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This week, in the heart of one of the nation’s best potential wind energy-producing regions, the Powder River Basin, the Obama administration handed away thousands of acres of federal land — land owned by you and me — to the coal industry.
Coal companies have been pushing to expand mining in the West, and they are no doubt uncorking champagne right now in celebration of this enormous gift. But for those of us who aren’t coal executives, the giveaway comes at a high cost.
The new coal will spew nearly 4 billion tons of carbon pollution into our air — the equivalent of building 300 new coal-fired power plants, or twice the amount of new coal plants proposed by the Bush-Cheney Energy Plan back in 2001. It’s not just the global warming pollution that’s worrisome. Burning coal produces all kinds of other toxic chemicals linked to serious health

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar yesterday announced an enormous expansion in coal-mining that dwarfs the Obama administration’s clean energy initiatives — suggesting that President Obama’s response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster increasingly involves doubling down on other forms of dirty, unsafe energy.
A statement from Wild Earth Guardians, Sierra Club, and Defenders of Wildlife put the announcement in perspective:
In other words, despite his administration’s rhetorical embrace of clean energy, when push comes to shove, Obama is effectively using modest wind and solar investments as cover for a broader embrace of dirty fuels. It’s the same strategy BP, Chevron, and other major polluters use: tout modest environmental investments in multimillion dollar PR campaigns, while putting the real money into fossil fuel development.
President Obama seems to be rushing to make this embrace even tighter: in the last week, the administration announced four new permits for deepwater offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — the same type of exploration that led to the BP oil spill disaster – even as a huge new oil sheen covers the Gulf of Mexico and inundates Louisiana

When you bought your last Apple iPod, you may have been aware that it had been manufactured at a factory in China, perhaps the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen in the province of Guangzhou. (Let’s put aside for the moment the working conditions there.) You may have been aware too that in manufacturing your electronic marvel, the Shenzhen plant emitted roughly 25 pounds of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It’s even possible that you were aware of the 9-10 pounds of CO2 emitted in transporting the device to you from China. (See Apple’s environmental report for the iPod classic [PDF].)
Here’s what you probably didn’t take into account: The coal that powered the Foxconn plant in the south of China likely was mined in the far northern province of Shanxi, transported by truck or rail to coal terminals on the coast (e.g., the port city of Tianjin), and from there shipped by freighter to Shenzhen in the far

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Update on Japan’s nuke crisis: Tap water warning lifted for Tokyo infants, but spreading elsewhere; Workers at stricken plant hospitalized for radiation exposure; Nukes now less popular in the US (for some reason); King crab invasion at the South Pole; PLUS: Japanese villages struggle to maintain tradition amidst disaster… All that and more in today’s Green News Report!…
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): Head exploder: GOPer wants creationism taught in school; WorldWaterDay: Which nations are most at risk?; BP Oil Disaster: Pipe piece caused blowout preventer failure; Google Maps now displaying EV charging stations; GA tree farm re-establishing American Chestnut; USDA gives GM crops boost over organics; Road salt killing Twin Cities’ lakes; EU Chief: French GM maize ban illegal; HUGE lease sale for WY coal; Lead, chemicals taint some urban gardens; EPA, DOJ sue MI’s largest coal plant; Canada is getting warmer: study …

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Not out of the woods yet: Japan’s nuclear and humanitarian crisis continues as electricity returns to the Fukushima nuclear plant which remains precariously on edge while radiation poisoning is found in milk, vegetables and sea water — but Japan’s wind farms come to the rescue and new nuke reviews are set for US plants; PLUS: Surprise! A new 100-mile oil slick spotted in the Gulf of Mexico … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): New tech could make desalination portable, cheaper; Delay in coal plant rules cost thousands of lives; Record rains hit Philipines, cause more flooding in Australia; German town where recycling really pays; US Chamber of Commerce: “The gang that couldn’t lobby straight”; New UK plastic recycling plant takes all sorts; How not to change a climate skeptic’s mind; Shipwreck threatens island’s penguins; Wolves could be de-listed; King Crabs Invade Antarctica for First Time in 40 Million Years …

