Blackened Pork: Liquid Coal Subsidies Sneak into Senate Tax Bill

by Target Global Warming

Is regular coal not dirty enough for you? Meet liquid coal fuel! Destructive to mine, water-intensive to manufacture, devastating to our climate at every step of the way – liquid coal is one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. Liquid coal production emits twice as much global warming pollution as gasoline & requires at least four gallons of water per gallon of fuel produced.  

Today the National Wildlife Federation has learned the Senate version of tax legislation includes subsidies for liquid coal fuels.

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How the West is Winning Against Coal

by Mary Anne Hitt

The past month across the western U.S. has been filled with victories against coal:

--After a two year campaign, we locked down the permanent retirement of the Oregon Boardman plant (600-megawatts of dirty coal power) by no later than 2020, and we continue to push for earlier date.

--Los Angeles recently released a draft plan for the nation's largest municipal utility that gets out of one of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country - the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona (though the plan still needs a little work [PDF]).

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Massey's Chance to Clean the Slate?

by Michael Brune

Don Blankenship, the chairman and CEO of America's most notorious coal company, unexpectedly announced his retirement this week. If you don't know who Blankenship is or why his departure from Massey Energy is significant, the profile that appeared in Rolling Stone last week ("The Dark Lord of Coal Country") covers that ground thoroughly.

Suffice to say that Blankenship ran Massey with an iron fist and a stunning disregard for the safety of its workers or the environmental effects of its mining practices. Last year alone, Massey had more than 500 safety violations and nearly $1 million in fines, and last April's explosion at Massey's Upper Big Branch Mine alone (29 men killed) was America's worst mining tragedy in 40 years.

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Our Orwellian Nightmare: Coal's Low Carbon Pitch

by Mary Anne Hitt

This week, I'm happy to introduce Justin Guay of the Sierra Club's International Climate Program, who is in Cancun at the international climate negotiations, and who draws our attention in this post to a little-known problem that could spur coal development around the world:

In Cancun all eyes are on climate finance and the role it will play in delivering progress on the international stage. Yet lurking beneath the surface lies a fatal incoherency in energy sector lending that has enabled coal to pass itself off as a low carbon option for developing countries.

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Students Call for Clean Energy, Thank EPA

by Mary Anne Hitt

This post was co-written by Kim Teplitzky of the Sierra Student Coalition.

Yesterday, despite some fierce weather in our nation's capital, members of the Sierra Student Coalition hung bright, colorful pinwheels on Capitol Hill and in front of the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters. (Check out photos here)

The pinwheels came from thousands of college students across the U.S., all asking for clean energy and thanking EPA for its hard work over 40 years (Happy birthday, EPA!).

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Eighteen Month Follow Up On The OTHER Dangerous Fossil Fuel Spill, the One in Tennessee.

by NNadir

On December 22, 2008, about a month before the end of the disasterous Presidency of George W. Bush, a containment dam at the Kingston, TN coal plant ruptured, releasing 3.7 million cubic meters of dangerous fossil fuel waste into the Emory River, a tributary of the Tennessee River.

The Tennessee River is a major source of drinking water for cities in the region, and is the drinking water supply for 4.7 million Americans.

A paper published in "ASAP" form in the current issue of the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology reports on the leaching of heavy metals and toxic nonmetals, from this dangerous coal waste now in the river.  The elements discussed are arsenic, selenium, lead, barium, strontium and boron, uranium, manganese and iron.

Here is a link to the paper.  

Environmental Science and Technology is a publication of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

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Blogging Begins from New Beyond Coal Director Mary Anne Hitt

by Bruce Nilles

Today I am officially turning over the blog reins to Mary Anne Hitt, the new Director of the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign. She will now be blogging weekly on important coal and clean energy issues - so I urge you to bookmark her blog. Her first post is up now.

Mary Anne has been with the Sierra Club for two years, serving first as the Deputy Director of the Beyond Coal Campaign. Before coming to the Club, she was the Executive Director of Appalachian Voices and co-founded ILoveMountains.org, an online campaign to end mountaintop removal coal mining that received national recognition for innovation and impact.

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Our Best Chance to Rein In Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

by Mary Anne Hitt

This is my first post as director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, and I'm focusing on mountaintop removal because I've lived in Appalachia for most of my life.

My new baby daughter is an 11th generation West Virginian, and I often wonder how many mountains will be left standing in the Mountain State by the time she has a family of her own. For too long, mining companies have enjoyed loopholes and rubber-stamped permits that have allowed them to flatten over 500 mountains across Appalachia.

Earlier this year, though, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued new guidance aimed at consistently protecting Americans from the pollution caused by mountaintop removal coal mining. I welcome these common-sense protections by EPA.

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Jobs should be blowing in the wind (and frying in the sun ...)

by A Siegel

Trends that go against 'common wisdom' are often hard for people to absorb and realize.  A journalist's job, however, should be to question (even challenge) common wisdom rather than simply parroting talking points that are, in fact, misleading if not outright false.  When it comes to energy and environmental reporting, sadly, such questioning often seems to fall by the wayside.

Part of the journalistic myth: fossil fuel (fossil foolish) policies are good on the jobs front.  Too many journalists seem to watch petroleum industry advertising rather than read serious reports that highlight how clean-energy investments outperform dirty energy in job creation per dollar of investment and per megawatt hour of electricity production. And, thus, those well-funded talking points get slipped into the mainstream consciousness and accepted as fact -- rather than assertions that might not stand up to scrutiny.

