NewsTrust - Coal - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Letters: Shale gas could fracture our renewables policy

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Apr. 24 - It beggars belief that fracking is recommended to be extended and earthquakes the only risk taken into account ( Gas fracking gets the green light , 17 April). Other risks are not just theoretical; appalling consequences have already happened on a wide scale in the US. Fracking has been carried out in rural areas where people's off-grid water supplies have been made unusable by pollution. There have been cases where people cannot use water from the tap at the kitchen sink because methane comes with it, with the risk of explosions. Only half the chemical-laden water used in the process is recovered. It is then kept in lagoons on the surface where it is allowed to evaporate volatile toxic chemicals into the air. We cannot afford the risk to our water supplies. We don't have the open spaces which have been affected in the US. Even now we are faced with water restrictions and drought. We don't have the necessary huge quantities of water available to be used and made dirty for ever. The landscape ...

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Petrol crisis 'is our Thatcher moment', Tory MPs reportedly tell party members

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Damien Pearse - Mar. 31 - Unite accuses ministers of 'spoiling for a fight' after memo from MPs emerges comparing situation with 1980s miners' strike Tory MPs have compared the panic over fuel supplies to the 1980s miners' strike and urged party members to "humiliate" the unions by stockpiling petrol, it has been reported. In a private message from MPs to constituency associations, seen by the Daily Telegraph's Charles Moore , members were told: "This is our Thatcher moment." The message reportedly continues: "In order to defeat the coming miners' strike, [Thatcher] stockpiled coal. When the strike came, she weathered it, and the Labour party, tarred by the strike, was humiliated. In order to defeat the coming fuel drivers' strike, we want supplies of petrol stockpiled. Then, if the strike comes, we will weather it, and Labour, in hock to the Unite union, will be blamed." In his blog, Moore comments: "There is a key difference which ministers have not spotted. When Mrs Thatcher piled up the coal at power ...

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Orrin Hatch, fossilized

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Salt Lake Tribune - Mar. 17 - By david folland Published Mar 17, 2012 01:01AM MDT When I read Sen. Orrin Hatch’s op-ed (“Boost U.S. oil production,” Opinion, March 4), it evoked the picture of a man speeding down the freeway with head turned backwards, checking to be sure no one was coming up from behind. Indeed, looking to the past, it would appear that expanding oil exploration, as Hatch asserted, would be the best way to lower gas prices. However, ahead of us lies a serious pileup, and we are going to join the crash if we don’t turn our heads and look forward. That accide... ...

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Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Thomas L. Friedman - Mar. 10 (Opinion) - Education is a better economic driver than a country’s natural resources.

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Editorial Board: Is the fight against global warming hopeless?

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Editorial Board - Feb. 26 (Opinion) - IS THE FIGHT against global warming hopeless? It can seem so. The long-term threat to the climate comes from carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years , locking in higher temperatures for generations. After decades of effort, only about one-tenth of America’s energy mix comes from renewable sources that don’t produce carbon ...

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Best of the Web Today: Bad-Faith Journalism

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By James Taranto - Jan. 04 (Opinion) - It's not as eagerly awaited as Time's "Man of the Year" was back when people paid attention to Time, but PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" nonetheless manages to generate a lot of chatter, aimed as it is at those who chatter for a living. This year almost all of the chatter was negative, as the St. Petersburg Times's self-styled "fact checking" operation, which usually leans left, tacked to the right, naming as its "Lie" the claim that "Republicans voted to end Medicare." The reference is to Rep. Paul Ryan's reform proposal, which passed the GOP-controlled House as part of a budget resolution before being rejected by the Democratic Senate.

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Here Comes The Sun

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Nov. 06 (Opinion) - We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power. If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

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Editorial: Blame Congress

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:09:03 -0700

New York Times - Jul. 19 (Opinion) - Congress has failed to enact climate change legislation that would have encouraged innovation.

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Unsure about nuclear power? The five questions you must answer to decide

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Apr. 21 (Opinion) - Twenty five years on from Chernobyl, the heated debate on nuclear power remains resistant to cold facts: simply too few are known. But making your own judgements on five key questions will lead to your answer Containing the elemental forces that rage inside a nuclear reactor is one of the great achievements of science, but losing control, as happened 25 years ago on Tuesday at Chernobyl , is one of its greatest failures. So what to think of nuclear power ? People often ask me if I support or oppose the building of new nuclear power stations, presuming I think that because of my job, I'll know the answer. If only it was that easy. Until the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant , I would say I was 51% in favour, on the basis that we need all the low-carbon electricity we can get to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and that I tend to trust scientists having been one. But 51% in favour is a pretty unsatisfactory position - it's 1% off I don't know. Surely I can be more certain ...

