Legislators Say No to Coal

Yesterday South Carolina legislators spoke out against coal. The issue was covered in a brief AP News story printed in The State. (A more in depth article appeared in the Augusta Chronicle):

A bill introduced by Republican Rep. Carl Gullick of Lake Wylie would ban coal-fired plants operated by state utilities from using coal from mountaintop mining.

In February, state health officials agreed to issue air quality permits to let state-owned utility Santee Cooper build two coal-fired generators at a Florence County site. The Southern Environmental Law Center has asked a special court to require the Department of Health and Environmental Control to reconsider that decision.

The Sierra Club says about half of South Carolina’s coal comes from mountaintop removal.

Read the full story here.

Mountain top removal is a method of coal mining that literally destroys mountains. Over 500 mountains and thousands of miles of rivers in Appalachia have been destroyed via this process. Learn more about this barbaric process (which our SC coal plants are implicated in) here. At the ILoveMountains website you can actually enter in your zip code and see your utility's connection to the destruction of our mountains.

The editors of the Greenville News thinks it matters. They editorialized on the bill today. Read the editorial here.