Directed by supervisors, miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine commonly disabled monitors that could detect methane gas before the explosion that killed 29 in April. An investigation by NPR has “documented an incident in February 2010 in which an Upper Big Branch electrician was ordered to circumvent the automatic shutoff mechanism on a methane detector installed on a continuous mining machine.” Ricky Lee Campbell, a 24-year-old coal shuttle driver and roof bolter who witnessed the incident, told NPR they circumvented the safety device so that they could “continue to run coal”:

Everybody was getting mad because the continuous miner kept shutting off because there was methane. So, they shut the section down and the electrician got into the methane detector box and rewired it so we could continue to run coal.

There were dozens of such incidents, NPR reports. Maintenance foreman Clay Mullins told NPR he “believed miners could run mining machines temporarily with disabled monitors because that’s what the mine’s foreman and superintendent told him.”

Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, was caught with a 2006 memo that told workers faced with safety rules, “you need to ignore them and run coal” because “coal pays the bills.”

Gov. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) special investigator has found that the April 5 explosion “was so large and powerful that it ripped through more than 2 1/2 miles of underground tunnels ‘in an instant.’” No charges have yet been brought against Massey Energy or its management for the fatal incident.

Meanwhile, four activists — 22-year-old Kathryn Huszcza, 22-year-old Colin Flood, 20-year-old Sophie Kern and 22-year-old James Tobias — “are in jail following a protest in which two chained themselves to a highwall miner at a Massey Energy surface mine in Raleigh County.” Massey Energy is the largest mountaintop removal company in the United States.

CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss, Susan Lyon, and Tina Ramos cook up a better bill from the most effective proposals.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced on July 13 he plans to bring clean energy legislation to the Senate floor the week of July 26.  The Politico reports, “Reid confirmed the bill will have four parts: an oil spill response; a clean-energy and job-creation title based on work done in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee; a tax package from the Senate Finance Committee; and a section that deals with greenhouse gas emissions from the electric utility industry.” He said Senate leaders would spend the next week putting together a bill with these four titles.

The approach could be akin to the children’s story “Stone Soup.” No villager alone had the ingredients to make a hearty meal for soldiers passing through their town, but each brought an ingredient and together they created a community soup. By the same token, no existing Senate energy bill has all of the needed components, but it is possible to craft a comprehensive clean energy and global warming bill that would actually achieve Reid’s four goals by combining the most effective provisions from a number of existing bills.

Senate committees have reviewed or voted on many of the existing bills. Combining their provisions into a single bill should make it easier to draft the bill and build support for the overall package. Think of it as “The Stone Soup Clean Energy Bill.”

Weiss, Lyon, and Ramos have gone through and examined the bills; what follows are what we consider to be the most effective provisions from existing legislation for each section outlined by Senator Reid.

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Renewables see ‘resilient growth’ in 2009

The building of new renewable energy sources continued to outstrip new fossil fuel power plants in Europe and the US during 2009, a report has shown.

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This November, California voters are in danger of undoing one of the most progressive pieces of environmental legislation ever enacted.

The Big-Oil-funded Proposition 23 seeks to repeal California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a landmark bipartisan achievement that is already creating jobs and reducing pollution in California. Repeal would devastate California’s burgeoning clean tech sector and make it harder to get federal legislation. Each week we’ll post on the fight to stop dirty energy. We call this series “Big oil showdown in California.”

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They always hate government — until they need it:

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You may recall Inhofe’s Grandchildren Build Igloo To Mock Killer Snow Storm: ‘Al Gore’s New Home’.  This, in spite of the fact that, as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan noted: “These ‘snowpocalypses’ that have been going through DC and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming.”

Since both NASA and NOAA report we are in fact experiencing record-smashing global heat this year, much as the climate scientists have predicted, the youth coalition Consequence decided to mock Inhofe by puting up a giant ice sculpture that quickly melted.  Here is CNN’s video:

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Last year, when the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, more than half of the representatives from the mountain West voted against the comprehensive climate and energy legislation.  Given that extensive research predicts the West will experience some of the worst impacts of climate change in the U.S., including a permanent drought with Dust-bowl like conditions by mid-century — and an increase of wildfire burn area by as much as 175% — the resistance among western lawmakers to legislation that could save their region borders on self-destructive, as CAP’s Tom Kenworthy explains.

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