A new report from the Department of Interior's Inspector General highlights several problems with the way DOI gives taxpayer-owned coal to companies like Peabody, Arch, and Cloud Peak Energy, including flaws in the way DOI calculates fair market value (FMV) and a failure to consider increasing coal exports. The report reinforces the need for a moratorium on federal coal leasing, as outlined in a letter to Secretary Jewell on her first day in office which noted these and other concerns. The New York Times reports: The report, the product of one of a series of investigations under way of federal …

Activists call on Secretary Jewell to Keep Our Coal in the Ground at the Colorado State BLM office, May 29, 2013 Protesters called on Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to “Keep Our Coal in the Ground” as the Department of Interior held a lease sale for 21.3 million tons of coal at the Colorado Bureau of Land Management (BLM) field office today. While the BLM called this a “competitive” coal lease, as usual only one company, Blue Mountain Energy, submitted a bid for the coal. The coal company, which hopes to expand its Deserado mine that supplies coal to the Bonanza …

Peabody held its annual shareholders meeting in Gillette, Wyoming on Monday, hoping to avoid more of the massive protests the coal company has faced at its headquarters in St. Louis. Indeed, while Peabody executives tried to put a positive spin on the company’s outlook for shareholders in Wyoming, thousands of union mine workers converged in downtown St. Louis to protest against Peabody and its efforts to cheat coal miners out of the pensions they were promised. The protest took place outside a bankruptcy hearing for ‘Patriot’ Coal, the company left with those obligations to retired miners and their families after …

Exxon’s tar sands pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas is highlighting concerns about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and raising questions about the risks of existing pipelines transporting diluted tar sands crude. In a familiar pattern for the oil industry, Exxon is impeding access to the spill, controlling information about the impacts, and threatening reporters with arrest; as Little Rock, Arkansas based journalist Suzi Parker put it, “the company has instituted something like martial law.” The Arkansas Attorney General has promised an investigation, but with Exxon running the show, many questions about the spill remain unanswered for now. We asked Rick …

Ambre Energy's losses dwarf its revenues. From Sightline Institute, "Ambre Energy, Caveat Investor" It's not a good time to be a coal industry executive in the US. Last year, wind power made up nearly half of all new installed electricity generation, and domestic coal use is on the decline year after year. With dimming prospects at home, companies are in a race to export US coal to foreign markets. Some of the coal companies pushing to export US coal are relatively well known, especially for their long history of environmental and labor abuses - think Peabody and Arch. But until now, little has been …

One of the many subsidies that coal mining companies like Arch and Peabody enjoy is coming under increased scrutiny from federal regulators. The Department of Interior (DOI) announced that an investigation has been launched to determine if coal companies are using sister companies to reduce the royalties they owe when exporting taxpayer-owned coal to foreign markets. The federal probe follows a Reuters investigation that found that "By valuing coal at low domestic prices rather than the much higher price fetched overseas, coal producers can dodge the larger royalty payout when mining federal land." In a letter to Senators Wyden and Murkowski, Secretary of the Interior Ken …

At a campaign event today in Etna, Ohio, Gov. Romney was asked, “Do you still think the rising of the seas is funny?” Romney responded, “I never imagined such a thing is funny,” despite using rising sea levels as a punchline in his speech to the Republican National Convention.

Oil is washing up along the Gulf Coast in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, churned up by Hurricane Isaac. After discovering hundreds of tar balls at Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama, a Greenpeace research team joined our allies at the Gulf Restoration Network to investigate the impacts on East and West Ship Island, off the coast of Mississippi. We found tar balls on East Ship Island and several heavily oiled areas on West Ship Island, which are both part of the Gulf National Seashore.

Oil and reeds washed up by Hurricane Isaac on West Ship Island, Miss., Sept. 4, 2012.

Meanwhile, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Louisiana is “closing a 12-mile section of Gulf coastline from Caminada Pass to Pass Fourchon after Hurricane Isaac washed up large areas of oil and tar balls at the location of one of the worst inundations of BP oil during the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 … agency crews surveying damage from Isaac discovered large sections of viscous oil and tar balls floating along the coast.”

Our national parks have been called "America's best idea," and Americans are proud of the special places we have protected for the inspiration and enjoyment of current and future generations. But protected areas from Florida to Alaska face new challenges on a warming planet, and melting sea ice means that a newly vulnerable area -- the Arctic -- is increasingly threatened by offshore oil drilling and industrial fishing. Protecting the Arctic is emerging as one of the great environmental challenges of our age -- so what lessons can we learn from earlier generations who came together and won protection for the parks, sanctuaries, and wildlife refuges that we enjoy today?

As we were making final preparations for our Save the Arctic tour in Alaska, some of the crew from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza had a chance to visit Kenai Fjords National Park, a wild and protected area in southern Alaska where the coastline is punctuated by extraordinary glaciers that empty into a sea dominated by humpback whales, seabirds, orcas, and seals.

The effects of climate change are impossible to ignore here, as these enormous glaciers melt and retreat back to the coast. Researchers here in 1909 observed and photographed Northwestern Glacier extending 10 miles into the sea. A century later, we find this glacier has retreated back so far that today it barely reaches the sea. Alaska has warmed twice as quickly as the rest of the United States, and this melting has accelerated in recent years.

Northwestern Glacier’s retreat has accelerated, and now it barely reaches the sea.

While the impacts of climate change are particularly dramatic here in Alaska, there's trouble for national parks and other protected areas across the United States. In many Western parks like Rocky Mountain National Park, pine forests are being decimated by the mountain pine beetle that thrives in warmer winters. In Florida, coral reefs in Biscayne Bay and the Dry Tortugas are being destroyed by warming and acidifying oceans, while sea level rise threatens low-lying areas like the Everglades. Glacier National Park may not have any glaciers left at all by 2030. The list goes on -- for more, see the National Parks Conservation Association's report, "Unnatural Disaster: Global Warming and Our National Parks."

A version of this article originally appeared on Climate Progress.

The BLM lets Peabody lease public land for next to nothing and strip-mine it for coal.

On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is scheduled to hold an “auction” for 721 million tons of taxpayer-owned coal in the Powder River Basin.

This is for the North Porcupine tract, and like the South Porcupine tract that BLM leased to Peabody last month -- even though this coal is owned by you and me -- the lease was drawn up by Peabody itself for its own profit. This is what’s known as a “lease by application,” and under BLM’s corrupt coal-leasing program, Peabody will almost certainly be the only bidder and pay next to nothing.

WildEarth Guardians’ 2009 report “UnderMining the Climate” [PDF] found that over the last 20 years, only three of 21 lease by applications had more than one bidder. Since Peabody knows it will face no competitive pressure, it can simply offer the lowest possible price, secure in the knowledge that if it doesn’t meet BLM’s absurdly low minimum price, it can just try again later. In fact, that’s just what happened with the South Porcupine tract; Peabody’s initial offer of just $0.90 per ton was rejected as too low by the BLM -- so they simply held another auction a few weeks later and accepted Peabody’s offer of $1.11 per ton. In both “auctions” Peabody was the only bidder.

Now, the company is once again seeking cheap access to more of our coal, so it can strip-mine it from public lands and export it to lucrative markets in Asia.