and climate justice. And that political winds are shifting towards more progressive positions on the role of capitalism, which values short-term profit and perpetual growth above all else.

Revisiting No Logo, Ten Years Later

Published in the Huffington Post
By Naomi Klein – November 16th, 2009

Almost ten years ago, on November 30, 1999, tens of thousands of protestors shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. The activists were not against trade or globalization, despite the many misleading claims in the mainstream media. They were against a system of deregulated capitalism that was spreading around the world.

At the time of the Seattle protests, my first book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, was at the printer. The book looked as the war being waged on public space by a new breed of corporate “superbrands,” as well as the first signs of a fight back against corporate power. It was good timing for an author-activist: I had the rare privilege of watching my book become useful to a movement I believed could change the world. More here…..

Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up

Published in the Nation
By Naomi Klein – November 12th, 2009

The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit. It’s set to come out ten years after a historic coalition of activists shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the spark that ignited a global anti-corporate movement.

The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle, but when I spoke to David Solnit, the direct-action guru who helped engineer the shutdown, I found him less interested in reminiscing about 1999 than in talking about the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen and the “climate justice” actions he is helping to organize across the United States on November 30. “This is definitely a Seattle-type moment,” Solnit told me. “People are ready to throw down.” More here…..

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Waterkeeper Alliance
50 S. Buckhout St. #302
Irvington, NY 10533

November 18, 2009

Mr. Jamie Dimon
Chairman and CEO
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
270 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10017

Dear Mr. Dimon:

I am writing to request a meeting with you to discuss JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s support of the coal industry, particularly mountaintop removal coal mining. Mountaintop removal in Appalachia is the worst environmental tragedy in American history and it is being financed by your bank. On the surface it appears that Chase has a commitment to environmental and social issues, but your company’s decision to lend significant amounts of money to Massey and other mountaintop removal coal companies belies that commitment.

My father visited Appalachia in 1966 and was horrified by the strip mining activities there, which pale in comparison to today’s mountaintop removal coal mining. He found then, as now, that Appalachia, with our nation’s richest natural resources, was home to America’s poorest populations, its worst education system, and its highest illiteracy and unemployment rates. In 1966, 46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Today, mechanization like mountaintop removal coal mining has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000 and the coal industry provides only two percent of the jobs in Central Appalachia: Wal-Mart employs more people than the coal industry does in West Virginia.

In recent years, West Virginia’s coal barons, many with financing from JPMorgan Chase, have flattened one million acres of pristine mountain landscapes, cut down 500 of the largest mountains in the state and ruined 2,000 miles of rivers and streams. If you continue to finance them they will soon have flattened an area the size of Delaware. Now Massey Coal, with your financial support, has threatened Coal River Mountain. Coal River Mountain is the last intact mountain in the Coal River Mountain range, and the tallest peak to be destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. Massey Energy, the largest mountaintop removal coal mining company in the nation, has moved heavy equipment up Coal River Mountain and begun barbarically blasting away at the ancient mountain. These actions are endangering the lives of citizens by blasting precipitously close to the largest coal sludge impoundment in the nation.

You can stop this Appalachian apocalypse before we lose Coal River Mountain forever. JPMorgan Chase has underwritten nearly $1 billion in recent financing to Massey Energy. You can leverage JPMorgan Chase’s existing relationship with this company by calling on Massey to stop destroying Coal River Mountain. More fundamentally, though, JPMorgan Chase must stop funding mountaintop removal coal mining and companies like Massey Energy, who show little regard for the environmental and social impacts of their actions.

Coal is not a good investment in Appalachia or our future. Investing in conservation creates 3.8 as many jobs as coal, and mass transit investments create more than 6 times as many jobs. Investing in renewable energy like wind and solar power creates at least 2.8 times the number of jobs as coal for the same investment. Coal River Mountain, before Massey began destroying it last month, had enough wind power potential to provide electricity for more than 150,000 homes, and would have pumped $20 million into the local economy each year of construction and $2 million a year after construction, along with stable, safe long-term jobs and long-term tax revenue for the state of West Virginia. Investing in a clean energy economy provides jobs and a sustainable, diversified local economy that mountaintop removal coal mining simply cannot.

I welcome the opportunity to sit down with you to discuss these issues.

