Friday roundup, Oct. 16, 2009

Bodies of some of the six miners killed by a gas explosion inside a coal mine lay in the back of a vehicle in Zulia, near Colombia’s northeastern border with Venezuela, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009. (AP Photo/Efrain Patino)

Six men trapped by an explosion at a coal mine in the Colombian province of Norte de Santander were found dead Wednesday, according to media reports.   Here’s another photo from the scene:

Miners carry the recovered body of one of six fellow miners killed by a gas explosion inside a coal mine in Zulia, near Colombia’s northeastern border with Venezuela, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009. (AP Photo/Efrain Patino)

Media reports are also saying that eleven workers were killed in an explosion at a coal mine in north China’s Ningxia region that also left three people missing.

Meanwhile, my buddy Don Hopey at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports on his city’s version of the Army Corps of Engineers public hearing on mountaintop removal.  And Debra McCown at the Bristol Herald-Courier has a story on the hearing in Big Stone Gap, Va.

In Washington, D.C., this week, there was a big hearing on the letter-faking scandal involving one of the coal industry’s main lobby groups.  More on that from Politico and the AP, via the New York Times.

Speaking of the Times, their reporter Charles Duhigg had another installment of his Toxic Waters series that focused on the coal industry. Here’s the heart of it:

Even as a growing number of coal-burning power plants around the nation have moved to reduce their air emissions, many of them are creating another problem: water pollution. Power plants are the nation’s biggest producer of toxic waste, surpassing industries like plastic and paint manufacturing and chemical plants, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.

Much power plant waste once went into the sky, but because of toughened air pollution laws, it now often goes into lakes and rivers, or into landfills that have leaked into nearby groundwater, say regulators and environmentalists.

And, the Times published this week yet another story on American Electric Power’s carbon capture and storage project at the Mountaineer Plant over in Mason County, W.Va.

The Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh also had this story:

Nicholas J. DeIuliis, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Consol Energy in Cecil, encouraged his fellow executives in the coal industry to meet critics head on yesterday.

In a presentation titled, “Coal Industry Wake-Up Call,” Mr. DeIuliis said contrary to the view of many, clean coal technology does indeed exist and that it has since the 1970s; that greenhouse gases make up only a sliver of the earth’s atmostphere, and human-produced greenhouse gases only a sliver of that sliver; and that the United States needs “a true portfolio” of energy sources that includes fossil fuels along with nuclear and renewables.

And SolveClimate reports in this interesting article:

A year after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the country’s National Action Plan on Climate Change, India appears poised to reject a proposed coal mine that brings together two of the country’s most pressing environmental issues: tiger conservation and climate change.

Closer to home, the Lexington Herald-Leader published an editorial called The Real Faces of Coal:

Fingered as a culprit in global warming and feeling heat from an administration that might actually enforce clean-water laws, the coal industry is ramping up its public relations efforts.

A new multi-state campaign is called FACES of Coal. The acronym (for Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security) puts a human face on the people who mine and move coal and also on coal’s benefits to the average Kentuckian. Chief among them: cheap electricity and the jobs it produces.

For many Kentuckians, though, “faces of coal” conjures up something else, the faces of people and places ravaged by the industry.

Loved ones lost to coal truck or mining accidents, like the Rev. Lonnie Preece of Martin County and Bud Morris of Harlan County.

Or Vina Lucas, 73, of Letcher County, one of many Eastern Kentuckians, who lost their drinkable water to mining.

And my buddy Ry Rivard over at the Charleston Daily Mail had this hard-hitting account of the real impacts of delays in approval of coal-mining permits in West Virginia. It ran at the top of the DM’s front page, under the headline, “Coal climate could affect Coal Bowls.”