Seven miners were killed and another 19 are missing “after an explosion rocked a Massey Energy underground coal mine” in southern West Virginia this afternoon. The explosion took place at 3 pm at Massey subsidiary Performance Coal Co.’s Upper Big Branch Mine-South between the towns of Montcoal and Naoma. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow dedicated the beginning of her program to covering the disaster, interviewing veteran Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward, Jr., and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) by telephone. Listen to Ward reporting on the tragic details slowly emerging from the mine:

This Massey disaster is on the scale of the 2006 Sago Mine disaster which killed 13 people, the worst coal mine disaster in the United States since the Farmington Mine disaster of 1968, which killed 78 miners. “It’s very emotional, very powerful, very awful, and finally very Appalachian,” Sen. Rockefeller told Maddow. He concluded:

Of all the glory of West Virginia characteristics of fighting and climbing hills all the time, this is the tragic part.

Watch the interview:

This tragedy is the latest deadly disaster to involve coal baron Don Blankenship’s Massey Energy. In 2006, two miners died in a fire at Aracoma Mine after Blankenship personally waived company policy and told mine managers to ignore rules and “run coal.” “In the past year, federal inspectors have cited Massey and fined the company more than $382,000 for repeated serious safety violations involving its ventilation plan and equipment at the mine run by subsidiary Performance Coal Co.,” the Associated Press reported. “The violations also cover failing to follow the ventilation plan, allowing combustible coal dust to pile up, and having improper firefighting equipment.”

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who’s trying to fight off a primary challenger who claims McCain is too moderate, has in an interview with Newsweek gone back on his most famous nickname.

“I never considered myself a maverick,” McCain said.

TPM has the video compilation that gives the lie to the Mother of all flip-flops:

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Part 1: The Carbon War Room starts to bust barriers in shipping

Readers are always asking what can been done to cut carbon beyond pushing for the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill.   I’m launching a new series aimed at the kind of serious action people can push for at a local and state level — and even at a national and global level — without waiting for politicians.  After all, the biggest, most money-saving strategies to cut carbon are already profitable (see “McKinsey must-read: U.S. can meet entire 2020 emissions target with efficiency and cogeneration while lowering the nation’s energy bill $700 billion!“)

The impetus for this new series is my interview today (below) of Jigar Shah, the uber-innovative clean energy financing guru who founded Sun Edison and now heads the new nonprofit, the Carbon War Room.  The objective of CWR, founded by entrepreneurs like Sir Richard Branson, is to “ensure a prosperous future for all on the planet by developing a post-carbon economy.”  The operational approach is to “bring together successful entrepreneurs in collaboration with the most respected institutions, scientists, national security experts, and business leaders to implement the change required to avoid catastrophic climate change.”

The Carbon War Room has “identified 25 battles across 7 theaters that are material to winning the war against climate change. Each battle accounts for over 1 billion tons (or more than 2%) of global anthropogenic CO₂e emissions annually.”   The figure above represents CWR’s “Theaters and Battles,” with filled in green circles representing an “Op in Progress” and the dotted circles a developing Op.  For instance, one area CWR has already start on is shipping, a too-neglected sector that has huge emissions and but only medium-sized market barriers, which they are addressing with Operation Rock The Boat“:

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Another doubly cynical cartoon, courtesy of Matson for Roll Call:

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Virginia’s radical attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA), is threatening the recovery of the American auto industry with new climate denial lawsuits. To the applause of automakers, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation finalized landmark new fuel economy standards last week, completing President Obama’s campaign promise. Cuccinelli has already filed a lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public, claiming that hacked “Climategate” emails prove a conspiracy by scientists involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to replace real science with “political science.” In response to the new fuel economy standards — the first rules to take into account greenhouse pollution — Cuccinelli is filing yet another lawsuit, according to spokesman Brian Gottstein:

In that motion, the attorney general’s office asked the EPA to reopen its proceedings in light of the recent evidence that the reports the EPA was relying on for its decision contained erroneous and/or unverifiable global temperature and other data. We will file a notice of appeal with respect to today’s ruling.

