Remember the study published a few weeks ago that found a link between mountaintop removal mining and birth defects? Well, so do the coal industry’s lawyers, and they’ve got a different explanation:
Last month, when coal execs read the report linking birth defects to mountaintop removal mining, they weren’t exactly thrilled. One rebuttal, penned by four attorneys with the firm Crowell & Moring, which represents the National Mining Association, accused the study’s authors of using cherry-picked and misleading data. But that apparently wasn’t convincing enough, so they went a step further and employed a discredited stereotype about inbreeding in West Virginia.
“The study failed to account for consanquinity [sic], one of the most prominent sources of birth defects,” the attorneys’ statement said. It then went on to advertise the firm’s services to coal companies looking to “counter unfounded claims of injury or disease” from potential lawsuits sparked by the study.
Consanguinity, which is presumably what the attorneys were referring to, is defined as: “relationship by descent from a common ancestor.”
Seriously, WTF.
Ken Ward talked to Michael Hendryx, one of the authors of the MTR study, who broke it down:
Maybe they are referring to third cousins or distant relatives that might intermarry, but 1) research on whether higher birth defects occurs for relatives more distant than first cousins is very sparse, 2) they’d have to argue that MTM areas had more of these interbreeding pockets than other rural areas, and 3) they still don’t account for the higher effects found in recent time and in proximity to higher mining. This is another one of these attempts to say what the effects “really” are as an excuse to deny the serious health problems in MTM areas that exist across many health outcome measures. The reasons are partly due to the poor socioeconomic conditions that mining creates (not that are correlated with mining, but that mining creates), and may be due to the environmental pollution caused by mining.
Jeff Goodell isn’t impessed with the coal industry’s argument:
From the industry’s point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what’s left of the local streams and aquifers. It’s that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.
After being called out, the attorneys quickly pulled the claim from their website. Fortunately, Ward saved it, so you can download it here.
