The benefit payments miners sick with black lung disease receive are not keeping pace with the cost of living, a new analysis showed.

Current monthly benefits for a miner and one dependent in 2024 are around $1,100, more than $3,000 lower than the average cost of living for a two-person household.

Quenton King, federal legislative specialist for Appalachian Voices, said lagging benefits are especially troubling when miners are increasingly developing black lung at younger ages, largely due to exposure to toxic silica dust.

"Younger miners are getting diagnosed with stage-three black lung, and they're having to quit mining in their 30s or 40s," King observed. "They're losing possibly 20 years, 30 years of work history, and they're unable to draw down that retirement fund."

Around 16% of the nation's coal workers are living with black lung, and after decades of improvement, the number of cases is on the rise again, according to the American Lung Association.

One National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study found modern coal miners, particularly those in Central Appalachia, are more likely than their predecessors to die from coal worker's pneumoconiosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer.

King pointed out although the coal industry in on the decline, thousands of coal miners and their families living in Appalachian communities are affected daily by the disease.

"Something I hear from people in the Black Lung Association, one of the heartbreaking things for me is that they're not able to play with their grandchildren, because they are on oxygen tanks," King noted.

Appalachian advocacy groups sent a letter to Congress asking for budget legislation prioritizing investments in curbing black lung and supporting miners already living with the disease. Proposed federal legislation, known as the Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act, would tie benefit levels to cost-of-living adjustments, rather than the federal pay scale.


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Forty religious leaders from different denominations gathered in Texas this week to call for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies and expansion of related infrastructure.The meeting occurred just days before the Environmental Protection Agency announced it is rolling back landmark environmental regulations.

Aly Tharp, Gulf South organizer for GreenFaith USA, said the faith community has a moral obligation to oppose the cuts and organize against the changes.

"So, when we listen to the science and when we listen to Scripture, to moral lessons from all faith traditions,' she said, "it's a clear call that we're on a path that's mutually assured destruction. And we must change and start investing in our common survival. "

The religious leaders took part in public demonstrations outside the annual oil and gas industry CERAWeek conference in Houston. They also drafted a letter to the Trump Administration calling for subsidy money to be redirected to improve the environment.

Faith leaders toured communities near fossil-fuel facilities in the Houston area. Ilka Vega, executive for economic and environmental justice for United Women in Faith, said the neighborhoods are predominantly made up of low-income people of color.

"Seeing through their eyes what used to be their post office, their houses, their schools and everything that was taken away from them," she said. "Places where they would go fishing and where they would go swimming and have fun, that were contaminated."

The head of the EPA has said he and President Donald Trump support rewriting the agency's 2009 finding that planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.

Religious leaders and people of diverse faiths are being invited to sign the letter to the Trump administration on the GreenFaith USA website.

Virginia has certain restrictions in place for workers handling animal waste in order to avoid contaminating groundwater sources. But one expert says the Commonwealth could do more to educate people about the risk.

Last year, Virginia updated regulations for animal waste at animal feeding operations. One of those regulations included ensuring that storage areas are higher than one foot above the seasonal high water table.

Bryan Dunning, a senior policy analyst for the nonprofit Center for Progressive Reform, said the Commonwealth took a step in the right direction with increased monitoring.

"It's for all facilities constructed after '98," he said. "So, that is some improved monitoring to get an idea of if there are problems with the facility that is breaching into the groundwater."

Dunning added that pre-1998 systems are grandfathered in under the new regulations. The agriculture industry accounts for half of the nitrogen and phosphorus that sucks oxygen out of Chesapeake Bay, which is needed to sustain aquatic life.

Dunning said Virginia officials could take steps to further combat groundwater contamination from manure at animal-feeding operations. That includes making data electronically available to the general public without the need to file a Freedom of Information Act request.

"Public information for these sorts of things is really important because if you source your water for your house from a private well, you're responsible for making sure that your water's clean," he said. "And without having that sort of publicly available database, basically to increase public knowledge, you're kind of operating in an information blackhole. "

Dunning added that unauthorized discharge of animal waste should be publicly disclosed. Confinement operators have said they are always looking for ways to be more environmentally friendly, while also keeping up with consumer demand for high-quality meat.


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Environmental advocates are waiting for results from legislation passed last year, regulating the use of industrial sludge from flowing into waterways like the Chesapeake Bay.

Before laws were passed, the state had limited regulations dealing with the handling and use of industrial sludge, often made up of leftovers from meat processing facilities, which are then used as farmland fertilizers. Mishandling or overuse of the fertilizers would lead to the contamination of groundwater and flow into waterways.

Evan Isaacson, senior attorney for the Chesapeake Legal Alliance, said it was even common for neighboring states with tighter regulations on industrial sludge to transport it to Maryland for dumping.

"We had essentially become the dumping ground for industrial sludge," Isaacson recounted. "It was just an opportunistic business opportunity, I guess, for that industry to evade existing regulatory frameworks in their home states and send it to Maryland."

A 2023 study by the University of Maryland found more than half of industrial sludge land applied in Maryland came from other states. The Maryland Department of Agriculture oversees the year-old regulations governing industrial sludge.

Isaacson argued the department could change regulations to promote more transparency or put out a report on industrial sludge. He pointed out some issues, like farm privacy, means the department's regulations are not always created with as much transparency in mind, like with the Maryland Department of the Environment. Isaacson hopes other states without regulations will introduce their own standards to keep industrial sludge from being dumped in neighboring states.

"Once this regulatory program is up and running properly, it fixes that problem," Isaacson emphasized. "At the very least, we're hoping that we no longer become the regional dumping ground and that those sources in Delaware and Virginia keep their material in Delaware and Virginia."

The neighboring states of Pennsylvania and West Virginia currently have no regulations on the use and dumping of industrial sludge.


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