Rescuers gather at the entrance of a shaft of Malishu Coal Mine in Shuangbai County, Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China’s Yunnan Province, Dec. 28, 2009. Five miners are dead and six are missing after a gas burst at the Malishu Coal Mine early Monday, local authorities said. (Xinhua/Chen Haining)

Back-to-back coal mining explosions in China this week have killed at least 18 miners, and the death count may rise because of other workers who are missing.

At least 12 workers died in a gas explosion Sunday at the Donggou Colliery in Jiexiu City, Shanxi province in Northern China. And early Monday, another explosion killed at least six in southwest China’s Yunnan Province.

Closer to home, the great Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Ralph Dunlop profiled miner and mine safety crusader Scott Howard in this piece. He quotes Howard:

My ancestors fought for better safety, and I’m not gonna go back. I’m not dependent on that company. I’m dependent on God. And God don’t put us here to be trampled on, mistreated.

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Steam and smoke is seen over the coal burning power plant in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2009. Coal power plants are among the biggest producer of CO2, that is believed to be responsible for climate change. Delegates from 193 nations at a U.N. climate talks conference in Copenhagen are deadlocked in talks on a deal to curb global warming. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

It’s been an interesting year — to say the least — here in the Appalachian coalfields.

So what do Coal Tattoo readers think are the biggest coal-related stories of 2009? Please join in with your comments, and provide links to articles that illustrate your point. To get things started, here are some ideas, offered in no particular order — and without defining what is meant by the “biggest” story … I’ll leave that to you to decide. Here we go:

– The U.S. House and a Senate committee moved forward with strong legislation to try to deal with global warming. Despite the United Mine Workers union’s statement that the House bill would ensure the future of coal, many industry officials continue to oppose congressional action. Some factions in the coal industry, led by Massey’s Don Blankenship, try to convince coalfield residents there’s no such thing as global warming and sponsor rallies against any action on the issue.

– The Obama administration announced plans for a crackdown on mountaintop removal, saying various agencies would be taking unprecedented steps to reduce the impacts of this form of mining.

– A variety of factors – the economic downturn, declining reserves, and concerns about global warming — are major setbacks for the coal industry, especially in Central Appalachia.  More and more, analysts are talking about the region soon reaching “Peak Coal” and then seeing production and jobs steadily decline. No new coal-fired power plants were started in 2009.

– Coalfield residents and activists from around the country carried out a series of peaceful civil disobedience protests  aimed at shutting down mountaintop removal operations and pressuring government agencies to ban mountaintop removal.

– Coal miners, their families and supporters fought back, mounting counter-protests and, according to the latest dispatch by the AP’s Vicki Smith, creating fears that violence would erupt as the mountaintop removal issue continues to heat up.

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Climate refugee Abul Mia, who lost his home to floods, carries coal at a brick field on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, Dec. 17, 2009. Disagreements between developing and developed countries, especially between China and the United States, which together emit about 40 percent of the world’s heat-trapping greenhouse gases, have hindered progress at the U.N. climate conference, which many say will end without a deal. (AP Photo/ Pavel Rahman)

This was a fascinating photograph, I thought, that includes so many important elements about coal, climate change, and the future of the world.

Of course, Bangladesh is at great risk from rising sea levels caused by global warming.  But it also uses coal, for things like a brick industry and household heating. And, at least according to this report, the country is trying to improve its environmental performance in these areas.

As I write this, we still don’t know for sure what’s going to come out of the Copenhagen climate talks. I’m sure we’ll be talking about that for some time, though. So much of what’s going on there is about the understandable desire of other nations and other people to develop.  And smart people are trying to ensure that we rich countries at least try to help the developing world avoid the mistakes we’ve made along the way.

It’s interesting, then, that carbon capture and storage for coal gets shut out of the picture, as reported previously on Coal Tattoo and now in a follow-up Wall Street Journal blog post. As Gene Trisko of the United Mine Workers told me in an e-mail message this week:

CCS is not included on the list of technologies that can qualify for CDM projects under Kyoto (neither is nuclear).  This means that a US firm investing in CCS in China cannot earn CDM credits for the CO2 reduced.

West Virginia Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, blogged about this in a dispatch from Copenhagen:

Carbon capture is our most important tool to address carbon dioxide emissions from coal.  It will not only benefit a state like mine with jobs and revenue, it will also benefit our nation and world by making clean coal a reality. 

It’s irresponsible that negotiators in Copenhagen seem to have brushed it aside.

A Coal Tattoo reader pointed out this interesting piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail, focusing on reactions to Copenhagen and climate change legislation in the heart of U.S. coal country, Greene County, Pa.  Here’s how it starts out:

Almost anywhere you plant your feet in fatefully named Greene County, Pa., you are likely to be standing on a bed of coal, the condemnable, combustible rock whose future is now being framed 6,500 kilometres away at a global climate-change summit in Copenhagen.

On some patches of this quiet stretch of the Allegheny Plateau all that remains below are the pillars of coal left standing to prevent the ground above from collapsing when the area was mined starting a century ago to feed Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills 100 kilometres north in Pittsburgh.

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