CHARLESTON, W.Va. - One of the world's largest financial institutions said this week it will phase out lending money to coal operators that use mountaintop removal mining.
Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. said it will stop financing companies that produce more than half of their coal from mountaintop removal.
"We feel the practice has a significant impact on the environment and on communities," said company spokesman Ernesto Anguilla.
Bank of America has provided financing for several major surface mine operators, including Massey Energy and International Coal Group, according to corporate financial disclosures.
Bank officials announced their decision the same week that the Bush administration moved to finalize a rule that removes one potentially key legal hurdle for mountaintop removal.
The Bank of America move, announced Wednesday, was months in the making, and the result of lobbying by local citizen groups with the help of national organizations such as the Rainforest Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Rainforest Action has sponsored protests outside banking operations across the country, and the NRDC took banking executives on a flyover to see West Virginia mining operations from the air.
"This is a testament to the hard work of Appalachian communities and anti-coal activists across the country, whose collective pressure left Bank of America with little choice but to abandon its support for this barbaric form of resource extraction," said Rebecca Tarbotton, director of Rainforest Action's Global Finance Campaign, which since October 2007 has pressed Bank of America to cease financing of mountaintop removal mining and coal-fired power plants.
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As for BoA's business decision, it will be up to their shareholders to let them know if that's a bad decision or not. BoA is in the business of making money, but they can also choose to make their money in some ways and not others. They may have looked at the finances and decided that there are better risks than loaning money to MTR mines that may be sued out of existence, or are bad publicity for their banking operation, or for any of a number of reasons that make good business sense that nobody on this board realizes.
In other words, maybe they've discovered that financing MTR operations is bad business or a big risk.
I didn't say we should shut down what we have immediately. I said we should not build any more coal-fired power plants. Doing so only contributes to the problem. Scrubbers do not rid coal from CO2 emissions, which we're hoping will be declared a pollutant soon, and regulated by the EPA.
Water still moves through these intermittent streams. Life does exist there, and these areas can be cornerstones of the larger ecosystem. Burying them under millions of cubic feet of rubble destroys this, and often leads to water quality problems downstream. Consider that toxics such as selenium, locked up in coal but exposed to water after the seam is cut wind up in the fill, and eventually in the water.
The human toll is another story entirely. Knowing the problems of coal in general, we should be preparing for a transition away from it, starting with MTR.
I brought God into it because many enviromentalists use that approach to back up their cause. Just saying it works both ways in most any argument.
Yes we need to look to the future for new energy sources. Until those sources are put into production we can't shut down what we have.
Just like the drilling off shore. Wouldn't be productive for ten years. What do the Dems want us to do. Wait til we're out of oil and then start drilling.
Scrubbers on emission systems installed at power plants have made coal as clean if not cleaner than other fossil fuels.
The "streams" involved are mostly creases and crevices in hill side. Dry until it rains. Those "streams" are replaced in the reclaimation process. More often than not it improves situations downstream.
Freshly reclaimed sites do have top soil problems. But a few years of grass and trees, the soil slowly returns. There are older reclaimed sites where if you didn't know there had been an operation there you wouldn't know it
God doesn't have anything to do with it. Trying to justify the use of mineral known to be harmful because you believe your deity of choice must have put it there is just silly. I don't need to give you a lesson as to why the coal is there and how it formed millions of years ago, do I? We don't have to burn it just because it's there.
We don't hear much about reclamation because there are very few actual success stories. There are a few showpiece sites, but still, any manmade reclamation effort doesn't address the problems with valley fills blocking streams and the loss of topsoil (nothing substantial grows there).