Free Republic

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear a major challenge to the limits set by the Obama administration on emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal-fired power plants. It is the latest effort by industry groups to roll back regulations that would reduce emissions like mercury, soot, sulfur, smog and carbon dioxide. The case also threatens to undermine one of the administration’s most significant victories and chip away at President Obama’s legacy. John Walke, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the regulation of mercury emissions that are at issue in the new case “the greatest...

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to review the first-ever national environmental standards requiring power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollutants, saying it would decide whether the government should have considered how much the rules would cost utilities. The court’s action extends a saga that dates back more than two decades. Congress first required the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations in 1990, but the agency’s efforts had been stalled for years because of several factors, including lengthy court battles. The EPA rules, adopted in 2012, require coal and oil-fired power plants to cut...

EPA: Coal Plants Should Spend $2B To Cut Emissions Mon, 11/24/2014 - 4:53pm Emily Schmall, Federal regulators are proposing that the largest coal-powered plants in Texas invest $2 billion in new technology to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, a measure energy companies are likely to resist. The plan released Monday would require that 15 units at eight coal-fired plants be retrofitted with controls to help clear the air near national parks and other federally protected land in Texas and Oklahoma. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the proposal would cut about 230,000 tons of sulfur dioxide emissions each year. Brad Watson,...

North Koreans working in Sarawak's coal mines legally Monday, November 24, 2014 - 10:26 The Star/Asia News Network SARAWAK, MALAYSIA - Deputy Home Minister Datuk Seri Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said the North Koreans were brought into Sarawak to work via a special arrangement between the Sarawak and North Korean governments. "Only Sarawak has North Korean workers (in Malaysia). This is not (allowed) in the peninsular,'' he said when commenting on the presence of dozens of North Koreans at a coal mine in the Sri Aman division. Besides the 46 North Koreans, the mine's 119 foreign workers were from Myanmar...

The focus of the 2014 Group of 20 summit meeting in Brisbane, Australia, was on stimulating economic growth across the industrialized world. Thanks, though, to President Obama’s grandstanding and attempted sabotage of the agenda as laid out by the host country, climate change also came to prominence. For several months prior to the G-20, and despite strong Australian resistance, radical environmental groups had been lobbying for inclusion of global-warming issues on the meeting’s agenda. Mr. Obama was happy to oblige them. His endorsement of the U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change just before the G-20 was a signal that he...

THE Queensland government, as host of last weekend’s G20 ­summit, is incensed over what it sees as an ill-informed, insulting speech from Barack Obama about climate change, the Great Barrier Reef and coal. Federal Coalition members are also angry at the US President’s public intervention in the Australian climate change debate at the G20 last Saturday, when most of his remarks in the summit’s closed session on energy, where the issue was discussed, were devoted to US gas supplies and production that have been boosted by coal-seam gas and shale oil. Tony Abbott told the G20 session that the “four-fifths”...

Ukraine’s troubles with Russian gas imports have been grabbing headlines for years, but a new area of concern has come to the fore in the country’s energy sector following the cancellation of imports of South African coal. UK-registered Steel Mont Trading (SML) has said it will stop supplying coal from South Africa to Ukrinterenergo, Ukraine’s state energy trading company, according to an announcement by Ukrainian Energy and Coal Industry Minister Yuriy Prodan at a cabinet meeting in Kiev on 12 November. Rajesh Kumar Saraiya, a member of SML’s board of directors, told Bloomberg it was because the company did not...

Comedian (and climate change advocate)  Jon Stewart seems to think vanishing coal jobs that force miners to find new jobs “is funny”.  So funny in fact, he thinks they should go and work for the NFL….because, you know, being a coal miner and a football player in the NFL are so similar.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – The former CEO who oversaw the West Virginia mine that exploded in 2010, killing 29 people, was indicted Thursday on federal charges related to a mine safety investigation that followed the blast.

Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian academic who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently declared that we have "the means to limit climate change" and that "all we need is the will to change." That's a rather glib statement given that just five years ago, Pachauri was lamenting the fact that so many of his fellow Indians were living in dire energy poverty. In July 2009, Pachauri asked reporters, "Can you imagine 400 million people who do not have a light bulb in their homes?" He continued, saying, "with the resources of coal that India has, we really don't have...

