Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

the carbon connection S 113
If this were not enough, the evidence now shows a strong
likelihood that sea levels will rise more rapidly than previously
thought. The Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change in 2001 predicted less than a onemeter
rise in the 21st century, but more recent estimates put this
fi gure higher as a result of accelerated melting of the Greenland
ice sheet and polar ice along with the thermal expansion of water
(Overpeck et al., 2006; U.S. Climate Change Science Program,
2009; Smith et al., 2009; McKie, 2009).
Nine hundred miles to the northeast of New Orleans as a sober
crow would fl y it, Massey Energy, Arch Coal, and other companies
are busy leveling the mountains of Appalachia to get at the
upper seams of coal in what was one of the least disturbed forests
in the United States and one of the most diverse ecosystems anywhere.
Throughout the coalfi elds of West Virginia and Kentucky
they have already leveled 500 mountains, give or take a few, across
1.5 million acres, and they intend to destroy a good bit more.
These companies wash coal on-site, leaving billions of gallons of
a dilute asphalt-like gruel laced with toxic fl occulants and heavy
metals. An estimated 225 such containment ponds are located over
abandoned mines in West Virginia, held back from the communities
below only by earthen dams prone to failure either by collapse
or by draining down through the old mine tunnels that honeycomb
the region. One of these dams failed on October 11, 2000,
in Martin County, Kentucky, when the slurry broke through a
thin layer of shale into mines and then into hundreds of miles of
streams and rivers. The result was the permanent destruction of
waterways and of the property values of people living in the wake
of an ongoing and mostly ignored disaster. This is typical of the
coalfi elds. They are a third-world colony within the United States,
a national sacrifi ce zone in which fairness, decency, and the rights
of old and young alike are discarded as unnecessary on behalf of
the national obsession with “cheap” electricity.
Jack Spadaro is a heavyset, rumpled, and bearded man with the
knack for describing outrageous things calmly and with clinical