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Putting the Higgs Boson in its place

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jon Butterworth - Apr. 17 - This time last weekend I was in Edinburgh at the Science Festival. I love Edinburgh, right from the moment the train pulls in at Waverley Station. I love the fact that it has a daffodil-filled valley with a railway in the middle, where most cities would have a river. I visited to take part in a discussion on " Engineering the Large Hadron Collider ", chaired by Robin Ince and with a talk from Lyn Evans (who was the project leader for LHC construction). My job was to be on at the beginning to try and explain why we built it. This is of course to do with finding the Higgs boson, or as I prefer to put it, understanding electroweak symmetry breaking (see below). Peter Higgs is a Professor at Edinburgh University, and members of the physics department there also work on ATLAS , so this was a bit like bringing coals to Newcastle. In fact the Edinburgh group are running a drop-in Hunting the Higgs event as part of the festival. On Sunday I chaired a talk with Ian Sample on his book ...

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Why nuclear power is still a good choice

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Mark Lynas - Apr. 10 (Opinion) - Perspective is needed when deciding between nuclear and other power sources. Renewable energy and conservation aren't enough in the real world. And burning fossil fuels will only worsen global warming. What a strange turn of events. Instead of uniting the environmental movement in renewed opposition to nuclear power, the Fukushima disaster in Japan has divided it still further. An increasing number of green advocates, including some very prominent voices, have declared their support for nuclear power as a clean energy option, even as radioactive water accumulates and the timeline for cleaning up the contaminated areas extends by decades. Can they be serious? They can. The irony of Fukushima is that in forcing us all to confront our deepest fears about the dangers of nuclear power, we find many of them to be wildly irrational — based on scare stories propagated through years of unchallenged mythology and the repeated exaggerations of self-proclaimed "experts" in the anti-nuclear movement. As the British environmental writer George Monbiot has pointed out, if we took the scientific consensus on nuclear energy as seriously as we take the scientific consensus on climate change, we environmentalists would be telling a very different story.

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What are the main types of carbon capture and storage technology?

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Mar. 18 - This question and answer is part of the Guardian's ultimate climate change FAQ • See all questions and answers • Read about the project There are three main types of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that could eventually help reduce emissions from power stations and other industrial sites: pre-combustion, post-combustion and oxyfuel. Post-combustion In this method, CO 2 is separated from the flue gas of the power station by bubbling the gas through an absorber column packed with liquid solvents (such as ammonia). In the most widely used system, once the chemicals in the absorber column become saturated, a stream of superheated steam at around 120C is passed through it. This releases the trapped CO 2 , which can then be transported for storage elsewhere. More experimental techniques to scrub CO 2 from flue gas without the two-step process include using seawater to absorb the gas and then returning the mixture back to the ocean for long-term storage. But, so far, these ...

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China's green gift to the world

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Frank Wolak, Richard Morse - Dec. 30 (Opinion) - Environmentalists who want to ban China's coal imports are 100% wrong: driving up the price of coal cuts carbon emissions.

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Are humans definitely causing global warming?

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - Dec. 30 - This question and answer is part of the Guardian's ultimate climate change FAQ • See all questions and answers • Read about the project Just as the world's most respected scientific bodies have confirmed that world is getting hotter, they have also stated that there is strong evidence that humans are driving the warming. The 2005 joint statement from the national academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the US said: "It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities." Countless more recent statements and reports from the world's leading scientific bodies have said the same thing. For example, a 2010 summary of climate science by the Royal Society stated that: "There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has been caused largely by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, including agriculture and deforestation." ...

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10 to watch: GOP freshmen on energy

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Politico - By Robin Bravender - Dec. 28 (Editorial) - House Republican freshmen looking to make names for themselves on energy issues in the next Congress have some goals in common: Ramp up domestic energy production, roll back the Obama administration’s environmental rules and ensure that cap-and-trade stays dead.

