Three environmental groups have put the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on notice that they intend to sue the agency, alleging it has failed to regulate water pollution from the nation's electric utilities, including discharges into rivers and lakes from hundreds of coal-ash ponds.
Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Integrity Project on Monday filed their notice of intent to sue the EPA - the first step in a federal lawsuit - alleging that EPA officials should have tightened their rules on power plant water pollution as far back as 1982.
Many readers of the New York Times probably dropped their jaws in amazement at the lead story
last Sunday: Seven-year-old Ryan Massey, of Prenter, West Virginia,
smiled back with capped teeth, the enamel devoured by toxic tap water.
His brother sported scabs and rashes, courtesy of the heavy
metals--including lead, nickel--in their bath water.
Verizon Wireless joined dozens of other companies last week in
dumping its ads on Glenn Beck's Fox New Channel program. Due to Beck's
"controversial track record," Verizon Wireless spokesman Jim Gerace told Color of Change organizers: "We made a decision that we don't want to be advertising on that program for a lot of reasons."
In a stunning blow to mountaintop removal blasting operations in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia this morning, two fearless protesters scaled massive trees and unfurled banners from their 80-foot-high platforms. Within 300 feet of the Massey Energy's Edwight mountaintop removal blasting site, above Pettry Bottom and Peachtree in Raleigh County, West Virginia, the protesters called on the federal agencies to crack down on the scandal-ridden West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WV DEP) and the stop the unsafe and reckless blasting in the area.
Last fall, Tom Zeller at the
New York Times Green Inc. blog wrote an eye-opening piece on a possible Indian government and corporate venture in Appalachia's coal mines.
And as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope pointed out, an even bigger coal story took place this week in India. Members of parliament from various political parties in the eastern part of the state of Maharashtra put aside their differences and called on the Prime Minister to stop a coal mine in a forest reserve.
The new head of the UK government's official green watchdog has strongly criticised moves to build new coal-fired power stations in Britain and condemned the planned expansion of Heathrow.
In the early morning of October 8, 2007, a small group of British Greenpeace activists slipped inside a hulking smokestack that towers more than 600 feet above a coal-fired power plant in Kent, England. While other activists cut electricity on the plant's grounds, they prepared to climb the interior of the structure to its top, rappel down its outside, and paint in block letters a demand that Prime Minister Gordon Brown put an end to plants like the Kingsnorth facility, which releases nearly 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day.
This might be a first in the country: The failed West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is emerging as such an embarrassingly pro-coal anti-mountain public relations nightmare for Gov. Joe Manchin that even retired coal miners have taken to the streets against the state's environmental regulators, calling on the federal EPA and Office of Surface Mining to take over the key duties of the dysfunctional state agency.
The Tennessee Valley Authority had been warned for years that toxic coal ash could spill out of its retention ponds and into nearby waterways, but managers ignored those warnings, the agency's inspector general said in a report issued last week.
In December, 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash at the TVA's Kingston Fossil Plant spilled out from a retaining pond. The ash polluted Tennessee's Emory River and swamped nearby homes.
Spoleto, Umbria--When President Barack Obama trundled into the bel
paese of Italy for the G8 gathering last month, some of my neighbors in
the verdant hills of Umbria were surprised to learn about their
country's small but lingering dependence on coal-fired plants. Draping
banners down five coal-fired towers of carbon emissions that week,
Greenpeace reminded the European gathering--and President Obama--of the
inconvenient reality of coal.
