First Energy Corp has agreed to settle its water pollution case in West Virginia

I reported on all the water pollution that is caused by coal companies in WV on March 27 of this year with a story about Massey Energy. As if the info given in that article was not bad enough, now we have a lawsuit filed against First Energy Corp which has been settled out of court.

This suit was brought under the clean water act by The Sierra Club, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the West Virginia Rivers Coalition. It was over First Energy's coal ash dump at the Mon Valley powerhouse. The thing is people that you must understand coal is taken from the ground and is riddled with many pollutants such as Arsenic in this case. But it is also full of mercury and sulfur-- and whatever else made up our atmosphere during the Carboniferous period when all this coal was originally formed.

During the Carboniferous period our atmosphere was very different from what it now is. It is what gave rise to a vast number of plant species. Most of which have dies away today due to lower carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. But arsenic, sulfur, mercury, and many other trace elements were abundant in our atmosphere back approximately 360 million years ago. By the way, the word Carboniferous literally means 'coal bearing'. But this period of Earth's history also gave birth to our natural gas and petroleum that we have been discovering for now over 100+ yeas.

The ONLY way to put a stop to polluting our atmosphere is to stop using these 'fossil fuels' to power everything we do. Now many instructors on the economy will tell you that coal is essential to emerging markets such as the ones now in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations. But I believe we should work with them and try to develop new technologies such as the Envia battery project (Atul Kapadia, their CEO is an Indian) because such developments would benefit us all. To me it only makes sense that we should work with them in order to break our dependance on the 'fossil fuel' industry.