coal-fired plant
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Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash
Here’s the damage from a coal ash spill in Tennessee.A civil lawsuit filed last week in state court in Delaware charges Arlington, Va.-based AES Corp. — one of the world’s largest power companies — with illegally dumping 160 million pounds of toxic coal ash waste onto beaches in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic, […]
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Congressional watchdog issues update on coal ash regulation efforts
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency still does not know the exact number of coal ash dumps at the nation’s power plants, but it’s moving ahead with plans to regulate them. Those are among the findings of a report [PDF] released last week by the Government Accountability Office on the status of EPA’s efforts to improve […]
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How green is Chicago?
On the same streets in the Windy City, where a young liberal Democratic activist named Francis Peabody peddled “smoke-free clean coal” in the 1890s, an estimated 400 Chicago residents marched to the infamous Fisk Generating Station coal-fired plant for the Chicago 350 Climate Action last week. Eight activists were arrested for blockading Cermak Road, in […]
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EPA revamping rules for toxic releases from coal plants
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that it plans to revise the existing standards for wastewater discharges from coal-fired power plants. The news came one day after three environmental groups announced they intend to sue the agency for failing to properly regulate such discharges. Many of these releases come from coal ash ponds like […]
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North Carolina governor calls for better regulation of coal ash dumps
North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue (D) has endorsed legislation that would increase oversight of the state’s coal ash dumps, the massive surface impoundments that power companies use to store the toxic waste left over after burning coal. Responding to watchdog pressure, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently disclosed the locations of 44 “high hazard” ash […]
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Audit finds Tennessee Valley Authority misled on ash spill disaster
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Inspector General released a critical audit this week on the federal company’s response to last December’s massive ash spill disaster at its Kingston power plant in eastern Tennessee’s Roane County. The incident involved a failure in a coal ash containment pond that released more than a billion gallons of toxic waste […]
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Taking coal back to the garden
“…we can train ourselves to attend to the beautiful things waiting to be noticed. We can become curious and push the perceptions outward towards the surrounding world and society. We can see the miracle of life around us. We can be altered and saved by the situation in which we find ourselves.” Anne Bogart, Siti […]
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Must-read new story on the Tennessee coal ash disaster and the myth of “clean coal”
Stop what you’re doing and proceed immediately to the current issue of GQ magazine, which contains a blockbuster piece of investigative journalism: “Black Tide,” by Sean Flynn. Here’s the slug: Just days before Christmas last year, an environmental disaster one hundred times the size of the Exxon Valdez (yes, you read that right) unfolded on […]
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Carbon geography
If you want to understand what’s been going on behind closed doors as members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee hash out a compromise on the Waxman-Markey bill, I highly recommend reading this post by enviro-blogger Devilstower at Daily Kos. Devilstower references a new (as-yet-unpublished) paper I mentioned the other day: “Carbon Geography: The […]