Respectfully,

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
President

Yesterday Rainforest Action Network’s executive director Mike Brune sent a letter to Chevron’s incoming CEO John Watson and made him an offer.  Come with us to Ecuador.  To our knowledge no senior Chevron official has toured Texaco’s former oil installations in Ecuador’s rainforest.  [Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, and with it, legal responsibility for the company’s massive oil contamination].

The offer is a genuine invitation to Mr. Watson to see for himself how his company’s actions continue to harm thousands of people.  We ask ourselves: How can John Watson deny what he hasn’t seen?

He knows that there is a pending lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuadorian court brought by affected communities for estimated damages as high as $27 billion. He also knows that the ruling is expected sometime next spring.

And Chevron has actually vowed publicly: “we’re not paying and we’re going to fight this for years if not decades into the future.”

It would be a big step for John Watson and Chevron to accept responsibility. We recognize that.

But we also recognize that Chevron doesn’t like to be burdened by the facts.

The fact is that families in Ecuador are poisoning themselves every time they drink oil-tainted water from the river – because they have no other source of potable water. The fact is that children are born with neurological disorders, women are having miscarriages and people are dying of cancer at rates previously unseen in the region.

And the fact is that the longer Chevron cooks up alleged corruption scandals, the more they produce pseudo news reports casting themselves as the victim of a corrupt political system in Ecuador, and the more counter lawsuits they file, the longer the people in Ecuador hurt.

So our offer to Mr. Watson to come to Ecuador is also an opportunity – an opportunity to use his new leadership role and resolve this crisis once and for all.

Mr. Watson – how will you respond?

As climate justice movements turn towards the floundering talks in Denmark, people in Appalachia are in the fight of their lives to save Coal River Mountain and end mountaintop removal. On Dec. 7, we’ll be rallying and protesting at the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) demanding that they stop the blasting on Coal River Mountain.

For almost a year Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice have joined coalfield residents in taking direct action to stop mountaintop removal operations in southern West Virginia (with over a 100 arrests) because agencies like the WV DEP refuse to do their jobs.

A few weeks ago, 13 activists in Washington D.C. staged a sit-in at the EPA headquarters demanding that they take action to stop the blasting on Coal River Mountain. On the same day in almost 30 cities, anti-mountaintop removal activists took action calling on the EPA and other entities to end mountaintop removal.

So please check your calendar and ask yourself: if you aren’t going to be Copenhagen, why won’t you be in West Virginia on Dec. 7.

CALL TO ACTION: Save Coal River Mountain Rally and Protest

West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection; Charleston WV; Dec 7 at 2pm

When:Monday, December 7, 2009; 2:00pm
Where: WV Dept. of Environmental Protection HQ– 601 57th Street SE, Charleston, WV
Contact:savecoalriver@gmail.com; www.savecoalrivermountain.org

Register Here on Facebook

In their insatiable quest to maximize profits Massey Energy has initiated mountaintop removal coal extraction operations on Coal River Mountain. The blasting has begun as the rumble of explosives and plumes of smoke coming from the mountain are being seen and heard.

The blasting of Coal River Mountain sets up a catastrophic scenario: Explosives are being detonated near the Brushy Fork coal sludge dam, a weakened class “C” dam that hovers above valley communities like a dark cloud. The Class “C” label is given to dams that in the event of failure, lives will be lost. At least 900 lives are expected to be buried in coal sludge if Brushy Fork should fail.

Many small communities lie in the very narrow Coal River Valley, tucked in between Cherry Pond Mountain and Coal River Mountain. Cherry Pond Mountain is already being bombed and blasted by Massey until it now looks more like a war zone than a once beautiful and plentiful Appalachian mountain. Massey’s blasting and bombing of Coal River Mountain will trap these communities in the middle, leaving them helpless to deal with silica dust, fly-rock, poisoned water, floods and mudslides. This is wrong!

Coal River Mountain is the last great mountain in the Coal River Valley. Destroying it not only places lives in danger, but it will also devastate a great opportunity for real jobs from wind energy and underground mining, long-term tax revenues, and clean energy.

There is no excuse for mountaintop removal. It is the perfect example of corporate greed placing profit before humanity.

We have lobbied. We have written letters to Congress, the Federal EPA, The Federal Office of Surface Mining, The Department of Interior, our state representatives and state agencies, all to no avail. Abandoned by our government we are left for sacrifice, trapped in this very narrow valley between two life-threatening mountaintop removal operations. We have now reached a true state of emergency in the Coal River Valley.

