West Virginia
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In Appalachia, he’s helping former miners dig into new opportunities
Brandon Dennison is on a mission to save West Virginia’s economy while preserving its unique history.
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Here’s how a post-coal Appalachia could thrive
Coal mining is disappearing in West Virginia and Kentucky. What will take its place?
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Watch a burning house float away in an epic flood
West Virginia is flooding in a pretty terrifying way.
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Villains who poisoned W. Va. drinking water could end up behind bars
Indictments have come down for execs at the coal-"cleaning" company that contaminated the drinking water of 300,000 people.
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If these kids can understand why mountaintop-removal mining is stupid, the government can too
Their pitch is this: "We're children. We're not scientists. But we understand what's happening."
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Bathtub photo lands coal activist in child-porn hot water
West Virginia coal activist Maria Gunnoe testified before a congressional committee about her community's ruined water supplies. Instead of action, her evidence triggered a conversation with the Capitol Police.
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Critical List: Big trees suffer more from deforestation; Japan’s version of Al Gore
Deforestation is disproportionately killing off the world’s largest trees. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif., a.k.a. the Mustache of Justice) wants to subpoena Koch Industries executives to force them to testify about the company’s connection to Keystone XL. The National Academy of Sciences wants to find out more about nanomaterials and their effects on humans, since the […]
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Monsanto won’t have to clean up dioxin in West Virginia
West Virginia continues to win the game of exposing human beings to extremely hazardous conditions in exchange for working-class pay, then telling them to deal with it when they get sick. The latest example of this behavior doesn't even have to do with coal, but with Monsanto and Agent Orange.
For 30 years, the Monsanto plant in a town called Nitro (named after the chemicals produced there! For real!) produced a defoliant ingredient that would later be used in Agent Orange. But the herbicides made in Nitro were contaminated with dioxin, which meant that Nitro residents were exposed to the toxic chemical beginning in the late 1940s. Dioxin has been connected to every bad health impact imaginable—for adults, problems like cancer and immune suppression, and for kids, problems like birth defects and learning disabilities. And now, because of the way West Virginia law works, the most that the citizens of Nitro can ask from the company is that it covers the cost of medical testing fees. -
Critical List: DOE’s loan guarantee head out; some beluga whales are toxic
Jonathan Silver, DOE's loan guarantee czar, is
the first government employee to lose his job over Solyndra.leaving the government because the loan guarantee program doesn't have any money left, anyway.Solyndra's also screwing the rest of the cleantech industry.
The BP spill is still affecting Louisiana, where the oyster season could be delayed and shrimp harvests dropped 99 percent.
A judge ruled that the EPA was a little too excited about regulating West Virginia coal mines and should have gone through more formal rulemaking on guidelines to dump coal waste into streams. Another part of their work, on water quality, is still at issue, which means coal companies could lose in the long run.