Vice President Dick Cheney says President Bush's plan to promote "cheap" coal as part of the administration’s national energy policy is just fine.

Cheney, interviewed recently on WWVA radio in Wheeling, has reportedly worked closely with Bush to develop the administration's energy policy. The plan would increase energy supplies like coal and ease restrictions on oil and gas development on public lands. It also would give the federal government power to seize private property for the use of transmission lines.

Democrats and environmental groups have raised objections to that plan while the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, United Mine Workers of American union and U.S. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-WV, have praised it, saying it could boost West Virginia’s role in energy production.

"A lot of places in the country ... coal is a very key commodity," Cheney said. "There’s a lot of it that’s cheap and dependable."

I agree with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition’s Janet Fout who says coal is "Cheap to the coal companies reaping billions in profits -- not so cheap for WV taxpayers subsidizing the coal industry's filthy messes."

Yes, coal is "cheap"-- but only in the sense that the companies that mine the coal are cheap. Except to slop money into the coffers of public relations spin doctors and politicians’ campaigns, coal companies put almost nothing into the communities that give up so much for that "cheap" coal.

Ask the folks at Sylvester, West Virginia, who breathe and eat the coal dust from a large coal preparation plant. They will tell us how "cheap" coal really is.

Ask the folks of Inez, in Martin County, Kentucky, and those downstream from there, who have endured almost a year of black muck dumped onto them by a failed coal waste impoundment how "cheap" coal really is.

Ask the survivors of the Buffalo Creek coal waste impoundment failure that killed 125 people and left hundreds more homeless and cost the state and federal government tens of millions of dollars how "cheap" coal really is.

Ask the folks at Pigeon Roost Hollow and dozens of other hollows whose homes are gobbled up and covered over by giant, open coal waste dumps, euphemistically called "valley fills," how "cheap" coal really is.

Ask citizens whose government is perpetually corrupted by the disproportionate influence of coal money and coal lobbyists how "cheap" coal really is.

The only thing cheap about coal is that its corporate promoters have successfully shifted and externalized the costs of mining and burning the coal from the artificial, market price of the coal itself to the real world that struggles in the wake of the mining and the burning this "cheap" energy source.

All the rest -- the talk about "clean coal technology," the "cheap" coal talk, the "responsible mountaintop mining" rhetoric, the "coal is the future" propaganda, etc. ad nauseam, is just blather.