Regulations aren’t enough to protect environment

Thank you for your thoughtful column ["Our position on power plant has evolved with the evidence, Jan. 20"].

Delegate Terry Kilgore extols Dominion Power and Virginia Tech as pillars of environmental and social conscience, when both are models of corporate monsterhood, adept at assaulting communities and poisoning humans and the environment.

And he tells us that Dominion’s coal-burning power plant will have to be approved by regulators. If that weren’t so tragic, it would be hilarious.

A recent Associated Press article about Massey Coal Co. illustrates what we can expect from regulation. Remember it when Kilgore, Virginia Tech, the governor, the legislature, the Department of Environmental Quality or anyone else bleats that this Dominion corporate assault will be regulated to protect us and the environment. Our regulatory system was never intended to protect humans and the environment. Its purpose has always been to permit corporations to contaminate and degrade the environment and human communities. It’s working perfectly.

In West Virginia alone, mountaintop-removal coal mining has buried 2,000 miles of streams and destroyed more than a half-million acres of once-forested mountains. The surface and groundwater is contaminated with coal dust, heavy metals and toxic chemicals, and hundreds of coalfield communities are now ghost towns. And all this horror is the result of regulated corporate activity.

The Associated Press reported that Massey Coal knowingly "violated the federal Clean Water Act at least 4,500 times between January, 2000, and the end of 2006 by discharging mining waste and sediment – including hazardous metals – into hundreds of streams and waterways and failing to control spills of coal slurry during its mining operation." No mention of violations prior to 2000.

Massey Coal is a multi-billion dollar corporation for which a $20 million fine is a slap on the wrist. And remember: that fine is a tax deductible expense – it’s considered a cost of doing business. And no amount of money will ever uncover and clean up the thousands of miles of buried and contaminated Appalachian streams.

In essence, the issue of Wise County citizens versus Dominion Power Co. is not about a power plant. It’s about whether democracy exists in Wise County, the commonwealth and the nation. Who gets to decide what Wise County looks like, feels like, smells like and how safe it is – the citizens or a handful of corporate officers supported by the corporate-owned state? That’s the conversation that needs to happen in every municipality in Virginia and the nation.

Shireen Parsons
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
Christiansburg, Va.