Government agencies are created with the purpose of protecting the people’s interest. When a government agency becomes one that facilitates corporate interest, the people are not well served. Such has happened with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. This agency’s inaction has made it very clear that it has no intention of performing its mandated duties, operating instead as a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate coal.

It is now time for citizens to intervene. On December 7, 2009 Coal River Valley residents and friends from across America will converge on the WV Department of Environmental Protection to demand that they suspend and revoke Massey’s permits to blast and destroy Coal River Mountain.

This is the line in the sand. This is a call to action. We call upon all good people to come join us on Dec. 7th. We call upon all who stand for human rights and people’s rights over that of corporate greed to come join us on Dec. 7th. We call upon those that are tired and fed up with government agencies that place corporate interest above that of The People, come join us on December the 7th.

IT’S TIME TO STOP THE INSANITY

When: December 7th. 2pm
Where: West Virginian Department of Environmental Protection; DEP Headquarters – 601 57th Street SE, Charleston, WV
Contact: savecoalriver@gmail.com; savecoalrivermountain.org
Directions: From I-77 North or South / I-64 East or West: Exit Maccorkle Ave. West, (Exit 95); Left on 57th. St ( Appx. 1/3rd mile from exit) Building is on right as soon as you turn onto 57th st.

Today, on the way to a meeting with the local NGO Elang, I passed villagers from the Kampar Peninsula, a carbon-rich and biodiverse ecoystem that is under attack by Sinar Mas’ oil palm operations and their timber division Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), on a hunger strike.

In front of the provincial parliament building, a group of men and women from the village of Kijang Kejo have set up a plastic tarp and banner, announcing to Riau’s elected officials that they will not eat until the oil palm plantation PT Arindo Tri Sejahtera, who stole their land and then paid thugs to kill three of their family members, is brought to justice.

10 days into their hunger strike, the villagers are pale and weak, sleeping while motor bikes and buses fly by them on the road. They told me they have not been able to meet with any members of the provincial government, and were not sure how much longer they could last without food.

The group that owns this particular plantation, Surya Dumai, might be on the nastier end of the scale of dirty, dangerous, and destructive oil palm and timber companies, but this is how the resource extraction game is played here in Riau, Sumatra; buy the military, government, and media and trample any local people that dare to stand up for their rights.

APP and Sinar Mas have been shown to violate Indonesian law and human rights, but with the authorities in their pocket, it is us, the consumers of timber and palm oil, that must demand  producers respect forests and the people who inhabit them.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

Exhausted from the canoe rides, bad roads, the concrete maze of Jakarta, and the foreign environment of a Kuala Lumpor convention hall, I found Pak Jamaluddin on the second day of the RSPO outside, sitting cross legged on the sidewalk. He waved me over, and I sat with him. He leaned over to me as he whispered: “It is over. Our forest is gone. Duta Palma has flattened the last of it. We are finished.”

A few months before, I visited with Pak Jamaluddin in his village of Semunying Jaya. Deep in the interior of Borneo, his village had become a hotspot of rainforest destruction and human rights abuse at the hands of the palm oil producer Duta Palma.

A Dayak community, Semunying Jaya’s residents had survived for centuries hunting forest pigs and gathering valuable honey, resins, and rattan, which they sold to Malaysian traders that would visit their village.

When I arrived in July, Pak Jamalludin was outspoken, angry, and in the midst of a brutal struggle to hold on to the last of his community’s traditional forest. Almost all of the rainforest surrounding Semunying Jaya had been flattened and burned by Duta Palma. Targeted by the company, Pak Jamalludin was jailed for his efforts to present his community’s case to the company and government. But the remaining rainforest gave Pak Jamaluddin hope, and he tirelessly tried to save it. Motivated by his struggle, I wrote a case study about his community’s case and shot a short film.

Pak Jamaluddin had traveled to the annual meeting of the RSPO in Kuala Lumpor to meet with Duta Palma, and ask for them to respect his community’s right to Free, Informed, and Prior consent, and compensate Semunying Jaya for the destruction of their culture, livelihood, and future. But, reflective of their complete disrespect of RSPO member responsibilities,  Duta Palma did not send a representative to the meeting.

Sitting on the cement, with no Duta Palma representatives at the RSPO and the last of his community’s forest destroyed for oil palm, Pak Jamaluddin did not have any struggle left in him.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

According to Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners LLC, in a Bloomberg piece this morning: “The future of mountaintop mining looks bleak.”