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Don Blankenship: The Dark Lord of Coal Country

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Jeff Goodell - Dec. 03 (Opinion) - Unless you live in West Virginia, you've probably never heard of Don Blankenship. You might not know that he grew up in the coal fields of West Virginia, received an accounting degree from a local college, and, through a combination of luck, hard work and coldblooded ruthlessness, transformed himself into the embodiment of everything that's wrong with the business and politics of energy in America today — a man who pursues naked self-interest and calls it patriotism, who buys judges like cheap hookers, treats workers like dogs, blasts mountains to get at a few inches of coal and uses his money and influence to ensure that America remains enslaved to the 19th-century idea that burning coal equals progress. And for this, he earns $18 million a year — making him the highest-paid CEO in the coal industry — and flies off to vacations on the French Riviera.

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Fighting the battle of Blair Mountain

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Beth Wellington - Nov. 22 (Opinion) - The struggle to conserve from stripmining the historic site of a labour struggle in West Virginia could not be more symbolic. Last week, with Massey Energy under siege from federal safety officials , yet still proposing to stripmine the site of the Battle of Blair Mountain , I recalled standing on battlefields at Gettysburg and Manassas, haunted as the landscape somehow revealed what had once happened there.

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Big Oil spends $69.5m on ads to get the Congress it wants

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Suzanne Goldenberg - Nov. 01 - It's worth a lot to the oil and coal lobbies to get the Congress they want and the investment seems to be paying off The next Congress is expected to throw up a whole new set of roadblocks to Barack Obama's environmental agenda - from time-consuming investigations to budget cuts. So how much was the fossil fuel industries willing to pay to help cast out White House allies on energy and climate change? A lot, it turns out. Oil and coal lobby groups have spent $69.5 million on television ads specifically targetted against Obama clean energy policies in these mid-term elections, according to data compiled by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. That's a 10-to-1 advantage over clean energy groups. Opinion polls are all predicting big wins in tomorrow's elections for Republicans, especially Tea Party candidates. Most of the Tea Party favourites deny the existence of man-made climate change, and some Democrats, like Joe Manchin who is running for the Senate from West Virginia, are ...

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Oil spill is a sign to Congress: kick the fossil-fuel habit

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - Jun. 06 (Editorial) - If the threat of global warming doesn’t persuade Congress of the need to reduce America’s reliance on oil and coal, the vast slick now befouling the Gulf of Mexico surely ought to. The oil billowing out of BP’s Deepwater Horizon site doesn’t just reveal the moral urgency of encouraging efficiency and renewable sources of energy; it also presents a leadership test. The Senate and the Obama administration must seize this moment to enact the Kerry-Lieberman energy and climate change bill, with its cap on utilities’ carbon dioxide emissions, its new controls on offshore drilling, and its investments in clean energy research and production. As a response to the ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf, putting a price on carbon emissions — a price that reflects the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels — makes much more sense than carping over whether President Obama has shown sufficient anger over the incompetence of BP.

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Letters: Anger Rises as the Oil Keeps Spewing

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 26 (Opinion) - Readers respond to articles about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Preserve EPA’s right to regulate

Sun, 23 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - May. 23 (Editorial) - IF US SENATOR Scott Brown is at all concerned about global warming, he should firmly oppose an effort by fellow Republican Lisa Murkowski to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases.

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April 'Earth Month' our worst ever

Sun, 02 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Danny Westneat - May. 02 (Opinion) - April was "Earth Month," a time to show our love for the planet. Surely no one is more relieved this observance has come to an end than Earth.

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‘Revolving door’ a bar to mine safety?

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

MSNBC - Apr. 18 - West Virginia tragedy exposes ties between industry and government that put miners at risk, critics say. ...

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The Truth About Don Blankenship

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Vanity Fair - By Michael Shnayerson - Apr. 16 (Opinion) - Last week, Diane Sawyer and other national reporters discovered what West Virginians have known for years: Don Blankenship is the Snidely Whiplash of coal, a larger-than-life figure so swaggering and creepy that his each next outrageous claim as chairman and C.E.O. of Massey Energy makes wonderful copy. But in the aftermath of the explosion that killed 29 at his Upper Big Branch mine an hour or so south of Charleston, they weren’t sure how to react when Don, in that soft Appalachian twang of his, declared Massey’s safety record better than the industry average, and said, in effect, that coal mining is a dangerous business and that accidents happen. Soon enough, they realized Don’s claim was flat wrong:

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Chinese Freighter on Great Barrier Reef Has Punctured Fuel Tank

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Keith Bradsher - Apr. 07 - A Chinese coal freighter aground on the Great Barrier Reef has at least one punctured fuel tank , prompting a delicate effort to transfer oil within the ship to tanks that are still intact.

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