Al Jazeera English, the world’s first global English language news channel to be headquartered in the Middle East, aired a ten-minute segment on the energy future war taking place in West Virginia coalfields, and focuses on the struggle over Coal River Mountain.

Shortly after a Senate sub-committee hearing on the anti-mountaintop removal bill the Appalachia Restoration Act (co-sponsored by Senator Lamar Alexandar [R-TN] and Senator Ben Cardin [D-MD]), a letter was released to the public detailing how two subsidiary companies of Arch Coal were encouraging their employees and families to boycott Tennessee in response to Sen. Alexander’s support of the bill. The letter claimed that the two companies had canceled annual company outings to Dollywood in Gatlinburg, and encouraged their almost 1200 employees and their families to not visit the fair state of Tennessee for personal vacation.

Not to be deterred, Senator Alexander reportedly responded that “Every year, millions of tourists come to Tennessee and spend millions of dollars to see our scenic mountaintops, not to see mountains whose tops have been blown off and dumped into streams.”

Since the letter first came out, one of the companies, TECO Coal based in Kentucky, reportedly backed off from its original support of the boycott, stating “We regret our previous action, which was an emotional response that doesn’t benefit our 1,200 employees, the eastern Kentucky communities we support, the environment we work to protect or our neighbors in Tennessee.” Tennessee brings in a reported $14.2 billion in tourism revenue a year, compared to coal, which generates only $67 million for the state.

We would like to encourage our readers to visit Tennessee for vacation this year. We even held our summer staff retreat on the banks of Watauga Lake, near Butler. What a beautiful state.

Read the original story by WV Public Broadcasting, the original letter, and the recent article by the New York Times.

GetEnergySmartNow.com posted an article today examining the escalating violence in the West Virginia coalfields between proponents and opponents of mountaintop removal coal mining. Threats of violence, both in written form and verbally, are growing on a daily basis. Videos posted to YouTube from the June 23 Marsh Fork Elementary School anti-mountaintop removal rally and from the July 4 family festival at Kayford Mountain have garnered numerous comments that are increasingly hostile. How will all of this turn out?

Read the full article on GetEnergySmartNow.com

The latest documentary film to examine mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, “Coal Country,” premiered Saturday, July 11 night to a standing-room-only crowd. While the event was mostly uneventful, during the screening there were boos and heckling from pro-mountaintop removal people in the audience and Capitol Police escorted several coal miners from the building after the screening.

Photojournalist Antrim Caskey was on hand for the event – read her full account at Climate Ground Zero’s blog.

Visit the Coal Country movie website

Read an account by West Virginia Public Broadcasting

The EPA yesterday finally released a list of 44 coal fly ash waste sites with high hazard potential, over-ruling attempts by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the list of high hazard dams private.

More than half of the coal waste ponds on the list are located in just three Appalachia states: twelve in North Carolina, four in West Virginia, and seven in Kentucky.

Members of Congress, lead by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) strongly criticized containment methods for coal fly ash following the TVA ash spill in Harriman, Tennessee last December. Boxer has continually pushed for stronger over-site of fly ash as a hazardous waste product, and successfully fought the recent order by the Department of Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the 44 most toxic sites under wraps for security reasons.

“We are pursuing whether the handling of these sites is consistent with the handling of other similar facilities, because of the critical importance of the public’s right to know about threats in their communities,” Senator Boxer said in a press conference June 12. “If these sites are so hazardous and if the neighborhoods nearby could be harmed irreparably, then I believe it is essential to let people know.”

“Coal combustion waste is subject to very limited regulation – in fact, there are stronger protections for household garbage than for coal ash across the country.”

