In this photo released by Greenpeace, volunteers display a banner at a coal-fired power plant in western Beijing on Tuesday, July 28, 2009. China’s top ten power companies and their heavy reliance on coal are hindering the country’s efforts to tackle climate change, Greenpeace said in a report released on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Greenpeace, John Novis)

As Coal Tattoo has tried to get across, the conflicts over coal raging in Southern West Virginia are actually happening to one extent or another all over the world. Coal is a major contributor to climate change. But it’s also considered an abundant and — if you don’t count the externalized costs — a cheap fuel. People around the planet are wrestling with what to do about it.

The photo above coincides with Greenpeace’s release of a new report  on coal power in China. It’s worth a read.

One of the major coal stories this week was the release of a TVA Inspector General’s report that detailed TVA’s failure to do anything about the repeated warnings that a coal-ash impoundment in East Tennessee could fail.

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There was a lot of coverage of coal issues over the weekend, highlighted by Rick Wilson’s great commentary on the Perspectives page of the Sunday Gazette-Mail. If you missed it, click here, because it’s worth a read.

Rick, who also does the wonderful Goat Rope blog,  compares the ongoing mountaintop removal debate to a Greek tragedy, saying:

There aren’t easy answers in a tragic situation. Mining is a fact of life now, but its future is uncertain. Nobody knows what is going to happen and some things are not within our span of control. But we could at least start thinking about the opportunities that exist and will grow in an emerging greener economy.

We could pay attention to some ideas put forward by Create West Virginia, which emphasize that in order to move to a high road creative economy, we need to focus on talent, technology, tolerance and quality of life issues, which include having the kind of place where creative and productive people will want to live and work.

We could also start taking advantage of existing opportunities for job creation under the Abandoned Mine Lands program and newer federal initiatives while we’re trying to figure out everything else. It might also make sense to consider devoting a portion of severance tax revenue to economic development projects in the coalfields.

And instead of blindly denying climate change, we should face up to the probability that the world is going to get serious about it. You can put Galileo under house arrest, but you can’t stop the earth from moving.

Also in Sunday’s Gazette-Mail, I had a story about a U.S. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement report that detailed major problems in the way the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is policing mountaintop removal mining:

At virtually every site, there were certain areas where the actual measured ground surface was significantly above or below the proposed lines shown in the permit.

I apologize that I haven’t posted a copy of the report online. But, the version I have is a draft that was provided to me by a source. And it has some of that source’s notes on it, and posting it would expose that source to potential problems — so I won’t be able to post the report at this time. Hopefully, OSMRE will move pretty quickly to finalize the document and release a final version.

Also this weekend, The Washington Post did its own story on the effort by strip-mine workers in Southern West Virginia to boycott tourism trips to Tennessee to protest Sen. Lamar Alexander’s support for a bill to ban mountaintop removal. The story was reprinted here by the Tennessean.

In West Virginia, there is news out today from the Clarksburg Exponent  that the WVDEP has approved a significant expansion of a CONSOL Energy slurry impoundment in Harrison County.

And, here’s a report today from the Roanoke Times, which says that the price of coal and efforts to control its pollution are increasing power costs in Appalachia …

Happy Monday everybody.

A laborer works at a coal trader’s yard in Allahabad, India, Sunday, July 19, 2009. (AP Photo/ Rajesh Kumar Singh)

Earlier this week, I posted on Coal Tattoo a statement from the West Virginia Council of Churches, calling for peaceful dialogue in the coalfields … it included this from the gospel of Mattew:

Love you enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. For in doing so you will show yourselves children of your heavenly father who sends rain on the just and the unjust.

On the Huffington Post, Jeff Biggers this week called for Jimmy Carter to make his next peacekeeping mission one to the Appalachian coalfields:

Never has Carter’s hands-on determination for economic revival and reconciliation between divided communities been more needed in the most polarized part of our country — the devastated coalfields of Appalachia.

It being on the Huffington Post and all, a lot of people probably read Jeff’s commentary. Probably nowhere near as many are reading Coal Tattoo, or are checking out what my friend Rick Wilson has written on his Goat Rope blog this week, taking up where this left off, and expressing what I’ve been feeling for some time — that things are really coming to a head in a way that isn’t helpful for anyone, and that might get someone hurt or killed.

Rick started off with “Dark as a Dungeon,” in which he says:

… The powers that be here will resist any climate change legislation or regulations of mining with the same intensity that those in the south resisted desegregation …  state political leaders will try to outdo each other in positioning themselves as defenders of the status quo–even some of the ones who know better … it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody gets killed. If that happens, it will probably be at the hands of people inflamed by over-heated rhetoric.

… When it’s all over, people will wish they’d done things differently … I’d really like to be wrong about all of this.

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