West Virginia House of Delegates Minority Whip Daryl Cowles (R) favors mountaintop removal mining.
Mountaintop removal mining is practice of blowing off the tops of mountains to get to a six inch seam of coal.
Mountaintop removal mining leads to a decline in fish populations, the destruction of animal habitats, the pollution of air and water, and increased rates of death and disease for people living in the area.
Cowles is being challenged by Independent Brenda Hutchinson in the upcoming November election for the West Virginia House of Delegates seat representing eastern Hampshire County and northern Morgan County (District 58).
Hutchinson is opposed to mountaintop removal mining and hydraulic fracturing. There is no Democrat in the race.
If Hutchinson defeats Cowles, she will be the first candidate independent of the two major parties to be elected to the West Virginia legislature in over 100 years.
Why does Cowles favor mountaintop removal mining?
Cowles says he favors the practice because he favors private property rights. If you own the rights to coal, you have a right to blow off the mountain to get to it.
But it could also be that Cowles favors the out of state coal corporations whose political action committees and executives have funded his campaigns over the years.
Take Massey Energy and its disgraced former CEO Don Blankenship.
During his first run for the West Virginia House of Delegates in 2006, Cowles was the recipient of $3,000 from Don Blankenship and his family members.
Massey Energy owned and operated Upper Big Branch Mine where 29 miners were killed in April 2010.
In January 2011, Massey Energy was bought out by Alpha Natural Resources for $7.1 billion.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) found that Massey’s culture of favoring production over safety contributed to flagrant safety violations that caused the coal dust explosion that killed the miners at the Upper Big Branch mine.
MSHA assessed $10.8 million in fines for 369 citations and orders, the largest for any mine disaster in U.S. history.
Alpha Natural Resources settled Massey’s potential criminal liabilities with the Justice Department for another $209 million.
In April 2014, four years into the criminal investigation of the deaths at the Upper Big Branch mine, federal officials told ABC News that prosecutors were focused on the role Blankenship played in the mine disaster.
“I believe this permeated from the top down – from Don Blankenship down,” Senator Joe Manchin, (D- West Virginia), who was governor at the time of the blast, told ABC News. “I believe that Don has blood on his hands. And I believe that justice will be done.”
The Justice Department has prosecuted four Massey employees — most recently securing a guilty plea from a high ranking official who acknowledged that the company employed a practice of tipping off mine workers when a safety inspector was coming onto the site.
U.S. Attorney R. Booth Goodwin II told ABC News that prosecutions to date show his office has been methodically going “up the line, and consistently so” in assessing whether conduct by mine operators may have led to the explosion.
“What we have seen is a conspiracy to violate mine safety and health laws,” Goodwin said. “And that conspiracy was very pervasive.”
Over his career, Cowles’ campaigns have been funded not just by Blankenship but by Big Coal political action committees and groups with civic sounding names like Committee for Responsible Government.
In fact, the Committee for Responsible Government is actually the PAC affiliated with American Electric Power — the giant electric utility that generates more than 65 percent of its electricity with coal. The Committee has donated $3,000 to Cowles’ campaigns.
So that’s $3,000 from the Blankenships and $3,000 from the American Electric Power PAC. And a thousand here and there from other out of state coal and nuclear power based generating companies — like FirstEnergy.
And just last year, Cowles started taking money ($500) from the political action committee affiliated with Alpha Natural Resources — the coal company that bought out Massey.
It’s clear from his record and his campaign finance reports that Cowles stands with out of state corporate giants like Massey Energy, Alpha Natural Resources, FirstEnergy and American Electric Power.