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DailyCancun: Fossil Fuel Factual Fallacies: New York Times Called Out by Renowned Geoscientist

by todbrilliant

Enough is enough. Energy literacy is mandatory in 2010.

If the New York Times wants to continue to willfully position itself in the service of fossil fuel interests, so be it. But we're fighting back. Today's uppercut is thrown by geoscientist and PCI Fellow David Hughes.  

Read on for a detailed 'correction' of NY Times reporter Clifford Krauss' woefully misleading 17. Nov 2010 article, "There Will Be Fuel."

Full release with charts/graphs/data at http://www.postcarbon.org/...

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Last Chance to Tell EPA We Want Strong Coal Ash Safeguards

by Bruce Nilles

The comment period ends tomorrow for the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed federal safeguards for toxic coal ash.

Coal ash is the by-product of burning coal for electricity, and it contains a toxic mix of chemicals: mercury, arsenic, lead, chromium, selenium, and more.

We've been calling for strong federal safeguards from EPA during the comment period over the past few months. You've seen more than 2,000 people wanting protection from coal ash rally and then pack the eight EPA public hearings across the U.S. We've helped more than 118,000 concerned citizens send in their comments via email and postcard so far.

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New Coal Ash Hotline and Video

by Bruce Nilles

The comment period for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) proposed coal ash safeguards is winding down, with the deadline being next Friday, Nov. 19th. (Have you submitted your comment yet?)

But just because the deadline is approaching does not mean we're slowing our action on coal ash. It's toxic and must be treated as such.

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Why is the U.S. Helping Finance Fossil Fuels Overseas?

by Bruce Nilles

In a blog post this week, United States Export-Import Bank President Fred Hochberg paints a rosy picture of future trade relations between the United States and key emerging markets such as India and South Africa - one which envisions a revamped American economy fueled by export trade that feeds a growing middle class.

Yet despite this rhetoric, Ex-Im Bank is not only failing to finance a clean energy economy, but it is also saddling dynamic emerging markets with 19th century fuels by propping up an industry only able to survive in a 21st century economy through political maneuvering, enormous subsidies, and misleading PR campaigns.

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RIP, "Clean" Coal

by TheGreenMiles

Rest in peace, "clean" coal. Such a tragic death -- killed by the people who claimed to love it. With "clean" coal's best interests at heart, they blocked the only thing that could've kept it alive: A comprehensive climate & energy bill.

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Coal Industry Continues its Shady Practices

by Bruce Nilles

My colleague said it well yesterday in his response to Tuesday's election results - we will not cede our future to polluters, who again poured tens of millions of dollars into various campaigns.

No surprise here, the coal industry is part of those polluters throwing money around to support candidates who will keep the loopholes and handouts in place and help them block any action on global warming.

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No Solar Energy Until You Eat Up All the Oil

by gmoke

All I know about simple solar at
http://solarray.blogspot.com/...
http://solarray.blogspot.com/...

Solar IS Civil Defense
http://solarray.blogspot.com/...

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BREAKING: KS Gov Sacks Health Official to Please Coal Interests, Republican Legislature

by greendem

Roderick Bremby, the Kansas official who blocked the proposed Sunflower coal plant on global warming and health grounds during the Governorship of Kathleen Sebelius, was forced out of office today by "Democratic" Governor Mark Parkinson in an election-day push designed to avoid media scrutiny.

The move is being seen by Kansans as a dirty-trick designed to please Big Coal and ram through a new plant most Kansans neither want nor need before the EPA steps in with new regulations.

The plant's power would largely be sent out of state, while the pollution would accumulate in state.

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Texas' Fight Against Coal and Coal Ash

by Bruce Nilles

This is the latest in our series of community coal ash profiles. This piece was written by Sierra Club Apprentice Sari Ancel.

Here's lovely daydream if you're from southeast Texas: It's a warm fall afternoon and you're out fishing on the banks of the Colorado River, listening to the sounds of birds migrating south.

Unfortunately, a proposed coal-fired power plant will soon ruin that daydream. There will be no fish to catch because their habitat has long been polluted. Those birds overhead will be flying through smoke plumes from the nearby coal-fired power plant. And forget a quiet afternoon, you'll be hearing the hum of that nearby power plant.

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Risking Arrest to Plant Trees on a Mountaintop Removal Site

by mogmaar

Today 44 volunteer 'reclamation workers' (activists) illegally marched onto a supposedly reclaimed mine site to plant trees.  Why?  Because the 'reclamation' efforts done by the mining company resulted in a barren hillside with sparse grass and baking sun - a far cry from the lush and diverse forest destroyed in the process.  

After negotiating with the police and planting all the trees, all 44 were allowed to leave the site without repurcussions.  

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One More Thing to Worry About in Middle School - Energy Regulations?

by Bruce Nilles

Mary Anne Hitt, the new director of the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign, is a new mom and has some words for those trying to greenwash schoolkids and college students:

As a new mom, I'm paying more attention these days to how big companies are trying to influence our kids. I just learned that one of the biggest blockers of climate action in the U.S. is now bringing its obstructionism to your kid's middle school classroom. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy just released an energy education guide for teachers of 5th - 8th grade.

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