Archive | Coal

https://www.nytimes.com/

Jason Clark has lived near Amity, Pa., in the southwestern part of the state, since he was born. He likes to call urban Americans “hypocrites.” At 38, he’s the president of the Pork Association in Washington County, which sits at the edge of Appalachia.

City dwellers are consumers, as he sees it; they gobble up resources like meat and coal and natural gas without knowing where they come from or thinking much about the toll that rural Americans pay to supply them.

There’s a term for that toll. Economists call it the resource curse, or the paradox of plenty. Since the 1990s, political scientists and development experts have used the resource curse to explain why countries richest in fossil fuels tend to remain poor. The problem, they contend, lies in the toxic impact of large influxes of cash: Easy money displaces more productive economic activity and fosters weak governments. Continue Reading →

https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/

Appalachia can humble people who think they have an ingrained GPS. I had flown into Pittsburgh, incorrectly assuming I had landed east of the city, then spent the next 15 hours resolutely determined that west was east.

Rarely has my inner compass betrayed me during my travels amid the North American West’s tall mountains and wide valleys. Amid the tree-covered hills and hollows of Appalachia, though, I felt like a whirling dervish, a Sufi mystic seeking enlightenment through dizziness.

My trip to Pittsburgh had dual missions: a conference but also an assignment to write about coal communities in transition. “When you think of coal, everybody thinks of Appalachia,” my editor in Chicago had said. Continue Reading →

http://znews24.com/

Donald Trump’s efforts to revive coal mining have been criticized as choosing winners. Truly, it’s extra like choosing losers: coal has change into a sundown business as cleaner vitality sources quickly get cheaper. If Mr. Trump succeeds at reversing the tide, it is going to come at a steep value, in each and lives, most tragically for the coal miners he purports to assist.

Centuries in the past, coal was a miracle materials. Cleaner, safer and extra environment friendly than wooden, it made the Industrial Revolution, steam energy and electrification doable. In a lot of the world it stays ridiculously plentiful and would be the energy era gas of selection for years to come back.

Within the U.S., although, coal is headed towards obsolescence. Due to the fracking revolution, natural-gas-fueled energy crops are actually cheaper to construct and function than coal-fired crops.Photo voltaic- and wind-generated energy now prices much less per kilowatt-hour to supply than coal. Continue Reading →

https://www.nytimes.com/

An environmental group’s analysis shows the five largest United States banks have started lending to coal companies again now that they’re out of bankruptcy.

Starting three years ago, the largest American banks vowed to cut back on lending to the coal industry.

“The bank has a responsibility to help mitigate climate change by leveraging our scale and resources to accelerate the transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon society,” Bank of America said in its coal policy in May 2015.

Their pledges seemed so dramatic that Paul Argenti, a professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, began citing them in lectures as a rare example of a corporate principle’s trumping profits. “I read it as: They were done,” he said. Continue Reading →