coal mining

The collision between environmental protection and coal extraction is nothing new to the Appalachian states, which are home to some of the largest coal deposits in the world. But in the middle of an unemployment crisis — and with a new administration showing signs of cracking down harshly on the destructive practice of mountaintop removal [...]

At the request of the federal government, a federal judge yesterday put a temporary halt to the legal clash over Appalachia’s largest mountaintop coal mine, the 2,300 acre Spruce No. 1 project in Southern West Virginia.
That project is slated to bury more than seven miles of mountain streams, leading to a protracted legal battle with [...]

Following up on our earlier post about senators’ requests for more funding for carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technology in the Senate bill, we were wondering just how much of its own money the coal industry spends on CCS.
Turns out, the average coal company spends very little.

Missed this over the long holiday weekend, but The Washington Post on Friday published a biting op-ed from Robert Kennedy Jr. in which the prominent environmental activist calls mountaintop coal mining “the worst environmental tragedy in American history” and attacks the Obama administration for doing far too little to end the destruction.
His wrap-up of what’s [...]

Bouncing around the InterWeb, one might get curious about what exactly mountaintop removal involves. And so one might do a Google on “mountaintop mining.” And one might click on the first link, which is an industry-sponsored site called mountaintopmining.com. And there one would read interesting statements claiming that blowing the tops off the nation’s oldest [...]

Amid much criticism that banks are refusing to lend for reasons of profit, one bank is refusing to lend for reasons of principle.
Bank of America on Wednesday announced that it will phase out its financing for companies that focus on mountaintop coal mining. That process — in which miners blast the tops off of mountains [...]