During the public hearing of the Governor's Task Force on Mountaintop Removal, the coal guys kept urging us to rely upon reason, not upon emotion.

I assume that they were talking about people such as the woman from Logan County who talked about what it is like to live six hundred feet from the blasting on a mountaintop removal mine. When the blasting was going on, the company required all its workers to get at least one thousand feet away from the blasting. Because the public road was within one thousand feet of the blasting, the company stopped traffic.

Meanwhile, back at her house, she has to keep her children inside for fear of flying rock. She finds this upsetting; the coal guys dismiss it as just emotion.

It's no wonder the coal guys want to eliminate from the discussion anything that they can label as "emotion." They deal in dollars and cents. They invest dollars; in exchange they get more dollars. The coal comes out; their investors are happy; their lobbyists can rattle off figures about how much they are adding to the local economy. If they can label everything that cannot be measured in dollars as "just emotion" and then ignore it, everything looks great.

There are other names for these things that cannot be measured in dollars, the things the coal guys label as "emotion." Economic theorists would call them the externalized costs. Those are the costs to society that are inherent in the mining but which are not borne by the mining company.

The company would, of course, bear the costs of its equipment, the wages it pays, the fuel it buys, etc. These are not the only costs. At the same time the mining is costing the company the price of its equipment, wages, and fuel, it is costing society the beauty of its mountains. It is costing us miles of free flowing streams. It is costing us the opportunity to breathe without choking on clouds of dust. It is costing those who live near the mines the opportunity to live in peace. These are the things that the economist would call "externalities"; they are the costs that the mining industry imposes upon society as a whole. These are the things that the coal guys would like to dismiss as mere "emotion."

Yet there is another name for what the coal guys dismiss as emotion: everything that makes life worth living.

What's the point of living in the country if your children can't go outside and play? You may as well live in a high rise apartment building. What's the point of living in the mountains if they are just going to get blown away? You may as well live on the median of the interstate. What's the point of even having a home if your neighborhood strip mine makes it miserable to live there?

These are the things that the coal guys want to dismiss as just emotion. They cast themselves as the clear headed realists, capable of analytically considering the issue. They talk in dollars and cents and think in terms of return on investment. Those things they can't measure in dollars and cents they describe as "emotion" and ignore.

The truth is that the things the coal guys ignore as simple mushy-headed emotion are the things that make life worth living.