I’m digging deep, and maybe even stepping on a few toes, but a Guardian report via ThinkProgress (or is it vice versa?) cites coal industry spokesman Joe Lucas as saying that mountaintop removal in Appalachia performs a civic function by creating flat earth.

Whoever scooped it hasn’t gotten nearly enough coverage, so let’s revisit with envy and ask how she, or he, got Lucas to step on his own tongue, as it were.

Lucas is vice president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, or ACCCE, a group SourceWatch describes as a “front group” for the coal industry.

It’s a good label, though I prefer “shill”. Another good SourceWatch label describes ACCCE’s predecessor, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), as an “astroturf” organization; that is, fake grassroots.

Enough of labels, though. In the report, Lucas is quoted as saying that community services like hospital and school construction in eastern Kentucky were previously hampered for lack of a flat space – a service that mountaintop removal coal mining performs admirably.

This is like saying that Manifest Destiny simultaneously wiped out Native Americans and buffalo so pioneers could improve their fence-building skills, and just about as offensive. 

In fact, mountaintop removal destroys entire ecologies and poisons water resources, and the mining residue – from liquid coal slurry impoundments to coal ash piles near generating plants – has been the cause of some of the greatest human disasters in American history.

I’ve talked to some of the leaders in the (mountaintop removal) opposition, and I can imagine Mountain Justice’s Charlie Suggs comments when he hears that blasting the hills into oblivion is a good way to improve Appalachian communities.