Last week, Appalachian Voices learned that a miner may have been injured during a non-violent act of civil disobedience that took place June 18th, when 14 activists climbed a dragline on a mine site. They were calling on the Obama Administration to end mountaintop removal coal mining. Though most reports now indicate that health concerns with the miner were unrelated to the protest incident, conflicting reports about the injury are still being resolved*. Appalachian Voices would like to issue the following statement:

Appalachian Voices recognizes the legitimate need for people to engage in non-violent acts of civil disobedience when the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government fail to protect them from the wanton abuses of powerful corporations and institutions. However, any acts of violence committed during civil disobedience–whether by protesters, antagonists or governmental authorities–must be fully investigated and all perpetrators brought to justice.

Mountain Aid – THIS WEEKEND!!

Music is often moving, but only once in a while does it help stop mountains from moving. That is the hope behind the inaugural Mountain Aid festival, taking place this Friday through Sunday, June 19 – 21, at the Shakori Hills festival grounds just south of Chapel Hill in Chatham County, NC. Mountain Aid is being billed as “a concert to end mountaintop removal and create a clean energy future for North Carolina and beyond.”

Mountain Aid will raise funds for the Pennies of Promise campaign to build a new school for the children of Marsh Fork Elementary. Located in Raleigh County, W. Va., the school sits just 225 feet from a coal loading silo that releases chemical-laden coal dust and 400 yards from a 385-foot tall leaking sludge dam with a nearly 3 billion gallon capacity.

Just last week, a West Virginia court approved the construction of a second coal silo to be built even closer to the school. Independent studies have shown the school to be full of coal dust.

Headlining the festival will be Grammy Award-winning country artist Kathy Mattea, whose recent release, COAL, deals specifically with the West Virginia native’s many personal ties to the subject. Raised near Charleston, W. Va., her mining heritage runs throughout both sides of the family: both her parents grew up in coal camps, both her grandfathers were miners, and her mother worked for the local United Mine Workers Association union office. Mattea’s father was saved from the mines by an uncle who paid his way through college.

Other performers include rising cello star Ben Sollee, festival favorites Donna The Buffalo, upbeat reggae-tinged rockers the Sim Redmond Band and more.

Pennies of Promise
When his granddaughter returned home from school sick, Pennies of Promise founder Ed Wiley fought to get the school moved away from the massive neighboring mountain top removal mine despite government inaction. According to West Virginia state officials, construction of a new school is a fiscal impossibility, but that was not going to keep Wiley and scores of concerned citizens from taking it upon themselves to come to the children’s aid.

To kick off the campaign, Wiley presented West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin with $400 in pennies. He then walked more than 300 miles from his home in Rock Creek, W. Va. all the way to Washington, D.C. to continue the fight. Funds generated by Mountain Aid will help the Pennies of Promise campaign move closer to their goal of $8 million to fund the new school and move the children out of harm’s way. For more information on the nonprofit, click to www.penniesofpromise.org.

Mountain Aid is sponsored by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC), a nonprofit organization formed in 1987 whose mission is to organize and maintain a diverse grassroots organization dedicated to the improvement and preservation of the environment through education, grassroots organizing and coalition building, leadership development and media outreach.

Tickets for Mountain Aid are $30 at the gate. Tent camping passes are $10 and vehicle camping passes are $40. For more information, click to www.mtnaid.com.

Story by David Brewer

According to a report released today by The Pew Charitable Trusts, green jobs—Pew dubs these “clean energy jobs”— across the country grew at a national rate of 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007, while traditional jobs grew by only 3.7 percent, a difference of nearly two and a half times. State levels also showed growth in clean energy outperformed overall job growth in 38 states and the District of Columbia during the same time period.

And this growth has happened despite a lack of sustained government support for clean energy jobs. According to the report, by 2007 more than 68,200 businesses across the nation accounted for about 770,000 jobs.

By comparison, fossil-fuel industries—including utilities, coal mining and oil and gas extraction—comprised about 1.27 million workers in 2007.

Green industries are also creating well-paying jobs people of all skill levels and educational backgrounds, including engineers, plumbers, administrative assistants, construction workers, machine setters, marketing consultants, teachers and many others, with annual incomes ranging from $21,000 to $111,000.

