Mitch Whitaker remembers well when Letcher County, Kentucky was booming with mining jobs. In fact, coal mines like the one near the land that Whitaker’s family has owned for generations made the town so busy that miners had three shifts running...
The US coal mining industry is collapsing. Consider this remarkable fact, from a new report by the Rhodium Group: The four largest US miners by output (Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Cloud Peak Energy, and Alpha Natural Resources), which account for...
On June 21, 2004, Charoen Wat-aksorn, a 37-year-old pineapple farmer from Bo Nok village in Prachuap Khiri Khan province, some 240 km [150 miles] south of Bangkok, was returning by bus to his hometown. He had just been in the capital to testify...
The raucous rattle of a low flying helicopter shakes me awake. It must be the Police. The sun hasn’t risen yet and the tent’s sides still smell of morning dew. I doubt I was the only one in this field who didn’t sleep deeply last night. Today...
The fossil fuel-based economy seems impossible to leave behind, but it’s only as immovable as it is profitable. Every single year, the United States alone unearths one billion tons of fossilized carbon. Over the past century and a half, the country...
Coal-fired capacity expansion in China is largely driven by an outdated market design that ‘guarantees’ each power plant a certain amount of operating hours. The system creates false investment security in an overcapacity situation, and has led to...
If you only focused on the United States, you might think coal’s days were numbered. The dirtiest of all fossil fuels once provided more than half of America’s electricity. That has since dropped to 39 percent, thanks to competition from...
A new report released today by Oil Change International, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) exposes for the first time a web of billions of dollars of public finance flowing to support the coal industry...
The coal industry is dying, and they are desperately trying to place the blame for their impending doom on someone other than themselves. The world around them is changing, and the industry is absolutely terrified of change. This is why they created...
In 2011, political theorist Timothy Mitchell published Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, which argues that the fossil fuel industry “helped create both the possibility of modern democracy and its limits.” The book begins with the...