“A few more decades of ungoverned fossil-fuel use and we burn up, to put it bluntly.” — Bill McKibben, leading environmental activist, 1989 I came across this quote, along with many others of comparable value, while reading Alex Epstein’s just-published book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. But Epstein’s book is much more than a fantastic collection of such delightfully mad environmentalist pronouncements — although that part alone is worth the purchase price. Rather, what Epstein presents is a powerful, systematic, and relentlessly logical philosophical case for the moral value of the fossil-fuel industry, and the fundamentally immoral basis...

The Obama administration is set to roll out a series of climate and pollution measures that rivals any president’s environmental actions of the past quarter-century — a reality check for Republicans who think last week’s election gave them a mandate to end what they call the White House’s “War on Coal.” Tied to court-ordered deadlines, legal mandates and international climate talks, the efforts scheduled for the next two months show that President Barack Obama is prepared to spend the remainder of his term unleashing sweeping executive actions to combat global warming. And incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have...

Sen.-elect Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) pledged on “Fox News Sunday” to be “extremely aggressive” in trying to rollback some regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency. “Extremely aggressive,” she said when asked how aggressive she would be in the Senate in trying to rollback some of the EPA regulations. “That is my promise to West Virginia. We have lost over the last two years, 5,000 jobs. Those are just coal jobs. “We had several thousand other miners who are what are called a warn notice, meaning they're potentially going to be losing their jobs. That doesn't even count the transportation job,...

Dems Realize “War on Coal” Cost Them Coal Country by Daniel Greenfield People are funny that way. They cling to their bibles and guns. And then if you declare war on them, they don’t want to vote for you. Coal-heavy districts in West Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois that had been steadily moving away from Democrats in recent elections appear to have completed that shift Tuesday, when they overwhelmingly backed Republicans who vowed to oppose what they call President Barack Obama’s “war on coal.”In West Virginia, once a long-time Democratic stronghold, Republicans will take control of both houses of the state...

Demonize coal. Keep the poor in the dark. And, above all, keep pushing the fantasy that U.S. government action (with or without the approval of Congress) is essential to dealing with climate change. That — in a nutshell — is the climate-change strategy of the Obama administration and its environmentalist allies. Evidence of the third point can be found by looking at the “Clean Power Plan” — the 645-page set of rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency last June that, if it withstands legal challenges, will effectively outlaw the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States....

Bowie Resource Partners says it has eliminated 150 jobs at the Bowie #2 coal mine near Paonia. ... Last year the shutdown of another mine in the region caused nearly 300 people to lose their jobs. That coal mine is in Somerset. In the release, Bowie says it will provide the 150 laid off workers with 60 days of wages and benefits.

After warning in August that hundreds of miners could lose their jobs, Boone County-based Coal River Energy has laid off 130 mine workers. Coal River Energy spokesman James "Skeets" Loving confirmed the layoffs Tuesday. In August, the company warned that 280 mine workers could be out of jobs. Loving said the company laid off 130 employees on Oct. 11, while keeping 94 workers and finding other work for 56 others. The affected mining areas are located near the border of Boone and Kanawha counties. Some are underground and some are surface mines. The company pointed to poor coal markets and...

Demonstrators gathered outside the Public Service Commission to protest against a requested rate structure change by the local utility company, Madison Gas and Electric (MG&E). During the protest, they decried the use of "dirty coal" and called for more renewable energy. To make their point, they had a blow-up coal power plant that was running on a fan powered by wind and solar charged batteries. Before the protest was over, however, the batteries died and their solar panel could not produce enough energy to keep the power plant standing upright.

DULUTH, Minn. -- Minnesota's leaders want federal help to ease railroad delays. U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken and Gov. Mark Dayton on Monday sent a letter to the head of the Surface Transportation Board saying that rail delays are hurting many parts of the economy. "As we watch winter come to the state of Minnesota, we have become increasingly alarmed by the service failures of several railroads that serve critical industries in our state," the three Democrats wrote to board Chairman Daniel Elliott. And on Tuesday, Dayton holds what is expected to be the last of a series...

“Renewable” energy is unreliable, and can never replace secure base load sources like coal, natural gas, and hydro. And now a bunch of greenies have embarrassed themselves and proved the point. Attempting to show how wonderful solar power is, a band of self-righteous greenie demonstrators in Madison, WI, the Berkeley of the Midwest, instead demonstrated that reliance on renewables means brownouts and blackouts. Protesting a proposed rate increase by the local utility, Madison Gas & Electric, they made utter fools of themselves, and showed by reliable power from hydrocarbons is the only way to have secure energy supplies. The MacIver...