Rand Paul, who's running for Senate in Kentucky, has no problem with Mountaintop Removal, the most devastating form of strip mining. From a profile in Details (via TPM):
Rules, control—just what Rand Paul abhors most, what chafes him about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and about environmentalists taking aim at Appalachia's coal industry for a practice known as mountaintop removal. The process involves blasting off the tops of mountains to get at the coal seams inside, then filling stream valleys with the resulting rubble and debris. Scientists and environmentalists say its effects are devastating, that it buries feeder streams, razes ecosystems, leaves toxic sludge pits and decapitated, denuded forests in its wake. "Mountaintop-removal coal mining," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief prosecuting attorney for the eco-watchdog group Riverkeeper, recently wrote, "is the greatest environmental tragedy ever to befall our nation."
Paul believes mountaintop removal just needs a little rebranding. "I think they should name it something better," he says. "The top ends up flatter, but we're not talking about Mount Everest. We're talking about these little knobby hills that are everywhere out here. And I've seen the reclaimed lands. One of them is 800 acres, with a sports complex on it, elk roaming, covered in grass." Most people, he continues, "would say the land is of enhanced value, because now you can build on it."
"Let's let you decide what to do with your land," he says. "Really, it's a private-property issue." This is a gentler, more academic variation on a line he used the evening before, during his speech at the Harlan Center: "If you don't live here, it's none of your business."
Sure.
The top of Kayford Mountain. Photo by Mike McGee, from Wilder Voice, vol. 5, iss. 9., here.
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