An issue worth the attention

United Nations human rights experts have brought attention to a proposed project in Bangladesh that would immediately displace 50,000 to 130,000 Bangladeshis and “threaten the livelihoods of thousands more by doing irreversible damage to water sources and ecosystems in the region.”

The project? An open-pit coal mine. Coal may seem less pressing than other human rights issues which offer vivid and immediate images of human suffering. But coal causes just as much suffering as other issues that dominate headlines across the world.

And coal hits close to home. In West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky, mountains are being leveled to moonscapes. Mountaintop removal mining has demolished more than 500 mountains, polluted the headwaters of the Southeast and dramatically increased cancer and chronic disease among those living in coalfields.

Relentless blasting has turned central Appalachia into a modern-day war zone and its residents into casualties.

One Sierra Student Coalition member who traveled to Appalachia over spring break described the view of the destruction from the top of a mountain the group hiked during their trip.

The students, who were expecting to see the rest of the beautiful mountain range, were instead confronted with what one described as “remnants of a war zone.”

From cradle to grave, coal represents a substantial human rights issue. The American Lung Association found that coal was responsible for more than 13,000 premature deaths in 2010 and almost 10,000 hospitalizations and more than 20,000 heart attacks annually.

Coal contaminates our air and water with toxic heavy metals like mercury, arsenic and lead. When it comes to climate change, NASA’s top climate scientist stated unequivocally that coal is “the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” And a recent Harvard study found that coal costs the U.S. somewhere from one third to over one-half of a trillion dollars annually.

Coal doesn’t make financial sense either. Banks like Credit Suisse have found that “a large chunk of the U.S. coal fleet is vulnerable to closure simply due to crummy economics.”

For these reasons Chancellor Holden Thorp committed to stop burning coal on campus by 2020. Fast forward two years and UNC still funds this 19th century fuel through its endowment. UNC students have won divestment campaigns in the past to remedy irresponsible investments like this.

In the 1980s, former Chancellor Chris Fordham sided with students on a matter of principle and supported South Africa divestment, allowing UNC to be “part of what turned out to be a reasonably effective and humane effort.”

More recently, UNC divested from companies profiting from the genocide in Sudan.

Public figures like Michael Bloomberg — who donated $50 million to the Beyond Coal campaign — are starting to make the case that coal is “the new tobacco.”

Coal is a massive problem; it should become politically and culturally unacceptable because of the damage it causes. As Bloomberg put it, “Coal kills every day.”

I encourage the UNC community to join the Sierra Student Coalition tonight at 7 p.m. at the Campus Y for “Divestment at UNC: a History of Social Justice” to learn about the power of divestment, how it has worked at UNC in the past and how it can work again with coal.

Let’s start a dialogue about UNC’s investment practices. We all stand to gain from ensuring that they are in line with our institutional mission of “leading change to improve society and to help solve the world’s greatest problems.”