Read the full press release on their website.

Appalachian Voices has filed a Freedom of Information Act request objecting to the secrecy over a new federal study focused on the safety of 15 high-risk sludge dams.

The study, by the federal Office of Surface Mine and Reclamation Enforcement, will be the first to combine elements of dam volume and downstream populations in a risk assessment. Although the engineering work is complete, release of the study is being held up so that coal companies and the state of West Virginia can review it, OSMRE said.

“Given the current state of emergency and severe flooding in West Virginia, we believe that this information has a direct bearing on vital issues of public safety,” Appalachian Voices said in a letter to OSMRE.

“We think that the government should not, indeed cannot in good conscience, wait for the document to be prepared in such a way as to satisfy stakeholders, but rather, that engineering data and draft conclusions must be released to the public immediately.”

Until recently, no federal office had taken a systematic approach to studying the safety of these earthen dams.

A previous FOIA request to the OSMRE this spring by Appalachian Voices revealed that since the late 1990s, the government has studied the safety of only a handful of “randomly selected” sludge dams. Those selected were among the smallest and newest in the region.

Greenpeace is calling for renewed leadership from President Obama and Congress following the release of the drastically weakened Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill today. The American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) was already in need of improvement when first released as a discussion draft in March, and has become severely worse as members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee actively worked to weaken the bill on behalf of fossil fuels industries and other corporate polluters.

“Despite the best efforts of Chairman Waxman, this bill has been seriously undermined by the lobbying of industries more concerned with profits than the plight of our planet. While science clearly tells us that only dramatic action can prevent global warming and its catastrophic impacts, this bill has fallen prey to political infighting and industry pressure. We cannot support this bill in its current state…”

Read the entire release and statement by Greenpeace

This just in from Jeff Bigger’s blog on Huffington post:

As American citizens in Mingo County and other areas of the flood-stricken Kentucky and West Virginia coalfields continue to dig themselves out of the muck, indefatigable Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward is reporting on his Coal Tattoo blog that the EPA has “signed off on almost all (87.5 percent, to be exact) of the mountaintop removal permits that has so far been reviewed under the initiative announced in March.”

Ward has just posted a letter dated yesterday from the EPA to US Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), announcing that:

“EPA has raised environmental concerns with six pending permit applications in the Corps’ Huntington District out of a total of approximately forty-eight we have reviewed. We have advised the Corps that EPA does not intend to provide additional comments on the remaining forty-two permits. The Corps may proceed with appropriate permit decisions on those remaining projects.”

READ THE FULL POST

By Robin Bravender, E&E reporter

(05/01/2009) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced today that the aging Capitol Power Plant will no longer burn coal, a practice that has long been criticized by environmental groups.

Stephen Ayers, the acting architect of the capitol, has reported that coal would be burned at the plant only if it is needed as an emergency backup. The Architect of the Capitol made the transition to natural gas as the primary fuel source for generating steam in March, according to a statement from Pelosi’s office.

In February, days before a scheduled protest against coal combustion at the plant, Pelosi and Reid called on Ayers to switch the plant entirely to natural gas (E&ENews PM, Feb. 26).

“For years, the Capitol Power Plant has been the largest source of carbon emissions on the Capitol Complex,” Reid said today. “The Architect’s switch to cleaner burning natural gas shows that the House and Senate are leading by example in reducing our emissions. I look forward to working with the Architect’s office to achieve even greater energy savings and efficiency through our greening programs.”

The nearly century-old plant, located just south of House office buildings, has been a contentious issue for years in Congress. Environmentalists and D.C. residents have continually called for the plant to stop burning coal, while lawmakers from coal-producing states have fought efforts to switch the plant entirely to natural gas.

Converting another boiler to burn natural gas will allow the plant to eliminate the use of coal even in the case of emergency situations, Ayers told Pelosi in an April 24 letter. The conversion could be completed as early as November 2010 or as late as October 2011, he said.