How many people die each year from the use of coal?  At least 24,000 just from the particulate matter, (according to the two doctors quoted below).   That is more than from traffic accidents and murders each year.   What form of life does coal not manage to damage or kill?  Maybe cockroaches, but not many other living things can thrive in dirty polluted air or in the filth left behind when coal is used.  It’s even killing cows and dogs.  And amazingly, they put coal ash in toothpaste.

“Elisa Young says she has lost at least six neighbors to cancer in the last ten years.

“I’ve lost neighbors to lung cancer who have never smoked,” she said. “I’ve lost them to brain cancer, breast, throat, colon, multiple myeloma, pre-leukemia. When my son, who’s in his 20s, came home to visit, he said, ‘Mom, is it normal for your mouth to taste like metal?’ We pulled over and he coughed until he got sick.”

Young has no doubt about what she believes is causing all the cancer: coal. For the past 10 years she’s lived in Meigs County, Ohio, the center of the second largest concentration of coal plants in the nation, and has become an environmental activist.

“There isn’t a house on this road that hasn’t been touched by cancer… I had melanoma and I currently have two more precancerous conditions for breast and thyroid cancer, none of which are in my family,” said Young, 47. “My dog died of cancer, my best friend’s dog died of lymphoma. I just gave up a dog because I couldn’t afford to take him into the vet. He was getting lumps on him.”

Each year, coal-burning power plants release nearly 100 million tons of toxic fly ash into wet ponds, rivers and landfills, according to a 2009 report by Earthjustice, an environmental legal advocacy organization. A 2007 risk assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency found that people who live near one of these coal ash waste sites have as high as a 1 in 50 chance of developing cancer, as well as an increased risk of damage to the lungs, kidneys, liver and other organs as a result of exposure to toxic metals. Further, says the report, the danger to wildlife and ecosystems is “off the charts.” Linking exposure to specific diseases can be difficult to prove scientifically — it has not been definitely proven that exposure to toxic fly ash caused the sicknesses in Meigs County.

Despite these findings, the Environmental Protection Agency has deemed coal ash a “non-hazardous waste” since 1988, a classification that allows fly ash to be dumped into ponds with no protective liner and re-used as pavement, building materials, fertilizer, potting soil and even toothpaste.

In October of 2009, the EPA finally re-evaluated the dangers of toxic coal ash and proposed new rules to regulate coal waste disposal, but the proposed regulations have been stalled for five months at the White [...]