I remember days and nights spent at a rewrite desk in Washington 25 years ago, taking in and editing nearly unbelievable information from reporters in Russia and Western Europe. Where was this place, Chernobyl? Was…
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Archive | Coal
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Coal’s Anonymous Dirt
Big Coal is planning an anonymous campaign blitz against elected officials (in Kentucky in this case) who dare to favor any restrictions on coal. That’s according to an internal coal company memo obtained by Kentucky’s Lexington Herald newspaper. This is only a tiny piece of the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision to let corporations pour unlimited anonymous money into political campaigns. How many of these memos do we not know about?
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$20 Billion for “Clean Coal”?
$20 Billion for "Clean Coal"? by Khan Shoieb Senators John Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and George Voinovich (R-OH) have reportedly come out with a bill that would give massive subsidies to the coal industry over the…
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Fossil Fuel Fiascos-in-Waiting
6-24-10 by dugan BP is touting restoral of its robot-damaged "cap" (which looks like a giant hat for the Tin Man) to corral a large fraction of the company’s Gulf oil spill, but is…
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Congress Gets It Backward
How is it that renewable energy producers struggle to renew expiring, and already expired, tax breaks and other funding credits in Congress, while the Senate overwhelmingly refuses to cut Big Oil’s $35 billion in…
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Which Is Worse, BP or MMS?
05-26-10 by dugan Big day today in learning about ways to demean and devalue safety. 1. A BP internal document (see it on Daily Beast) used a dismissive "Three Little Pigs" analogy in deciding…
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Dread on the Gulf Coast
5-6-10 by dugan (Fort Walton Beach, Florida)–In the northern Gulf of Mexico, along a sparkling coast from Louisana to Florida, everyone is used to hurricanes. You can prepare, and afterward repair, no matter how…
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The Price of Cheap Coal
04-7-10 by dugan It’s not just mountaintops blown to smithereens and drinking water polluted. Cheap coal’s price is also the the 25 miners known dead, plus four more feared dead, in Monday’s West Virginia…
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‘Clean’ Coal PR, Dirty Reality
3-29-10 by dugan Just as the oxymoronic American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity launched a new campaign telling us that coal is sooo much cheaper than natural gas (coal’s chief, and cleaner, competitor), the admirable…
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Sympathetic Hired Guns
3-2-10 by dugan While the end game on health care legislation sucks up the available news space, proposals to curb greenhouse gas emissions are being picked to shreds by power companies, coal companies, oil…
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Oil vs. Water: You Choose
If you had to choose between oil and water, one or the other, which would you choose? Living without oil or natural gas wouldn’t be fun, but you wouldn’t live at all without drinkable water….
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Sen. Byrd whacks Big Coal
12-8-09 by dugan On the other fossil fuel front, Sen. Robert Byrd, the coal industry’s best ally in Washington for decades, is standing up against its current scare campaign in West Virginia, and its demand…
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Hapless state gets it on climate
11-24-09 by dugan California doesn’t have many bright spots lately, what with a new $21 billion hole in its budget, more than 12% unemployment and a hapless state Legislature. But its prospects looked up…