The Economics of Mountaintop Mining

My mountaintop mining article came out today, and one of the commenters raised a valid and often-heard refrain:

I will start out by saying I'm not a fan of MTR. But you have to understand that the only industry that is here in Eastern Kentucky is that of coal. There simply isn't anything else here. These coal companys here, just as anywhere else, do as little as possible to get by to keep from destroying the environment. If they could get away with stripping and blasting everything, anywhere and everywhere, then dumping the waste right beside your back door and doing nothing to reclaim the land, believe me, they would. In the past, they would do just that. As I said before I am not for MTR, but I will not let my family starve, and somebody has to pay taxes around here so somebodys neighbors don't starve too.

The question, though, is whether mountaintop mining actually does put food on tables and taxes in the mail, or if it does the same thing to local economies as it does to the mountains.

As the *Christian Science Monitor *reported last year, 120,000
people once worked coal jobs in Appalachian mountains of West Virginia.
That number has dropped to 15,000. In eastern Kentucky, jobs have dwindled from 36,000 in 1979 to about 14,000 today -- and it sure isn't because we're using less coal than before. Appalachian mines are producing more coal than ever -- but mountaintop mining operations employ far fewer people than traditional shaft mining. It doesn't take many workers to run a few pieces of heavy machinery.

Now, this doesn't mean that old-fashioned shaft mines are pleasant places. Hauling rocks out of tunnels in the earth sounds awful to me.
But it beats blowing up the mountains.

Image: Vivian Stockman