EDITORIAL: Grandstanding on the mountains: State and national policymakers are more responsible than activists

Jun 22, 2009 (Charleston Daily Mail - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- MEE | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- LAST week, 14 people opposed to mountaintop mining trespassed onto Massey Energy prop-

erty in Boone County, scaled the boom of the dragline, and shut down the operation until they were arrested.

This "action" was designed to create publicity for their opposition to mountaintop mining, and they obviously were angling for the arrests that resulted.

There's nothing wrong with people being histrionic as long as they don't break the law. These people did.

Flyovers and emotional protests are easy.

The inconvenient truth is that the United States must have a realistic, rational, national energy policy. That is more demanding work.

Were national leaders to make energy policy on the basis of moral exhibitionism, the American people would wind up doing their laundry on washboards in the dark.

Coal provides half the electric power that Americans count on. Coal mining fuels almost 100 percent of the power West Virginians expect to get when they flip a switch.

Forty-two percent of the coal produced in West Virginia comes from surface mining, which affects only a small fraction of its total acreage.

The United States will remain dependent on coal for decades to come, because adequate replacement sources do not exist and may never exist. Americans would have to cover hundreds of thousands of square miles of land -- deserts, mountaintops, offshore areas -- with windmills and solar cells to generate even a fraction of the power that now comes from coal.

That energy would be far more expensive, too.

A coal-free future would do devastating damage to the American economy.

None of that matters to the zealous fringe, which is interested only in the great morphed-up bugaboo called "global warming."

Most of the anti-coal activists who hammed it up in Boone County were from places like North Carolina, Tennessee, Washington state, Ohio, Maine, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C.

They do not concern themselves with the realities West Virginians face. They are not responsible for whether their fellow Americans have the reliable, reasonably priced power they need to sustain a competitive economy.

Elected officials -- state and national -- are responsible for all that and more.

It's heavier lifting than grandstanding for television cameras, and should be taken more seriously.

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