In his speech at the UN Summit on Climate Change today, President Barack Obama admonished world leaders that their nations "cannot allow the old divisions that have characterized the climate debate for so many years to block our progress."

Yet, during this week-long summit to lay the groundwork for...

This might be the shameless story of the week: Either that, or West Virginia University president James P. Clements has a lot of explaining to do--especially to the widows and children of the deceased miners in Crandall Canyon, Utah, and to the sick children and ailing communities in the Coal...

Many readers of the New York Times probably dropped their jaws in amazement at the lead story last Sunday: Seven-year-old Ryan Massey, of Prenter, West Virginia, smiled back with capped teeth, the enamel devoured by toxic tap water. His brother sported scabs and rashes, courtesy of the heavy metals--including...

Invoking an earlier promise to "use the best science and follow the letter of the law," Lisa Jackson's EPA, with a little help from her friends at the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Interior, announced today that 79 pending mountaintop removal mining permits in the Appalachian coalfields...

Big Coal giant and mountaintop removal king Massey Energy is getting strip-mined of its "Friends of America" rhetoric, and charged for sponsoring job-taking, water-polluting and land-destroying operations.

Hours after the West Virginia state Supreme Court considered new arguments in a $85 million damage suit brought against Massey Energy,...

How easy to be cynical on this Labor Day, and declare it a day that will live in infamy for coal miners and coalfield residents and green job advocates across the nation.

But thanks to United Mine workers like Terry Steele, and West Virginia military veterans like Chris Carey, and...

Verizon Wireless joined dozens of other companies last week in dumping its ads on Glenn Beck's Fox New Channel program. Due to Beck's "controversial track record," Verizon Wireless spokesman Jim Gerace told Color of Change organizers: "We made a decision that we don't want to be advertising on that...

Verizon Wireless needs to reconsider its "Friends and Family" feature--or, even better, it should withdraw its support for Massey's Energy's outrageously bogus "Friends of America" rally on Labor Day Weekend.

Do 87 million Verizon Wireless customers, stockholders, and its Public Policy Development and Corporate Responsibility department know that their...

Now is the time for all good greens, rednecks, social entrepreneurs, hellraisers, Repower America and Al Gore to come to the aid of their fellow citizens in the Appalachian coalfields.

While Big Coal Gone Wild continues to unravel in its bizarre pr campaigns this summer, coalfield residents and advocates from...

Question of the week: As Capitol Hill and the various Obama administration agencies hold meetings with coalfield residents and coal industry representatives, as part of their fact-finding process of making major decisions on mountaintop removal, coal and climate change policies, will they meet the "real" faces of coal or Big...

In a stunning blow to mountaintop removal blasting operations in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia this morning, two fearless protesters scaled massive trees and unfurled banners from their 80-foot-high platforms. Within 300 feet of the Massey Energy's Edwight mountaintop removal blasting site, above Pettry Bottom and Peachtree in...

Last fall, Tom Zeller at the New York Times Green Inc. blog wrote an eye-opening piece on a possible Indian government and corporate venture in Appalachia's coal mines.

And as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope pointed out, an even bigger coal story took place this week in India. Members of...

While Big Coal continues to bankroll the largest public relations campaign of "clean coal" denial in recent history, former US Representative and historian Ken Hechler has issued an urgent wake up call to Greens and liberal Democrats: Tragic lessons in history remind us that the coal crisis and its deniers...

This might be a first in the country: The failed West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is emerging as such an embarrassingly pro-coal anti-mountain public relations nightmare for Gov. Joe Manchin that even retired coal miners have taken to the streets against the state's environmental regulators, calling on the federal...

With so many qualified candidates for the directorship of the important Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, why is the Obama administration nominating a controversial advocate for coal ash dumping, who also admits he still needs to learn more about the even more controversial and huge issue of mountaintop...

As the brilliant lights of the White House shine across Pennsylvania Avenue Monday evening, generated by a coal-fired plant that uses coal stripmined from devastating mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia, religious leaders and organizations representing over 45 million Americans from across the country will hold a special candlelight prayer vigil...

Dissing Dolly. Forging letters to Congress. Jumping out of airplanes. Violently attacking peaceful coalfield mothers and residents. Calling climate change "superstition." Blocking cemetery entrances.

Stand back, Sarah Palin. The antics of Big Coal and its sycophants this past month have all the lurid ingredients of a prime time reality TV...

Spoleto, Umbria -- When President Barack Obama trundled into the bel paese of Italy for the G8 gathering last month, some of my neighbors in the verdant hills of Umbria were surprised to learn about their country's small but lingering dependence on coal-fired plants. Draping banners down five coal-fired towers...

Mired in the acrobatics of regulatory doublespeak, the Obama administration's increasing oversight of the unbearable daily toll on Appalachian coalfield residents from mountaintop removal begs the question: Are Obama's well-meaning but irresolute environmental administrators abetting the crimes of human rights violations and historicide?

Whether they are unaware of decades of...

"Oh these nights. My blessed bounty of dreams." -- Luci Tapahonso, Blue Horses Rush In

The bounty of green job dreams is one step toward becoming a reality on the Dinetah-Navajo Nation. Thanks to the indefatigable work of the Navajo Green Economy Coalition and Navajo Nation Speaker Lawrence T. Morgan,...