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Health effects of coal mining
Negative and positive impacts of coal mining
Negative and positive impacts of coal mining
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Laura Jones MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL IN KENTUCKY 1
Stop Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in Kentucky!
Specific Purpose: To persuade my audience to take action against the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in Kentucky.
Thesis Statement: Mountaintop removal has a negative effect on the environment and there are steps we can take to stop it from happening in Kentucky.
Attention Step
Kentucky is a beautiful place full of mountains, streams, and trees. Kentucky is special to everyone in this room today because we have chosen to call it home. Today I want to tell you about something that is threatening the beauty of the place we call home. This threat is the process of extracting coal through mountaintop mining. This method of extraction threatens our health, water sources, plants, animals, and our mountain views. As Kentuckians, we have a duty to speak out against this barbaric method of coal extraction that is happening in our state. Together we can eliminate this threat and preserve Kentucky’s natural beauty for generations to come.
Now that you know a little about the subject of mountaintop mining and the devastation that it causes I would like to go into further detail about the process and the harmful effects.
Need Step
As a Kentucky resident, I understand that coal is much more than form of energy, for many it is a way of life. Kentucky is the third largest producer of coal in the United States, and for many families in Eastern Kentucky, the coal industry has provided stable employment for generations. I would like to make clear that I am not speaking out against coal mining in general; I am speaking out against one method of mining. Mountaintop removal mining is the most destructive form of coal extraction in existence...
... middle of paper ...
...health by mountaintop removal coal mining is irreversible and goes as far as to proclaim that the only sensible course of action is a permanent and immediate ban.
Coal companies have been destroying our mountains, polluting our water, and poisoning our communities for far too long.
Please, I urge you to follow the guidance of our best scientific research and the pleas of the residents across Appalachia who have suffered enough from the damage caused by mountaintop removal.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
Now that you know how easy it is to speak out against this problem that is effecting you state I would like to leave you with this page that lists the email addresses and other contact information for your state representatives.
Jaclyn.Farmer@ky.gov
Contact Governor Beshear
Mailing Address
700 Capitol Avenue, Suite 100
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
Regulations.gov
Epa.gov
The dark side of mining was brought to the fore when the Aberfan disaster hit the community. Mike Jenkins talked about how his son ‘ran forever’ unaware of the undetected ‘tumour’ that was lurking within the mountain. He describes the danger as a ‘tumour’ like that of a tumour in a body that is undetectable until it is too late and the danger cannot be averted. The other analogy with the tumour is that it is terminal and eventually will kill the patient.
Removal of the mountaintops causes environmental impacts from blasting. The blasting has caused rocks to be deposited into valleys on the hillsides, burying almost 2,000 miles of streams which feed the Mississippi River. Slurry, the residue which is used to clean the coal can wash into groundwater and may contain arsenic, lead, manganese, iron, sodium, strontium, and sulfate. A recent research study is beginning to link these environmental impacts to the grave health concerns in the Appalachian communities. During most of the Mountaintop removal mining’s history coal industries have been able to obtain permits easily to operate, but once under the Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) those permits now take more time to obtain. The permit process requires all applications to be reviewed before being given out to coal
This Paper will describe and analyze three articles pertaining to the ongoing debate for and against Glen Canyon Dam. Two of these articles were found in the 1999 edition of A Sense of Place, and the third was downloaded off a site on the Internet (http://www.glencanyon.net/club.htm). These articles wi...
Mountain Top Removal is an American tragedy, the process in which mining companies remove forests and topsoil then explode the mountain apart level by level to get to coal layer. It is estimated that the explosives are equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. A lot of the mining waste is discarded into valleys and streams; the water runoff is high in silt, ion, and sulfur compounds, which in turn pollute water downstream. Even with chemical treatments, vegetation has a hard time growing on the infertile and highly acidic soil. Mountain top removal occurs in eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwest Virginia, and east Tennessee. Virtually 1.2 million acres of land has been surface mined and more than 500 mountains have been ruined by mountaintop removal mining.