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in yet another step to do the right thing to protect the environment from MTR have told mining companies that they must safeguard the mayfly, one of the oldest winged insects.

“Applicants for new mines will have to show they wouldn’t cause pollution deadly to the aquatic bug. That puts at risk about $3 billion a year in coal that operators led by Massey and International Coal Group Inc. extract in Appalachia…
Without new permits, Massey Energy will rely more on conventional tunneling, CEO Don Blankenship said on an Oct. 28 conference call with analysts. The impact of permit restrictions may be felt beginning in 2011.

“We always worry about what EPA and others will do,” he said.

More than 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) of creeks and streams have been buried by mining debris in Appalachia from surface-mining techniques, including mountaintop removal, the EPA said in 2005.

Mining’s threat to mayflies, which hatch in streams and grow to a quarter-inch to more than an inch (2.5 centimeters) long, has been documented since the late 1990s. This year, the EPA under President Barack Obama for the first time held up new permits on the grounds of inadequate safeguards for the insect.”

While I had hoped that the contamination of precious drinking water, the demolition of historic mountains and the threat to community health from MTR would be enough cause to abolish the practice, at this point we are running against the dynamite fuse and every step counts. As RAN’s Dana Clarke put it: “The mayfly is a key indicator species and an entire order of them is disappearing, which from a biological/extinction point of view, is a very big deal in terms of what that says about the impacts on the ecosystem.” Let’s hope that in this case the mayfly is also an indicator that we will soon see MTR become extinct.

On Tuesday, RAN activists disrupted a speech by Gordon Nixon, president of RBC at Ryerson University. Nixon was speaking as part of a business conference on Canadian Manufacturing. RAN activists interrupted the speech four times with banners and comments, as well as once during the question and answer period.

During the event, Nixon admitted that tar sands projects were the largest polluters in Canada, though declined to take responsibility for financing the projects. Instead, Nixon maintained RBC was not an oil company.

“Nixon admits that tar sands projects are the largest polluters in Canada, yet he seemingly fails to understand that these projects cannot go forward without financing. Pretty disturbing given he is the president of Canada’s largest bank” noted RAN activist Maryam Adrangi.

Tar sands oil has serious environmental, climate and human health impacts. Described by the United Nations Environment Program as one of the world’s top “environmental hot spots,” global warming pollution from tar sands production is three times that of conventional crude oil. Unconventional tar sands oil is derived from lower-grade, difficult and expensive-to-access raw materials, which have enormous consequences for air quality, drinking water and the climate. In addition, as this oil spills into the U.S., refinery communities face air and water pollution from tar sands oil, which contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel and five times more lead than conventional oil.

The action continues a series of actions performed by RAN Toronto who are lobbying RBC to divest funding from tar sands projects. RBC is the world’s largest financier of tar sands projects and has invested over $20 billion USD over the last 5 years. To extract tar sands oil requires churning up huge tracts of ancient boreal forest and polluting so much clean water with poisonous chemicals that the resulting waste ponds can be seen from outer space. The health impacts to Alberta’s First Nation communities are severe, with cancer rates up in some communities as much as 400 times its usual frequency.

About two weeks ago, on a Nation Day of Action to End Mountaintop Removal, dozens of actions happened around the country targeting the EPA, coal financier JP Morgan Chase and other political,utility and regulatory pillars of mountaintop removal.

Last week (and continuing into this week), over 63,000 people have taken online action calling the signatories of last June’s Memo of Understanding on the regulation of mountaintop removal to stop the blasting at Coal River Mountain.

NOW while we have been advocating, protesting, sitting-in, calling and emailing to stop the blasting on Coal River Mountain, it turns out the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection actually took some steps and did their job. Last week, they cited Massey Energy for using TOO large a load of explosives on Coal River Mountain.

Ken Ward reports: “But last week, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection quietly cited Massey subsidiary Marfork Coal Co. for using too large a load of explosives in its blasting operations at Bee Tree.”

Ummm Bee Tree is the site next to the Brushy Fork impoundment, is it not? And that impoundment holds back billions of gallons of coal sludge. If the dam were to burst, it would flood the Coal River Valley and estimated deaths are as high as 1000 (Massey’s own numbers). Now we find out that Massey is using too large of explosive loads. It’s criminal and immoral what’s going on there (and throughout the rest of Appalachia).

If nothing, this is a sign we need more action on this issue.