… Senator Robert C. Byrd only seems to get better with age.  I first began to appreciate our Senior Senator when he was the lone voice in the wilderness urging President Bush, Congress and the American people to reconsider their headlong rush into a war in Iraq.  During that debate, he used his tremendous grasp of history to explain that we had never before gone to war in the absence of a clear and imminent threat to our nation.  America paid a heavy price for failing to heed Senator’s Byrd’s message.

Today Senator Byrd speaks truth to power about coal.  His theme: “The time has come to have an open and honest dialogue about coal’s future in West Virginia.”

  • Why aren’t we having that important dialogue?  Because politicians and industry are “scapegoating and stoking fear over the permitting process.”
  • Can the world live without coal?  ”No deliberate effort to do away with the coal industry could ever succeed in Washington because there is no available alternative energy supply that could immediately supplant the use of coal….”
  • What about mountaintop removal coal mining?  ”It is not a widespread method of mining, with its use confined to only three states.  Most members of Congress, like most Americans, oppose the practice, and we may not yet fully understand the effects of mountaintop removal mining on the health of our citizens.”
  • What about climate change?  ”To deny the mounting science of climate change is to stick our heads in the sand….”
  • What do we need to do?  ”West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it.”

West Virginia will pay a heavy price if it fails to heed Senator Byrd’s message.