In the beginng of try to answer the ethical question of was mountaintop removal mining right or wrong for West Virginia, I decided to look at the environmental hazards first, exploring all the possible...
Instead of starting with ancient civilizations from the past, Diamond starts off by talking about present day Montana to give people an idea that there truly are many environmental problems affecting the world today. The Bitterroot Valley presents a microcosm of the environmental problems plaguing the rest of the United States: increasing population, immigration, increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of water, locally and seasonally poor air quality, toxic wastes, heightened
5). The high mortality rates are related to the environmental exposures of the coal mining along with other factors such as smoking, poverty, education, age, race and sex. “Higher lung cancer incidence and mortality in the Kentucky Appalachia is thought to result from higher smoking rates and correlates of poor socioeconomic conditions which limits the population access to health care” (Hendryx, O'Donnell, & Horn, 2008, p. 2). The population residing in coal mining areas, are exposed to contaminated water and air from the coal mining and there is a concern for respiratory illnesses related to the pollutants. The fumes or toxin released from the coal mine, this places the individual at a risk for respiratory issues such as emphysema, black lung, brown lung and
...y question, what good is a profession that destroys your home and your body? While environmental groups make the protection of people and the environment of the Appalachian region top priority, the mining companies focus on acting cheaply, not responsibly. And the policy government keeps their heads in the sand when it comes to this issue because they seek benefits of steady jobs and tax revenue of coal mining instead of seeking to guarantee clean water for Appalachians.
Coal has a very negative impact on the environment, one of the main impacts on the environment is the actual process of extracting the coal from the ground. The two ways that coal is mined, underground and surface, both have different effects on the environment. The first way that coal is mined is by digging tunnels and creating mineshafts underground and then removing the coal from th...
What comes to mind when you think of coal mining? If you're like me, coal mining means living in darkness and a cold hearted industry. Other words that come to mind are poverty and oppression. Coal mining is not a job that you dream about or get a degree for. People who are coal miners do not chose a life full of danger and repression, they get stuck with it. There are many dangers that come along with coal mining, not only for the workers, but for the environment. Coal mining and the coal industry have caused irreversible damage to our environment and has killed innocent miners.
Perhaps the most infamous American example of a coal mine fire is Centralia, a town in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania. Centralia was like any other coal town until one fateful day in 1962, when a heap of burning trash in a dump that doubled as a mine stripping pit quickly spread to other parts of the mine. After a few months of bureaucratic haggling, the local government finally agreed to drill to suffocate the fire, but it had spread faster than had been anticipated and could not easily be contained. In the next few years, subsequent efforts to quell the fire proved futile while it expanded beyond the confines of the coal mine to other areas underneath people’s residences in the town of Centralia.
In 2007, the world consumed 5.3 billion tons of coal, 31.1 billion tons of oil, 2.92 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, and 65,000 tons of uranium. All of these energy needs could have been met with only 6,600 tons of thorium, an abundant, slightly radioactive element found in the Earth’s crust.
Burning and mining coal for fuel is harmful to the environment but because how cheap and easy it is to find many people are unwilling to give it up as a fuel source. One of the problems with coal is that they are limited and are non-renewable so once it has been used we won’t be able to use it again.
In our days, mining for resources is inevitable. The resources we need are valuable in everyday life. Such resources mined up are coal, copper, gold, silver, and sand. However, mining poses environmental risks that can degrade the quality of soil and water, which can end up effecting us humans if not taken care of and many of the damages are irreversible once they have occurred.
Fuels like coal, and oil that once were a fine innovation in creating energy are now rapidly deleting and one day will be gone forever; energy that won’t last is often referred to as non-renewable energy. Besides being set up to fail and become inefficient in the future, fossil fuel energy is not clean to use and poses several environmental complications. Coal, for instance is “the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Coal combustion not only produces sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides that contribute to acid rain and snow, it generates millions of tons of particulates that cause asthma and other respiratory diseases.” As with all usage of fossil fuels, it creates enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, which contributes to greenhouse gas. Not only are fossil fuels dirty, they also pose as a security risk and unforgiving on the American wallet. (Saini)