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Environmentalist group protests Bank of America


monsoon

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I am very close to the coal power industry, lets see if you can guess which company in charlotte, you probably wont, anyways and whenever discussions like this come up, I have given up. People refuse to see the truth, coal is essential, and it is getting cleaner, the scrubbers going into dukes power plants are going to drastically help them with emissions and cliffside has strong efficiency as well. Yeah you can say they will dump hydrocarbons into the air and Co2 but I like being able to turn on my lights at night and type on urban planet. I also like not paying something ridiculous for that lovely position our nation has put us in. Anyways I'm not going to get worked up with the environmentalists.

Coal is King

Coal will be king for a while longer

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Give the Corps a pass b/c the are "doing their job"? Would that be making money at all costs?

Sure, blame the politician for holding his hand out, but putting money in that hand is not "doing your job", it's screwing the system for your own ends. These folks don't want alt energy development b/c it threatens their cash cow - and if they didn't have DC in their back pocket we would have developed legitimate alternatives long ago.

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Regardless, I (for one) am super-glad to see this kind of open-minded, progressive form of free speech be exhibited (even if they DID get arrested, which they indeed deserved). Alas, we ALL know that this kind of "subvert the government," flaunt the law kind of behavior is even more effective when martyrs get to be shackled up and go to jail ... so obviously we can now understand the enormity of their actions and why they did so....

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..... Corporate drones like me and the other >50k downtown don't change our mind because some patchouli-scented miscreants scaled a crane at daybreak (from San Francisco no less!) on behalf of some third-rate activist organization. We change our minds due to mainstream appeals to common sense. .....
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The truth to this story is that the US is the Saudia Arabia of Coal. Coal is the basis for everything American, like it or not.

Until you can convince people like Ted Kennedy (Dem) to allow windmills in his precious CapeCod view, you will long continue to power your Mac and Ipod with coal energy.

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I'm more dumbfounded by the LACK of support for this. You've got people advocating roughing them up, throwing them in jail, etc. That's crazy. America was founded on civil disobedience. Remember a little thing called the Boston Tea Party? That was illegal. The American Revolution (against Britain)? That was treason and if we'd lost most of the Founding Fathers would have been executed for it. You cannot have a participatory democracy without citizen action. As I hinted at before, we are already on a slippery slope to a police state (IMHO) and the more people throw away their civil rights, the worse it will be.

I will get off my soapbox now, though, since this is wandering off the topic of BoA and coal mining.

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- I am a Charlotte native.

- I have been a Bank of America customer since about 2000.

- I currently reside on a mountain in the Appalachian chain.

- During a recent airplane flight I saw several huge areas degraded like the pics above -- less than a day's drive from my home.

- Until today's protest, it never crossed my mind that my home town's pride-and-joy corporation, and the bank with which I do my business, could be connected to the horrible environmental conditions I witnessed near my home.

Taking the above into consideration, I'd say the protest worked.

I do not consider myself an environmentalist, but there is a point at which I simply will not tolerate overt destruction of our natural areas. People, we are not talking about regular old coal mines -- we are talking about mountains turning into craters. I simply cannot describe how colossally destructive this method of mining can be. Imagine -- 50 million years from now, when all of our societies are dust and coal mining is a distant memory, mountains will be missing in the Appalachian chain. Not simply degraded or radioactive or naked of life... missing. Gone. A huge natural feature completely destroyed. It's mind-boggling.

And for what? Cheaper coal. Coal that could have been mined using conventional techniques, but instead was removed in a massive explosion that shattered the face of the landscape. And for no other reason than to pad the coffers of the wealthiest companies in the world -- energy companies' profits are measured in the trillions nowadays. The wealthiest companies in the world, allowed to obliterate the landscape in order to crack the thirteen-digit mark on the profit line. Only a fool would fail to oppose such institutional corruption.

