OCU,
Lets start by cutting subsidies to VA!
And making them responsible for health costs for their miners!
Scumbag Cantor should be ashamed...! clo
March 09, 2010
Does the Coal Industry Get Subsidies?
Hey Mr. Green,
An acquaintance of mine claims that there are no subsidies for the coal industry. Well?
--Bill in Landenberg, Pennsylvania
Puzzling out the subsidies to the coal business is as unnerving as edging through a dark mineshaft swarming with Velcro-winged bats. This is because a big chunk of the subsidies are not direct handouts, but packaged as tax credits, tax breaks, and other goodies too numerous to itemize here. The U.S. coal industry enjoyed subsidies of around $17 billion between 2002 and 2008, including tax credits for production of "nonconventional" fuels ($14.1 billion), tax breaks on coal royalties ($986 million), exploration, and development breaks ($342 million), according to a study by the Environmental Law Institute.
On top of this federal largesse, state and local governments coddle coal with hundreds of millions per year. The Kentucky state government’s net subsidy to coal is $115 million. Virginia grants tax credits of about $26 million to power plants just to burn Virginia coal, and doles out credits ranging from 40 cents to $2 per ton for another 20 million tons not burned by power plants. Bioregionalism at its finest.
Around $1.5 billion of the federal costs are associated with damages to miners’ health such as the notorious black lung disease. Thinking of the miners’ plight lands us smack in a morass of hidden subsidies as thick as the billion gallons of coal-ash sludge that poured into eastern Tennessee in 2008.
What is the true health and environmental cost when mining machines rip off mountaintops and chuck the rubble into streams? What was the cost of acid rain? What’s been the healthcare cost of 47 tons per year of mercury from burning coal that put 300,000 fetuses at risk for neurological damage each year? And how do you calculate the cost of coal’s 20 percent contribution to global-warming gases?
It doesn't end with this list.
http://sierraclub.typepad.com/mrgreen/2010/03/does-the-coal-industry-get-subsidies.html
DO SOMETHING!
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