Robert Byrd
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Labor and enviros join up in W.Va. to fight mountaintop coal mining
For the first time in years, mining unions are finding common cause with advocates who are seeking to end mountaintop-removal coal mining.
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The Climate Post: Climate scientists: It’s war
700 climate scientists agreed to speak out as experts about global warming. Plus, coal enjoys November and the Copenhagen failure costs $1 trillion.
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Senator Robert Byrd: An Appreciation
This post was co-written by Mary Anne Hitt of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, who is also a native West Virginian. On September 21, 2006, grandfather and former coal miner Ed Wiley took the final steps of a 455-mile walk that began in the coalfields of West Virginia and ended in Washington, DC, at […]
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What Robert Byrd’s death means for the climate bill
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who died early this morning at the age of 92, fought for most of his legendary career to keep coal mining at the center of West Virginia’s economy. But in the last few months of his life, he hinted at a remarkable change of heart, speaking out on the damage coal […]
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Safety ‘#1 priority,’ coal chief Blankenship assures Congress
Poor Don Blankenship. The Massey Energy CEO had to sit quietly through a Senate hearing yesterday while the head of the United Mine Workers called his company’s safety performance “deplorable,” and West Virginia’s finger-wagging, Democratic senator, Robert Byrd cried “shame” on Massey’s “alarming record.” But in his first appearance before Congress since 29 Massey miners […]
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Has coal’s strongest defender had a change of heart?
The elders of the U.S. Senate usually aren’t good people to look to for signs of hope and change. But Robert Byrd, the 92-year-old senator from West Virginia, is making some surprising statements lately. After a career as a loyal coal-industry defender, Byrd made headlines last year by calling on the industry to “embrace the […]
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More evidence that Sen. Byrd sees the writing on the wall for coal
Last Friday, the EPA took a significant step toward blocking a Clean Water Act permit for Arch Coal’s Spruce Mine, the largest proposed mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia history. It’s a big deal — see Ken Ward Jr. for more on what it means and what comes next. I just wanted to highlight the […]
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EPA’s Jackson establishes deliberative path to control global warming pollution
Big oil, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and senators including Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) are whipping up hysterical fears that the Environmental Protection Agency will use its existing authority under the Clean Air Act to immediately restrict global warming pollution for even the smallest of emitters. For instance, NAM President John […]
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As Copenhagen kicks off, a Good News roundup
The fashionable narrative about climate politics in American media is deflationist: nobody cares about climate any more because of some emails, the Senate clean energy bill is doomed because of the economy, and the Copenhagen climate talks will end in failure because of intractable differences between developed and developing nations. It gets old. Just for […]