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Yes the environmental damage in those pictures is very real and disgusting! My first year in college, we had a family visit my class from West Virginia which was being displaced my the complete removal of mountaintops. Even a small rain shower caused enormous amounts of runoff which flooded entire communities. Sure coal is needed in this ever hungry country of ours, but there are certainly better ways of obtaining what we need. And, we can debate all we want about whether or not this protest was worth the effort, but I'm pretty sure if you ask the guys who climbed that crane if it was worth it, they wouldn't think twice. We already have 4 pages worth of responses to what happened today, I think that speaks for itself. I for one learned something today that I didn't know thanks to these guys.

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A huge natural feature completely destroyed. It's mind-boggling.

And for what? Cheaper coal. Coal that could have been mined using conventional techniques, but instead was removed in a massive explosion that shattered the face of the landscape. And for no other reason than to pad the coffers of the wealthiest companies in the world -- energy companies' profits are measured in the trillions nowadays. The wealthiest companies in the world, allowed to obliterate the landscape in order to crack the thirteen-digit mark on the profit line. Only a fool would fail to oppose such institutional corruption.

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A fact that I didn't know until I just sat down to read my latest issue of Charlotte magazine...Bank of America is partner with the Redwood Forest Foundation in preserving more than 50k acres in the Usal Redwood Forest in Mendocino County in California. Interesting that a company would preserve and ruin at the same time.

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A fact that I didn't know until I just sat down to read my latest issue of Charlotte magazine...Bank of America is partner with the Redwood Forest Foundation in preserving more than 50k acres in the Usal Redwood Forest in Mendocino County in California. Interesting that a company would preserve and ruin at the same time.
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A fact that I didn't know until I just sat down to read my latest issue of Charlotte magazine...Bank of America is partner with the Redwood Forest Foundation in preserving more than 50k acres in the Usal Redwood Forest in Mendocino County in California. Interesting that a company would preserve and ruin at the same time.
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While I do not condone destroying our natural resources, this form of coal mining is much safer on the human scale and more efficient on the company scale than the man-with-a-pickax method. Sure there are methods for protecting workers that they should always do without exception, but coal mining has devastating effects on the lungs without the use of heavy and cumbersome utilities that then infringe on productivity.

As for the mountains, in our lifetimes we will have fewer peaks to enjoy, but on the scale of nature, these scars in the land will not be noticed. Mountains form and erode; sure it's on the level of millions of years, but they do. Since their formation, the Appalachians were once the tallest mountains in the world. No, I did not "learn" that in middle school, I learned that while studying marine and terrestrial geoscience in Sydney where their would not be that geographical "home state" bias. These scars will be noticed by our children, and our children's children, and so on; but eventually nature would have eroded this land away anyway. Soil will eventually be blown over these holes and plant life will reemerge, the ecosystem in this area will eventually recover on its own without human intervention. New mountain chains will form in other parts of the world while older ones will fade slowly into history. The only reason I bring this up is in response to the point made earlier that in 50 million years, these scars will still be there. They won't. That doesn't take away from the fact of what is taking place, I just felt like mentioning that.

To me, what the worst part is is where all of this land is truly going. It's not the point that these mountains are just being relocated, they are being dug up, processed, and burned, and we literally have mountains of coal byproduct floating in the air we breath every day. The same air our children and their children will be breathing in the future. If we continue down this path and do not look for better sources of energy, the air outside will be no better than the air in coal mines.

What these protesters are doing is just; but, in my mind, they are attacking the wrong company. Sure, BoA provides the loans for these companies, but in all actuality, the coal industry doesn't even need these loans. They have so much money that they could survive without the help of banks at all. What BoA is doing is just turning a profit over on something that isn't even necessary. Thus, the bank isn't supporting the coal industry, they are just profiting from it as a third party. If the bank was out to kill our air supply, they wouldn't donate to charities that preserve forests.

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As for the mountains, in our lifetimes we will have fewer peaks to enjoy, but on the scale of nature, these scars in the land will not be noticed. ...The only reason I bring this up is in response to the point made earlier that in 50 million years, these scars will still be there. They won't.
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I agree that this story will not get any big play at all. The O and local media only focused on the traffic obstruction aspect of the protest and not the valid environmental concerns behind it. While Fox Charlotte and The O occasionally delve deeper, the press in this town is beholden to the banks and the other big businesses for ad revenue etc and will never rock the status quo corporate boat too hard.

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