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

The biggest single source of electricity in the United States is coal-fired power plants. And that electricity is way too expensive. The Environmental Protection Agency this past week proposed a rule to make that electricity much cheaper.
You see, burning coal has the unfortunate side effect of releasing mercury and arsenic into the air. It is generally agreed that burning coal for electricity puts at least 48 tons of mercury into the air — the largest unregulated source of

Any day now, the United States’ export credit agency, the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), is expected to decide on whether or not it will help finance the construction of one of the world’s largest coal plants. Located in South Africa, the 4800 MW behemoth, known as Kusile, would be the size of about 10 typical coal plants in the US. On top of the tens of millions of tons of climate polluting gases it would spew out every year, Kusile would create a public health nightmare for poor South Africans living in already overly polluted

A 42-year-old coal miner in southern Illinois recently asked me a question I couldn’t answer: Who took Van Jones’ job in the Obama administration as the green jobs administrator?
Anxious to find a job in another field in a depressed town with no industry (but cross-country truck driving opportunities), my coal miner friend recognized that Van Jones understood, as a I wrote a year ago, that strip-mining operations have blindsided any progress for sustainable or diversified economic development and clean energy jobs in coal mining regions from Appalachia to Alaska.
Van Jones, alone in Washington, had included coal miners in his green jobs crusade.
Love mountains and miners? Want to end mountaintop removal strip-mining and get floundering labor, greens and jobs-scared coal-rich state Democrats at the same table?
It’s time to campaign for a joint public/private Coalfields Regeneration Fund.
Or, as my coal miner friend in southern Illinois badgered me, if the federal and state governments can provide billions of dollars in subsidies for multinational coal corporations during record years of profits, why can’t we establish a specific fund to assist impoverished coalfield communities into clean industries?
This coal miner, like many I have interviewed over the past decade, can’t wait to find another

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IN TODAY’S SPECIAL RADIO REPORT: Natural disaster, humanitarian disaster, and now man-made disaster, as 50 nuclear plant workers are all that stand in the way of full nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in Japan … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): Politifact says GOP lies about gas prices; 5 myths about EPA agenda; House GOP votes to discard science; CA farmers: pesticides vs. new bike paths;

As the second explosion at a nuclear power plant in Japan blew the roof off a containment area today, and authorities attempted to downplay the radiation fallout unleashed by the devastating earthquake, I’ve been thinking about the “Big Shake” in my southern Illinois coalfields and Big Coal’s policy of denial:
Why is Peabody Energy building one of the biggest coal-fired plants in the nation in the New Madrid Seismic zone?
A boondoggle in the making, the Peabody Prairie Energy plant has already doubled in construction costs–the ballooning $4.4 billion price tag will now be shouldered on utility ratepayers, among others.
But the spiraling costs–not to mention the 12 million tons of CO2 emissions that will annually be released–are nothing compared to a potential earthquake disaster.
Peabody’s 1,600-megawatt pulverized-coal plant is being built in Lively Grove, in southern Illinois–between the Wabash seismic and New Madrid fault lines. Anyone with a lick of history knows what happened in Lively Grove during the “Big Shake” of 1811, when the largest earthquake in US history in nearby New Madrid, Missouri altered the very waterways that will feed into the Peabody mine-mouth operation.
In brief: In the early hours of December 11, 1811, a rumbling noise swept across the southern Illinois region like a guttural moan of thunder. Then came the shocks and

The current budget wars in Washington are exposing a rift in American politics that finally puts to pasture the long used and abused labels “conservative” and “liberal.” I propose a new set of political terms that more accurately reflect the ideological battle taking place as Congress debates how to spend American dollars in a tough economy. Just as Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon characters, the futuristic Jetsons and the Stone Age Flintstones, met up in the 1987 cartoon “The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones,” two camps with wildly different mindsets are meeting on the floors of Congress. This budgetary battle is being fought between the Jetsonians and the Flintstonians.
The Flintstonian-proposed cuts in environmental protection, family planning and health care, and their war on collective bargaining reveal an ideological agenda that belies fiscal

