- We're the Trillbillies, Tom —
- and Tarence.
And here we are at Black Mountain, the highest point in Kentucky.
Elevation 4,145 feet above sea level.
This is the Appalachian mountain range.
The artist formerly known as Pangea.
We took something that was millions 
and millions of years old
and we turned it into this, 
in just a matter of a couple years.
That is the power of capitalism, folks. 
That is the power of industry.
We took the oldest mountain chain in the world —
- turned it to dust. Rubble.
This behind us right here is the Looney Ridge Mine.
It's a ridge off of Black Mountain that has been
mined by process called mountaintop removal.
Mountaintop removal is, of course,
the act of using explosives to blow the
tops off of mountains to get to the coal
seams underneath.
When you wake up in the morning and you roll over
and you look at your iPhone
and you turn your lights on and you go to brush your
teeth —
- Charge your dildo.
Charge your dildo.
- It all comes from this.
It all comes from this, baby.
You know, in the Seventies, late Seventies, early Eighties,
they passed legislation to regulate strip mining
because people were experiencing
all kinds of floods and landslides.
So it's actually kind of ironic.
The coal industry sort of, you know, found a
clever way to get around that
legislation to put even more people out
of jobs.
- And so since the Seventies, roughly,
coal production's went up by like 400% 
while coal jobs have just plummeted.
This kind of land will just be 
completely useless from here on out.
There's been a lot of
research that says that people living
near these sites are at higher risk of
all kinds of cancers, birth defects, things of that nature.
- Water table's been destroyed, 
I think is sort of an obvious thing.
If you look at what's going on in
Martin County, Kentucky, not too far from here,
they're in the throes of a full-blown
Flint-esque water crisis.
The Clean Air and Water Act has never been meaningfully enforced in the coal states.
So when our liberal friends will say something like, you know, that's why we need to get Democrats in office,
or, you know, that Obama was so good on
climate or whatever — it's just smoke and mirrors.
It's none of it true.
Mining at this site was going on under Obama.
Even the remedies to it are
all centered around what can we do with
these lands that have sort of been
bombed out and depleted?
What can we build on them to 
squeeze even more capital out of it?
And of course, the answer we get here is:
Prisons.
You know, in a capitalist economy,
all the productive capacity of that society is
put towards the unending creation of capital,
and the funneling of that to the people at the top of it.
Which means that any
regulatory agency or law that exists is
just an obstacle to that process, and
therefore creates loopholes that you have to get around.
Mountaintop removal is actually the best example of that.
Like we said, regulations were put
in place in the late Seventies, early Eighties
to curb some of the worst
effects of strip mining.
And then what do you get 15, 20  minutes later? 
You get this.
This wasn't happening in the Seventies.
This happened in the late Nineties, early 2000s, years and years after the Clean Water Act,
after the Surface Mining Control 
and Reclamation Act [1977].
This is what regulations and laws do.
- Innovation, baby!
Yeah, this is innovation. Exactly.
Regulatory agencies, in general, exist specifically to facilitate business.
That's the whole point. 
It's not to actually protect people or public health.
For example, if really wealthy people were living in this valley right beneath here, you can guarantee it that there would not be a mine right here.
- A common refrain during 2016 I think that really broke all of our brains is that
that institutions can't save us. 
And that's absolutely correct.
Yeah. Nobody has your best interests at heart.
They will absolutely destroy the environment and
everything around you
to make sure that profit and resources are continually flowing, continually being channelled
upwards to the people at the top.
- We're the Trillbillies, and this has been the 2019 Destruction Tour.
No one's gonna save you, folks. No one has your best interests at heart. We're fucked.
- Tired of living in a crawl space for
$1600 a month? Come here!
Yeah, bohemians in New York, in Brooklyn — we've got plenty of space.
