“The challenges that face Appalachia are indeed great. To solve them, one must question why our “national interest” still lies in an “above all” energy policy. One must question how so much wealth has been extracted from the Appalachian coalfields while the communities there remain so poor. One must question why the largest consumers of fossil fuels are great militarized nation-states. One must question why such an ecological crisis is occurring. One must question the pervasive influence of the corporate monopoly on the people’s democracy. One must stand up for themselves, their community, their consensus and yes, even their biodiversity.

Today, these questions are being asked. Appalachia is rising.”

The busted tank is owned by Freedom Industries, which uses the chemical for coal processing. Some 300,000 people have been directly impacted by the disaster, forced to wait in long lines at fire stations to receive potable water. There’s been a constant run on stores for the precious resource as well.

This is a story to often told in Appalachia. The Massey Energy coal slurry spill in Martin County, Kentucky (where 306,000,000 gallons of toxic slurry hit the town) and the TVA coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee, are also part of the history of industrial disaster in the region. This history is wrought with class struggle, environmental degradation and corporatism. From the expulsion of Native Americans to the rise of King Coal, the Hawks Nest incident, the labor struggle, the Battle of Blair Mountain and the wholesale destruction of mountain ecosystems via Mountaintop Removal, Appalachia is on the front lines of the war with the politically connected.

The coalfields of Appalachia have long been home to impoverished people, overlooked by the affluent in the United States. Still, the “War on Poverty” has made its way into the Appalachian hills several times. Most famously, US president Lyndon Johnson singled out the region for his “Great Society” programs, and presidents 42, 43 and 44 have all tried to help the region as well. Instead of offering a new way forward, their programs further damage the area.

Much of the “War On Poverty” has been fought via economic engineering, centralizing the economies of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky (along with parts of Tennessee and Virginia) into the hands of extractive fossil resource industries — notably coal and natural gas. The mechanization of these industries, however, has reduced the labor force. Specialized labor moving to the region has caused short-term booms and long-term busts. Once an extractive resource is exploited and gone,  communities are left to deal with mono economies and irreversible ecological destruction.

The challenges that face Appalachia are indeed great. To solve them, one must question why our “national interest” still lies in an “above all” energy policy. One must question how so much wealth has been extracted from the Appalachian coalfields while the communities there remain so poor. One must question why the largest consumers of fossil fuels are great militarized nation-states. One must question why such an ecological crisis is occurring. One must question the pervasive influence of the corporate monopoly on the people’s democracy. One must stand up for themselves, their community, their consensus and yes, even their biodiversity.

Today, these questions are being asked. Appalachia is rising.

Over the years numerous citizen coalitions have formed. These groups are networking together to ban the exploitation of Appalachia. Groups such as Appalachian Voices, Mountain Justice, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy  (see: ilovemountains.org), Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and many others, have developed true grassroots movements across the region.  The Appalachian movement is building a sense of urgency around the plight of the weeping mountains, and the people who call them home. Movements work, the line has been drawn: The corporate state or its end — it really is that simple.

Which side are you on?

Well, maybe not. According to oil analyst Arthur Berman at Labyrinth Consulting Services, the Bekken shale is a classic example of a bubble economy. Shale oil extraction simply isn’t sustainable or self-financing. It requires enormous investor financing to get the wells producing. Returns per well quickly decline, so there’s no way to recoup that investment from production. The average one-year production drop-off from existing wells is 38%. Wells more than a few years old have very little output, and most current output is from the most recently drilled wells. The so-called “shale boom” requires not only large-scale financing up-front, but continued drilling just to keep the operation going.

Similarly,  Alberta tar sand oil requires massive taxpayer subsidies to be usable. The Keystone XL pipeline,  the main projected distribution route for oil from Alberta, is built on stolen land, seized by government through eminent domain, some of it in violation of Indian nations’ territorial claims. In Texas and Oklahoma, anti-Keystone protesters are blocking — with their own bodies — construction of this criminal project by oil companies in league with the government.

What’s more, tar sands pipelines are exempt from contributing to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. When the Enbridge Line 6B burst near Marshall, Michigan in 2010, polluting the Kalamazoo watershed with millions of gallons of tar sand sludge, the Trust Fund released money to help clean up the mess. But the company responsible never paid a penny into the fund. And oil companies’ liability for spills is capped at $75 million in any case.

Fossil fuel from deep offshore wells, shale and tar sands has one thing in common: It’s costly and difficult to extract, bottom-of-the-barrel stuff,  worth bothering with only because the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. There’s a technical term called EROEI — Energy Return on Energy Investment — referring to the number of units of energy it costs to extract a unit of usable energy from any given source. These new sources of oil all have very low energy returns on energy investment. It takes a lot of energy to get just a little more net usable energy at the end of the process.

That means it’s only profitable when it’s heavily subsidized by taxpayers, extracted from stolen land at government expense. And even then, the total increase in net energy output doesn’t equal the oil produced by all those legacy fields in places like Saudi Arabia and Texas that are near exhaustion.

America’s 20th century economy developed largely by adding more and more inputs of artificially cheap resources, guaranteed by the state, rather than by using resources more efficiently. The fossil fuel economy and everything dependent on it — mass production factories supplying distant markets, suburban sprawl, the car culture — was essentially a free rider on this artificial abundance created by the state. And now even the state is realizing that there are limits to its resources.

Meanwhile, a recent IMF study found that simply eliminating government subsidies to fossil fuels would reduce carbon emissions 13% worldwide. That’s not even counting subsidies to specific forms of energy consumption, like the U.S. civil aviation system and Interstate Highway System.

If climate change is a real problem — and I believe it is — it’s not something the government needs to fix. It’s something the government needs to stop causing.

If the military takes a greater interest in renewable energy than it previously did, this could lead to general improvements in renewable energy technology. Whatever marginal gains come from this will at some time be held up by military industrial apologists as something we should thank military spending for. By the same logic, we should thank insurgents for kindly burning fuel trucks and killing people.

The military takes tremendous amounts of wealth out of the productive economy. It costs a lot of money to operate remote bases securing those who make deals with U.S. authorities. That money could have instead been spent on renewable energy and environmental research.

A more prosperous society will in general spend more on environmental concerns. And the green advertising campaigns, annoyance of concentrated car exhaust, association of carbon emissions with climate change, health risks for those who live near power plants, and noise complaints regarding wind power suggest that there is significant interest in environmental improvement. But government takes resources that people could use to improve life and forces them to instead fund toxic military sites, uranium ammunition purchases, and widespread death and destruction. Not to mention government protections that keep wealthy polluters from paying for damage they cause.

Regardless of how you measure it, the U.S. military has been fighting in deserts for a while now. But apparently they are just getting around to thinking about solar power.

An organization laden with entrenched interests cannot change quickly unless the power brokers see something in it for themselves. If the organization forces people to fund it and bans competition, it will become massive and bureaucratic, sucking up resources from enterprises that actually create wealth. By claiming the right to exercise authoritarian power over other peoples’ lives it becomes a magnet for those who wish to benefit from ruling others and can afford to play the games.

A coercive organization that answers primarily to pressure from the top will attempt to manage change on behalf of the connected interests trying to secure profits through force, instead of allowing new ideas to be adopted as people need and desire. To re-tool society for health and freedom, it is essential to reduce our dependence on government.