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The ‘war on coal’ is a myth
Photo by Nick Humphries. A version of this post originally appeared on Climate Progress. Big polluters and their congressional allies have created a new straw man to knock down with the invention of...
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Bathtub photo lands coal activist in child-porn hot water
Maria Gunnoe West Virginia coal activist Maria Gunnoe is used to intimidation, as writer/blogger Aaron Bady points out. It’s one thing to oppose coal companies from the office of the mayor of New York...
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Here’s what Pittsburgh looked like before smoke control
These vintage photos of Pittsburgh, from before it passed a smoke-control ordinance in 1941, are so hazy that some of them look like they’ve been hit with some kind of artsy-grunge Instagram filter....
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Energy companies, seeing a greener future, are losing their faith in coal
The stuff fortunes were made of. Tallying the predictions of energy industry executives is an interesting exercise. Like any dominant business sector, the energy industry’s predictive powers are...
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Mayors: We’d appreciate it if coal plants stopped poisoning people with...
Mayors from over 90 cities wrote a letter supporting the EPA’s mercury regulations. As local elected officials representing big cities and small towns, we want to express our strong support for the...
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Why the power industry is running away from coal
Beautiful — but deadly. Last September, we reported that “peak coal” had come to Appalachia. There’s a reason that the industry is relying on destructive practices like mountaintop-removal mining:...
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Miner fired for whistleblowing gets his job back
Photo courtesy of the National Archives. After being fired by Cumberland River Coal Company last year, Charles Scott Howard sued, alleging that he was fired for blowing the whistle on the company’s...
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Will the Senate make you inhale mercury? We find out today
The EPA doesn’t want you inhaling this. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), a first-of-its-kind baseline regulating the emission...
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EPA to consider whether Alabama landfill violates community’s civil rights
Coal ash from the Tennessee spill. One of the core tenets of the environmental justice movement is that poorer communities and communities of color disproportionately bear the negative impacts of a...
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Romney opposes mercury rule, beclowns himself again
Photo by Austen Hufford. Today marks a symbolic vote in the Senate: Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) is putting forward a Congressional Review Act resolution [PDF] that would stop the EPA’s impending...
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How Peabody gets dirt-cheap land and the rest of us get a gigaton of carbon...
A version of this article originally appeared on Climate Progress. The BLM lets Peabody lease public land for next to nothing and strip-mine it for coal. On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management...
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Coal companies routinely win ‘competitive bids’ against no competition
Coal trucks in the Powder River Basin. (Photo by KimonBerlin.) There are two senses in which coal is artificially cheap. The more sophisticated reason is the idea that coal has negative impacts on the...
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Enough cheap coal: Using public lands for the public interest
I hope everyone read Joe Smyth’s post about the upcoming “auction” of 721 million tons of publicly owned Powder River Basin (PRB) coal. “Auction” goes in scare quotes because there’s only one bidder:...
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Coal plants are the VHS tapes of the energy production flea market
“Tell you what. You take three coal plants, I’ll throw in this Schwinn.” (Photo by Donna L. Faber.) When the Clean Air Act was updated in 1977, existing power plants got a free pass: They didn’t have...
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Good news about fossil fuels! Related: Bad news about fossil fuels!
How you will feel at the end and beginning of this post, respectively. (Photo by loresjoberg.) Presenting: New data about fossil fuel consumption from the Worldwatch Institute, in decreasing order of...
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New York says eff you to coal plants
Take your coal and shove it. (Photo by ballanross.) It will soon be nearly impossible to build a coal-fired power plant in New York. Regulators at the state Department of Environmental Conservation...
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Europe goes crazy for coal — and we can blame ourselves
London, during the coal-caused “Great Smog” of 1952. (Photo courtesy of Geograph.) Germany just set a new record in solar energy production, creating 14.7 terawatt-hours of electricity over the first...
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Black lung disease, once on the brink of extinction, is back. Thank the coal...
In February 1969, miners in West Virginia launched an illegal wildcat strike. The action halted extraction for half of the mines in the northern part of the state for days. The miners had one demand:...
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Patriot Coal files for bankruptcy
Logo via Patriot Coal. Patriot Coal, a St. Louis-based coal company, has filed for federal bankruptcy protection. Coal companies have been hit hard by a decline in demand, arising in part from...
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Coal: Unpopular
Also, unpopular! All of a sudden, everyone hates coal. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) Shares of coal mining companies tumbled Monday as inventories continued to build with weaker demand in the...
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