Coal and Oil Driving Climate
John Denver's Country Roads Parody: Almost level, West Virginia: Watch the Music Video
I met John Denver when I lived in Colorado and worked at Rocky Mountain Institute (in a place he helped build). I'm quite sure he would have approved of this spoof of his classic song:
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Meet Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy Company.
Meet Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy Company. Blankenship is also on the Board of Directors of the US Chamber of Commerce. In this speech above, he denies climate change, derisively refers to Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, and others as "greeniacs", and calls them all crazy. Watch the speech, you'll see. In his mind, "the greeniacs are taking over the world."
Massey Energy Company, Blankenship's highly successful strip-mining and mountaintop removal operation is the parent company of Performance Coal Co, where a tragic explosion occurred on April 5th. As of this writing, 25 miners have died and 4 more are still missing. Twenty-five families are without a loved one. Four more may discover they have lost someone they love too. 29 families in all, forever changed by one single, violent event in a coal mine. One single violent event in a coal mine run by a company so obsessed with profit it runs roughshod over employees' and neighbors' health and safety.
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Don Blankenship's Mine In Montcoal Has Been Cited For Over 3,000 Violations, Over $2.2 Million In Fines
Massey Energy is actively contesting millions of dollars of fines for safety violations at its West Virginia coal mine where disaster struck yesterday afternoon. Twenty-five miners were killed and another four are missing after a explosion took place at 3 pm Monday at Massey subsidiary Performance Coal Co.'s Upper Big Branch Mine-South between the towns of Montcoal and Naoma. It is "the most people killed in a U.S. mine since 1984, when 27 died in a fire at Emery Mining Corp.'s mine in Orangeville, Utah." This deadly mine has been cited for over 3,000 violations by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), 638 since 2009:
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Major safety lapses at mine long before blast
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - At the sprawling coal mine where 25 perished in an explosion this week, regulators found that dirty air was being directed into an escapeway where fresh air should be. An emergency air system was flowing in the wrong direction, which could leave workers without fresh air in their primary escape route.
Terry Moore, the mine foreman, told officials that he was aware of one of the problems found during a January inspection and that it had been occurring for about three weeks.
The air-flow problems are among a string of safety violations that federal inspectors found in the months and days leading up to the deadliest mining disaster in more than a quarter-century.
"Mr. Moore engaged in aggravated conduct constituting more than ordinary negligence in that he was aware of the condition," the Mine Safety and Health Administration wrote in fining the company a combined $130,000.
Miners were so concerned about the conditions that several told their congressman they were afraid to go back into the mine.
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In March 2010, 53 new safety citations were issued for Massey's mine, including violations of its mine ventilation plan
MONTCOAL, W.Va. - As rescue workers waited anxiously on Wednesday to re-enter the Upper Big Branch mine where at least 25 people were killed in a deadly blast this week, federal officials said two safety citations were made against the mine's operator on the day of the explosion.
According to newly released records from the Mine Safety and Health Administration, one of the citations issued Monday against the operator, the Massey Energy Company, was for failing to properly insulate and seal spliced electrical cables. That citation was for a problem outside the blast area and the error was fixed immediately, federal mine safety officials said.
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MASSEY'S MARTIN COUNTY COAL-SLURRY DISASTER
Martin County Slurry Disaster Three Times the Volume of the Exxon Valdez Spill. Massey Energy is the parent of Martin County Coal, responsible for the "nation's largest man-made environmental disaster east of the Mississippi" until the 2008 Tennessee coal-ash spill In October 2000, a coal slurry impoundment broke through an underground mine shaft and spilled over 300 million gallons of black, toxic sludge into the headwaters of Coldwater Creek and Wolf Creek," in Martin County, KY.
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Sen. McConnell and Wife Stopped MSHA Investigation.
U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), oversaw the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Chao "put on the brakes" on the MSHA investigation into the spill by placing a McConnell staffer in charge. In 2002 a $5,600 fine was levied. That September Massey gave $100,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, chaired by McConnell.
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Mining interests are heavily invested in GOP
The mining industry, which finds itself under renewed scrutiny this week after dozens of fatalities at a West Virginia coal mine, wields major political clout in Washington thanks to hefty campaign contributions to GOP lawmakers and expensive lobbying efforts aimed at blunting the impact of environment- and safety-related legislation.
