Federal regulators and Alpha Natural Resources this week reached an “unprecedented” settlement regarding the tragic explosion that killed 29 miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine outside Beckley, West Virginia in 2010, and though the deal has hardly pleased victims’ families, members of Congress were quick to pile on Massey (which was sold to Alpha Natural Resources earlier this year).

Among those members was Rep. John Kline (R-MN), the chairman of the House workforce committee, who slammed Massey’s “reckless disregard for critical worker safety protections” and for making its workers “face greater danger in an inherently hazardous profession.” But while Kline has repeatedly rebuked Massey, he and his GOP colleagues have done little to address mine safety. Congress, in fact, hasn’t passed a mine safety law since 2006, despite numerous deadly accidents since, as the GOP claims such laws will inhibit job creation — despite evidence showing that increasing mining regulation does just the opposite.

Instead, he has heaped blame on the the agency charged with enforcing mining regulations, as he did in June, when the original Massey report was issued:

“As we have said time and again, the strongest laws on the books will not protect workers if those laws are not obeyed and enforced,” he said. “We will continue to follow this ongoing investigation closely and work to ensure mine safety laws are being followed by mine operators and aggressively enforced by federal officials.”

Kline is correct in stating that even the most stringent laws won’t prevent disasters if they aren’t enforced. What he ignores in blaming regulators, however, is that years of Republican policies made federal mine regulators virtually impotent in efforts to prevent such tragedies. It was a Bush-era policy that urged the Mine Safety and Health Administration to “point out safety violations and help mine operators comply with the rules,” The Hill notes, instead of issuing safety violations and citations. Even so, MSHA issued thousands of violations and citations at Upper Big Branch before the tragedy, to no avail.

Close relationships between politicians and coal officials often prevent regulators from being effective as well. President Bush, for instance, appointed a former Massey official to an MSHA review commission in 2002, despite the company’s already-deadly record. And Bush’s MSHA chief was a former coal exec whose company had amassed injury rates at double the national average. In coal states like Kentucky, officials on the state mine safety board are former coal executives from companies with shoddy safety histories.

Mine safety legislation, meanwhile, continues to go nowhere. The latest effort, a bill introduced in April 2010, was never taken up in the Senate, likely because it couldn’t break a Republican filibuster, and failed to pass the Republican-controlled House.

A Massey Energy security official has been convicted by a jury for his role in covering up the coal company’s culpability for the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that killed 29 miners in April 2010. Former mine security director Hughie Elbert Stover was found guilty on Wednesday for lying to investigators and “seeking to destroy thousands of security-related documents,” and faces up to 25 years in prison. Stover called his attempt to destroy the documents the “stupidest, worst mistake” in his life. Stover is the second person who has been charged in the investigation so far.

On Tuesday, the United Mine Workers union charged that Massey Energy and its CEO Don Blankenship have committed “industrial homicide.” In a 154-page report, UMW President Cecil Roberts asks, “Why didn’t Don Blankenship shut this mine down?” The report details how a “rogue corporation, acting without real regard for mine safety and health law and regulations” “established a physical working environment that can only be described as a bomb waiting to go off”:

Massey Energy must be held accountable for the death of each of the 29 miners. Theirs is not a guilt of omission but rather, based on the facts publicly available, the Union believes that Massey Energy and its management were on notice of and recklessly tolerated mining conditions that were so egregious that the resulting disaster constituted a massive slaughter in the nature of an industrial homicide.

“We’ve got a security guard who has been indicted, but Don Blankenship can’t figure out how to spend all of his money,” UMW President Cecil Roberts said.

“The investigation continues, so it’s premature to say we haven’t brought justice or we haven’t gone after the real villains,” U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin told reporters after Stover’s conviction.

Two climate activists perched in trees next to a strip mine atop Coal River Mountain in West Virginia have shut down operations for nearly two weeks now. Sunday marked the 12th day that protesters Becks Kolins and Catherine-Ann MacDougal have been camping in trees 80 feet above the ground on the Bee Tree permit, Alpha Natural Resources’ only active strip mining permit on Coal River Mountain. The tree sit is the longest one in West Virginia history, according to the RAMPS campaign, and “has successfully halted blasting on portions of the site, aside from a small blast last Friday afternoon.” Kolins and MacDougal are part of a nationwide movement of people willing to engage in civil disobedience to stop the immoral destruction of their future by the fossil fuel industry, the campaign — an affiliate of Peaceful Uprising — says:

The sitters expressed solidarity with Tim DeChristopher, a West Virginia native who was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison for peacefully disrupting an illegitimate oil and gas auction and saving tens of thousands of acres of public land from oil and gas exploitation.Prior to his sentencing, DeChristopher expressed his strong support for the tree sitters. From the trees, Becks wrote, “Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years. Please support him and all those who suffer to bring justice to us all.”

“Until this past Wednesday, trucks were still hauling coal that had previously been extracted and stockpiled; now, even this work has ceased,” the campaign reports. Local resident Junior Walk was arrested for supporting the tree sitters along with Elias Schewel on the first day of the protest. Both were released on bail that evening.

Citizen activism may be the only protection the mountains have against the mountaintop removal mining, which is giving local communities cancer and birth defects. West Virginia’s politicians are working with Tea Party Republicans to overturn Environmental Protection Agency efforts to enforce Clean Water Act rules against the pollution caused by blowing up mountains.

On Aug. 20, several weeks of protest will begin in front of the White House to challenge President Obama to prevent the construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

“We thank the multitude of people across the country that have expressed their unwavering support for the tree sitters,” the RAMPS campaign wrote in an email update on Saturday. “Please be assured that these words of encouragement are being passed on to the young people in the trees, and will be ever more necessary with each passing day they spend sitting and sweating in the muggy West Virginia heat.”

The RAMPS campaign, reporting on the tree sit on Twitter at @RAMPSWV, is seeking contributions and comments that oppose the renewal of the Bee Tree mining permit, acquired by Alpha when they took over Massey Energy.

At the Power Shift protest in front of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington DC, climate activist Tim DeChristopher explained why he’s put his liberty on the line to fight the fossil fuel industry. In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress, he discussed how extractive corporations like BP and Massey Energy — both powerful members of the Chamber — are destroying our nation and corrupting our politics, committing crimes and killing Americans without consequence:

No corporations have been prosecuted for killing 29 people in West Virginia in the Big Branch mining disaster last year. No corporations have been prosecuted for killing 11 people and destroying an entire ecosystem in the Gulf last year. Those are the big crimes that we need to be fighting.

Watch it:

In March, DeChristopher was found guilty for disrupting a Bush administration oil lease auction, in a trial even the judge admitted was flawed. As bidder 70, DeChristopher competed with oil companies for the tracts of pristine Utah wilderness, winning $1.7 million worth of bids in an auction held during the waning days of the Bush-Cheney administration. The auction, which included land within site of Arches National Park, was found later to have been in violation of federal law and withdrawn by the Obama administration. DeChristopher was not allowed to explain that — or his concerns about the destruction of our planet’s atmosphere from fossil fuel pollution — at his trial.

DeChristopher’s sentencing hearing is set for June 23.

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.