From a previous article:

To the left is the ? technology ? of mountaintop mining. Dynamite. Really?

Coal mining is a messy business. In parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, mining companies often get at underground coal seams by blowing up the tops of mountains — a process known as mountaintop removal mining. Once that’s done, they’ll dump the debris into the valleys below, which can contaminate streams and waterways with toxic heavy metals.

Appalachian Voices, (click here) an environmental group, estimates that coal companies have buried over 2,000 miles of streams in the region through mountaintop removal mining since the 1990s. And there’s growing evidence that when mining debris and waste gets into water supplies, the toxic metals can have dire health impacts for the people and mostly rural communities living nearby.

The toxic metals found in streams is not necessarily from the coal so much as the land being dumped into the water. The practice is ridiculous in the year 2017. Coal mining was something my grandfathers did for work. The mining technologies has replaced the 'human being' as coal miners. There are a few ten thousand miners left in the USA as technology replaced them.

These companies never bothered to realize the future of energy would look different, instead, they paid off politicians to prevent the future from arriving. The most hideous example of that is Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He is a US Senator from Kentucky. He touts he is keeping the coal mining industry alive for those patriot coal miners in his state. Lies, lies and more lies.

...As anyone living in the coalfields knows, (click here) coal production and employment in eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia follow boom and bust cycles. But starting in the early 1980s, the close link between production and employment changed as mechanization and explosives replaced mine workers. Since then, coal production in Kentucky has declined by about 19% while employment has dropped by 62%....

By allowing toxic and radioactive pollution in our streams, does anyone believe that will bring back jobs? No. The "Age of the Coal Machine" is well underway and there is no future in allowing dumping all over again.

"Kentucky Quarterly Coal Report," (click here) the dinosaur is taking it's last breaths. The increase in Western Kentucky production is a whopping 0.2 percent. OMG. There is no future for this form of energy.