Mining companies and related trade groups have sharply increased their lobbying efforts in recent years, tripling their spending from $10.2 million in 2004 to nearly $31 million in 2008, according to a review of lobbying disclosures by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a watchdog group.
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The Bush Connection
Blankenship's closeness to prominent Republicans helped him land allies at the highest levels of the federal mine safety system during the Bush administration. Massey COO Stanley Suboleski was named a commissioner of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission in 2003 and was nominated in December 2007 to run the Energy Department's Office of Fossil Energy. Suboleski is now back on the Massey board. After being rejected twice by the Senate, President Bush put one-time Massey executive Dick Stickler in charge of the MSHA by a recess appointment in October 2006. In the 1990s, Stickler oversaw Massey subsidiary Performance Coal, the operator of the deadly Upper Big Branch Mine, after managing Beth Energy mines, which "incurred injury rates double the national average." Bush named Stickler acting secretary when the recess appointment expired in January 2008.
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Coal Companies Get Off Easy - $16. Million Toyota Fine
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - A Massey Energy subsidiary has admitted to criminal safety violations that caused the deaths of two Logan County coal miners in a January 2006 fire, federal prosecutors revealed Tuesday.
Massey's Aracoma Coal Co. has agreed to plead guilty to 10 criminal charges, including one felony, and pay $2.5 million in criminal fines, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Charleston.
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Coal freighter rams Great Barrier Reef, spilling oil into pristine waters
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said salvage teams were assessing how they might be able to refloat the China-bound carrier, including removing all the oil from the ship first.
"This is going to be a very specialist and delicate operation," she told the Nine Network.
"If this ship was to break further apart, if there was another very significant oil spill, then we would not only see tonnes of oil into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park but modeling shows it is likely to come up onto the beaches of Shoalwater Bay, which is a national park area."
Bligh said the vessel was in a restricted zone of the Great Barrier Reef which was "totally off limits" to shipping and the government would investigate why the ship was so far off course.
The carrier's Chinese owners, a subsidiary of Cosco Group, could be fined up to $920,000 and the captain handed a $230,000 penalty over the incident, she said.
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Koch Industries' Extensive Funding of Climate Denial Industry Unmasked
Koch Industries has "become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition," spending over $48.5 million since 1997 to fund the climate denial machine, according to an extensive report today by Greenpeace.
The Greenpeace report reveals how Koch Industries and the foundations under its control spent far more than even ExxonMobil in recent years to fund industry front groups opposed to clean energy and climate policies. Koch spent over half the total amount -nearly $25 million - funding climate denier groups from 2005 to 2008, a period in which Exxon only spent $8.9 million.
Greenpeace's attempt to lift the veil of secrecy inherent to a private company like Koch Industries is no easy task. Because it remains privately owned, Koch faces few of the disclosure requirements designed to increase transparency among publicly-traded companies.
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REPORT REVEALS OIL GIANT KOCH INDUSTRIES IS A 'FINANCIAL KINGPIN' OF CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS:
A new Greenpeace report has revealed privately owned U.S. oil company Koch Industries donated nearly $48 million to climate change denying groups from 1997-2008, outstripping even Exxon Mobil in its funding efforts and "also spent $5.7m on political campaigns and $37m on direct lobbying to support fossil fuels." According to the report, the Kansas-based company -- owned by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who have long worked to burnish their reputations by buying museum and opera halls -- has contributed $24.9 million to global warming denying groups since 2005 compared to Exxon Mobil's $8.9 million in contributions. The report also finds that Koch Industries "provided financing for organizations that heavily propagated the so-called 'ClimateGate' scandal." For example, Koch funded a 2007 junk science analysis that disputed the risks climate change posed for polar bears and financed supposedly independent Spanish and Danish studies that attacked green jobs and propagated a pack of lies about the costs of climate legislation. Responding to the report's charges that Koch Industries amounted to the "financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition," the company's communications director Melissa Cohlmia said they have "worked to advance economic freedom and market-based policy solutions to challenges faced by society."
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