coal - take action

from 350.org - this is a close-to-home justice issue.  please prayerfully consider taking action.

Dear friends,
We know many of you are still recovering from the unbelievable organizing you did for the day of action on Oct. 24, and you know that as a campaign 350.org is mostly focused on the global negotiations coming up in Copenhagen.
But sometimes things happen at inconvenient moments.
And if you think it's inconvenient for us, imagine what it was like for residents of Pettus, West Virginia to wake up last week to find that the blasting had started on Coal River Mountain, one of the epicenters of the fight over the hideous practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains. Coal River Mountain is an iconic symbol of the energy choices our country now faces: we can blast off the mountain's top to scoop out the dirty coal inside, or we can harness its enormous wind potential and start to build a better world.
So we're going to ask those of you on our USA e-mail list to take a small but signficant action to help our friends who are fighting the good fight there in West Virginia and Kentucky.
Could you please take a few minutes to send a message to decision-makers in the Obama administration, and ask them to intervene at Coal River Mountain?

Click the following to send your message: www.350.org/coal
The Obama administration officials who could stop this need to know that it's not just people in the hills of Appalachia who can hear the explosions--we all know what's going on.  And we know that every lump of coal that comes out of those hills adds to the carbon burden of the atmosphere we all share.
Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist who first gave us the 350 number, has pointed out that the western world needs to be off coal in little more than a decade if we're ever going to get back to 350--and this is the obvious place to start. It would be a small gesture our government could point to when it gets to the UN talks in Copenhagen this coming December--and for the brave folks who have been fighting this fight to save their homes for decades now it would be a very big gesture indeed.
Coal is near the heart of the planet's climate problem. Let's take a moment to help here, in no small part because it will help in the climate talks ahead.

So many thanks,

Bill McKibben and the 350.org crew