This past Saturday, Premier Wen Jiabao delivered his 2011 “Report on the Work of the Government” to the 3,000 delegates gathered in Beijing for the National People’s Congress. The report, delivered annually, is comparable to U.S. President’s State of the Union Address, laying out the successes of the past year and the direction the government plans to take in the next year. But, as this is a year that the Congress will issue the next Five-Year Plan (the 12th), Wen’s report looks beyond 2011, down the road as far as 2015.
Parsing the “Report on the Work of the Government” is no easier than parsing the State of the Union

A Harvard University study published on Feb 17, 2011, has determined that the true costs of using coal to generate electricity in America are between $330 and $500 billion dollars annually. The study, “Mining Coal, Mounting Costs — The Life Cycle Consequences of Coal” by the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment examines the costs for so-called “cheap coal” that don’t show up on the monthly electric bill: the so-called “externalities” or hidden costs. In a time of huge budget deficits, Americans — and our leaders in Washington — should be looking at these costs.
All businesses try to externalize their

When President Obama conferred the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal on several American heroes yesterday, including Kentucky poet Wendell Berry, he forgot one last award: The Medal of Freedom to Tim DeChristopher.
Instead of being convicted today on two felony accounts for placing bids and disrupting an auction for pristine wilderness Utah sites that would have been opened to gas and oil exploration, 27-year-old Tim DeChristopher should have been receiving our nation’s highest honor for “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States.”
In truth, according to DeChristopher supporters, the leases auctioned to DeChristopher were later overturned by the Obama administration on the grounds that the George W. Bush administration’s Bureau of Land Management had failed to complete the analysis required by federal law for the “protection of national and cultural resources.”
Mr. President: Just as Rev. Martin Luther King,

China may be the epicenter of the global environmental crisis. Along the Yangtze, Yellow and Pearl rivers, fragile ecosystems meet the world’s largest population and most rapacious economy. In an epic journey, Jonathan Watts, the Guardian’s Asia environment correspondent, has visited the places where the world’s factory is bursting at the environmental seams. In a new book, he reports what he has seen.
On his journey, Watts passes through the logging towns of China’s far North and the cancer villages of industrial

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Dems call for probe in U.S. Chamber of Commerce plot to target citizens like us; Indictment in WV coal mine disaster investigation; Deepwater drilling permits resume in the Gulf, but that’s still not good enough for Republicans; Climate scientists in fake ‘ClimateGate Scandal’ vindicated — AGAIN; PLUS: More on the WI GOP power play to privatize Wisconsin’s power plants … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): NYT “fracking” bombshell: toxic & radioactive water dumped in rivers; US

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Oil prices spike on Libya unrest; Gettin’ gassy at the Oscars; Hidden costs of coal; Air pollution deadlier than cocaine … PLUS: Unrest in the Midwest, powered by Koch (the Billionaire Koch Brothers, that is) … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): (see links below): Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily, still dead; Americans trust the EPA over Congress; 10 Ways Rising Oil Prices Endanger the

As American kids, we were raised on the culture-defining parable of The Little Engine that Could… an early industrial age tale of a little blue steam engine that through positive thinking (“I think I can”) and sheer determination overcame the greatest of obstacles.
I have often thought that the steep uphill climb faced by advocates of renewable energy was like the “little blue engine” of the post-industrial age. Is it possible to power that steam engine of economic growth with renewables like wind and solar instead of coal and oil?
I was first faced with this question as the director of Greenpeace’s international Atmosphere and Energy program in 1991, and at the time it seemed like a near impossible

With the nation challenged by two grinding wars, a struggling economy and mounting debt, House Republicans used their new majority status this week to go on a reckless rampage against essential health and environmental safeguards Americans everywhere both depend on and expect.
Under the guise of deficit reduction, the GOP launched an unprecedented assault on public health, clean air, fresh water, open space and wildlife. This attack on our environment won’t take a nibble out of our deficit, but it will take the teeth out of needed protections.
The winners, instead, are corporate polluters like Big Oil, cement makers and coal companies that blow the tops off of mountains and leave the landscape in ruins. The losers are Americans everywhere who expect responsible leadership from the Congress and a decent modicum of corporate stewardship from

