My experience last Tuesday at the coal ash hearing in Louisville left me feeling more hopeful about the future of the environmental movement than I have felt about anything in the last two years. The press conference held in the Sierra Club’s action room launched the day in an inspirational manner. While my fellow students and I held signs near the podium in support of subtitle C and a clean energy future, hardened environmentalists, many of whom had experienced the effects of coal ash on human health first hand in their work, gave impassioned speeches in support of an EPA ruling that would lead to this substance being more stringently regulated. Upon arrival at the hearings, I had been fairly ambivalent about the topic, having not had any first hand experience with it. I was there more to learn about the Beyond Coal campaign and understand the process of an EPA hearing than to actually take part in the proceedings. Then I witnessed the press conference and met other young activists, from Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and other universities and heard about the hanging of the Greenpeace banner reading “EPA: People Not Polluters” that morning. The enthusiasm in these activists’ speeches and the overall sense of urgency that pervaded the proceedings soon had me wanting to testify myself. And that was before I had even heard what the other side was saying.
Later, we sat and listened to testimonies for a few hours while waiting for, and after, delivering our own. The pattern was very straightforward and yet quite absurd: someone whose livelihood was connected with coal ash, whether they were a professor at the University of Kentucky, the owner of a coal ash recycling firm, or an employee of a coal electricity company, would talk about the detrimental effect a classification of coal ash as “hazardous waste” would have on their industry, and how that classification was unjustified to begin with. Nearly every person who spoke against classification as “hazardous” at some point said that it was scientifically proven that coal ash was not dangerous to human health. Their testimonies were often passionate and heartfelt, and I sympathized with them because many honest, hardworking people truly will suffer economically if coal ash is ultimately classified as a hazardous waste material.
My sympathy for them, however, was more or less nullified when I heard dozens of testimonies, often immediately preceding or following those of coal ash industry members, in which stories and first hand accounts of serious health problems, from asthma to cancer, due to coal ash and scientific data listing the toxic substances (such as arsenic and lead) in the ash, were related. Clearly someone was twisting the data, and as painful as I know it will be for people in industries dependent upon coal ash to deal with, I can only hope that the EPA stands strong in their duty to protect citizens and the environment, and rules to classify coal ash under subtitle C, as a “hazardous waste,” so that the price of coal becomes more self-evident and we can begin to implement sources of power that don’t destroy us as we use them.