Cuccinelli’s suit against the science of global warming is baseless, as numerous Virginia climatologists have told the Wonk Room. Furthermore, the auto industry stands fully behind this new program,” as Dave McCurdy, President and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers has written.

Killing the endangerment finding — as numerous state legislatures, attorneys general, and lawmakers in Congress are trying to do — would destroy the stakeholders’ fuel economy agreement. The United Auto Workers describe that “California and other states have agreed to forgo state-level regulation of tailpipe emissions and abide by the new national standard that will be created by these NHTSA and EPA rules.” If the denier Dirty Air Act efforts go through, UAW explains the “critically important progress” will be “overturned”:

However, the critically important progress that was achieved with this historic agreement will be undermined if EPA’s endangerment finding is overturned. Without this finding, EPA will not be able to proceed with its current rulemaking on light duty vehicles. If the joint rulemaking process collapses, NHTSA has indicated that it will not be able to meet the statutory timetable for implementing any fuel economy increases for the 2012 model year. And in the absence of the EPA standard, California and other states would certainly move forward with their standards, thereby subjecting auto manufacturers to all of the burdens that the one national standard was designed to avoid.

The fears of UAW that multi-state standards would be catastrophic are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even though the American auto industry can certainly handle multi-state standards, a return to the Bush era of recrimination and lawsuit instead of a focus on competitiveness and innovation would be crippling. Cuccinelli is not only wasting taxpayer money trying to overturn EPA’s scientific finding, he’s trying to dismantle the historic agreement that all stakeholders agree will create American jobs and increase national competitiveness.

Utah conservative falsely asserts: “Greenhouse gas emissions have absolutely nothing whatever to do with clean air. CO2 does not add to pollutants or cause asthma or any of the other things you think of with dirty air. “

One of the classic signs of anti-science syndrome is repeated asserting that because CO2 is needed for life, vast increases of CO2 must perforce be vastly good for life (see Rep. Shimkus: Cutting CO2 emissions is “Taking away plant food from the atmosphere”).

In fact, lots of things are needed for life that are fatal in high doses or amounts.  Iron and water come to mind.

Another classic sign of ASS is denying that too much CO2 is harmful to life.  This sometimes gets taken to its ASSinine extremes (see House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical”).

Let’s look at the many anti-science symptoms manifested by Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT), courtesy of Think Progress.

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Whether revisionist or reality-based, Republicans for Environmental Protection is running their ads in the wrong media markets.

You are worried about what man has done and is doing to this magical planet that God gave us. And I share your concern.  What is a conservative after all but one who conserves, one who is committed to protecting and holding close the things by which we live….

This is what we leave to our children. And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.

Those 1984 words from President Reagan serve as the basis for one of the new ads in a radio campaign launched by Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP):

Sounds great, until you remember that President Reagan almost single-handedly killed America’s global leadership in renewable energy (see “Who got us in this energy mess? Start with Ronald Reagan“).  Yes, he did help save the ozone layer, as REP points out:

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Plastic Electronics Could Slash the Cost of Solar Panels

A new technique developed by Princeton University engineers for producing electricity-conducting plastics could dramatically lower the cost of manufacturing solar panels.

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After Greenpeace detailed the efforts of the Koch Industries’ billionaire brothers to pollute energy policy and deny the threat of global warming, Koch Industries communications director Melissa Cohlmia attempted to greenwash their record:

Both a free society and the scientific method require an open and honest airing of all sides, not demonizing and silencing those with whom you disagree. We’ve strived to encourage an intellectually honest debate on the scientific basis for claims of harm from greenhouse gases.

Americans for Prosperity “” founded, funded, and overseen by David Koch “” claims to be trying to build that “free society” by “educating citizens about economic policy and mobilizing those citizens as advocates in the public policy process.” So far, they’re not doing a very good job of engaging in an “intellectually honest debate” without “demonizing and silencing those with whom you disagree”:

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