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
A Bolivian judge ordered Chevron this week to pay $8.6 billion in damages for polluting the Amazon rainforest from 1964 until 1990. The payout is the second largest ever in an environmental case, with only the damages BP agreed to pay in the wake of last summer’s Deepwater Horizon spill being higher. Environmental lawyers and advocates hailed the case as a landmark victory, but as Rebecca Tarbotton reports at AlterNet, Chevron is still planning to fight the case. “In fact, the oil giant has repeatedly refused to pay for a clean up even if ordered to by the court,” she

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Heavier storms now definitely linked to climate change… But one MT legislator says “Bring it on”; Score one for the whales; PLUS: Oil subsidies, shmoil-shmubsidies — Republicans vs. Obama’s budget and Big Bird vs. Big Oil

Editor’s note: Live updates will be filed as the historic sit-in and march against mountaintop removal mining unfold today in Frankfort, Kentucky.
Day 4 of the historic sit-in: Valentine’s Day in the Kentucky governor’s office.
As thousands of protesters descend on the Kentucky capitol in Frankfort today for the “I Love Mountains” march today to end mountaintop removal mining, the 14 sit-in Kentucky Rising protesters inside the governor’s office have electrified the clean energy movement across the nation with an unflinching and inspiring valentine for the country:
This is the year to end mountaintop removal mining.
Talk about “one love.” Across the 48 states that rely on coal-fired electricity, we are all connected to the egregious human rights and environmental crime of mountaintop removal mining.
Every reader can simply go to this website and enter his or her zip code and see their connection to coal-fired electricity supplied by coal strip-mined from mountaintop removal or other strip-mining operations.
Despite limited EPA moves to reduce the damage of mountaintop removal operations to waterways and communities, devastating mountaintop removal mining, which provides less than 5-8 percent of our national coal production, takes place in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, southwest Virginia and eastern

As the sun rose on the Frankfort capitol in Kentucky on this beautiful winter morning, 14 anti-mountaintop removal activists were already in meetings on the third day of their historic protest. After marking the second night on the floors and chairs in their Kentucky Rising occupation of Gov. Steve Beshear’s office, four of the sit-in participants, including the celebrated author Wendell Berry, appeared at the east capitol entrance for an exclusive interview with Huffington Post blogger Jeff Biggers and Kentucky filmmaker Ben Evans.

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

As the nation’s beloved author/farmer philosopher Wendell Berry settled his 76-year-old lanky frame onto the floor of Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear’s office last night, he picked up a copy of The Tempest. But in joining other protesters in this extraordinary sit-in to halt reckless mountaintop removal mining, including a coal miner and inspector who dedicated 40 years of his life to the industry, a Harlan County activist whose brother was killed in a mine, a nurse who has served black lung-affected coal miners for decades, and some of the country’s top Appalachian labor and history scholars, Berry was not taking part in any Shakespeare spectacle.
When Prospero commands in the classic play, “We are such stuff, as dreams are made on,” Kentuckians, who have lived among the ravages of strip-mining for a century–and mountaintop removal operations since 1970–were making it clear that they can no longer wait for the elusive dream of coalfield justice and democracy in their own homeland of central Appalachia.
(Photo of Wendell Berry reading The Tempest by Silas House)
When Martin Luther King wrote his game-changing letter for the Civil Rights movement on the need for civil disobedience, “Why We Can’t Wait” from the Birmingham, Alabama jail in 1963, the neighbors and families of these same Kentuckians were already in the throes of a growing movement to stop the devastation from unyielding and increasingly lawless strip-mining operations.
While King sought “to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,” besieged strip-mined residents in Knott County in eastern Kentucky organized their own sit-ins and protests to keep unchecked strip-miners from destroying their historic homelands and hillsides and watersheds. They exclaimed to the world: “We feel we have been forsaken.”
As early as 1965, a 50-car convey of coalfield residents made the same trek as today’s protesters to the governor’s office in Frankfort, and called on him to enact enforceable laws to keep absentee coal companies from “ruining our farms and fields and streams.”
Yesterday’s meeting between the sit-in activists and