Big stuff happening on the mountaintop removalfront, much of it coalescing today.
First, my dear friend Ashley Judd -- OK, we're not there yet but I have hope -- will be giving a speech that I helped arrange at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. A Kentucky native and ardent activist, she'll be lending her celebrity to shine a spotlight on the ills of the world's worst coal mining. You can watch the speech liveon C-SPAN at 12:30pm ET.
Also today, the Tennessee state legislature will be taking another crack at passing a bill to protect Rocky Top by banning mountaintop removal. Kudos to our local allies at LEAF for their relentless push to pass this important legislation. And check out these great editorial cartoons on the issue in the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Duke Energy is making news. The power company, one of the nation's biggest users of coal, is trying to gauge what it would cost to stop buying coal mined by the controversial practice of mountain coal removal. North Carolina is one of the nation's top users of mountaintop coal. About half the electricity used in the state comes from coal-burning power plants, and about half the coal for those plants comes from mountaintop blasting.
Duke, which sells electricity in five states and has 1.8 million customers in North Carolina, is asking its suppliers to estimate the cost of coal that doesn't include any mined by removing mountaintops. The utility is doing this as part of an internal review of its position on mountaintop removal in light of the Obama administration's intense focus on the controversial mining practice. Other power companies, such as American Electric Power, are also considering adopting environmental review standards for coal suppliers that could penalize mountaintop mining.
This positive development is one more example of how companies -- from banks to investment firms to utilities -- are beginning to accept that mountaintop removal is rogue mining that is responsible for unacceptable devastation throughout Appalachia.
This particular extreme form of fossil fuel extraction, as well as the the Gulf oil spill tragedywhich is exposing the the danger of our nation's dirty energy addiction, are compounded by the findings of a new studyfrom the International Energy Agency which reveals that total global subsidies to dirty fossil-fuel energy amount to $550 billion a year -- about 75 percent more than previously thought.
The only silver lining I can think of is that perhaps we've reached the tipping point when the overwhelming demand of the American people for clean energy will finally force our elected leaders to wake up and smell the destruction caused by our dirty energy dependence. Bring on clean energy!