Queensland court agrees Adani overstated benefits of Carmichael coal mine -by Lisa Cox (Brisbane Times – December 16, 2015)

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/

A Queensland court has found Indian mining company Adani exaggerated the economic benefits of its proposed Carmichael coal mine, including the amount of jobs and royalties the $16.5 billion project would generate.

In a judgment on Tuesday, the Queensland Land Court recommended the Queensland government grant mining leases and environmental approvals for the controversial project, which would become Australia’s largest coal mine.

But the approvals should only be given with additional environmental conditions, including regular monitoring of water bodies near the mine site in central Queensland and a more thorough assessment of the presence of threatened bird species, the black throated finch.

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The Paris summit: A colossal waste of time – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – December 15, 2015)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

What a cliffhanger. As delegates from 195 countries pulled all-nighters in search of a climate deal, the world held its breath. At last, success! Perhaps we’ll save the planet after all. In fact, a deal in Paris was always in the works and everybody knew it.

After the Copenhagen debacle of 2009, the mighty UN climate juggernaut desperately needed a victory. And here it is – an agreement that’s unenforceable and toothless, but makes everyone feel good. Especially Canada.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, our fearless and photogenic leader, took a delegation of 300 politicians, functionaries and hangers-on with him just to prove it. “Canada is back, my good friends,” he announced in Paris.

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COLUMN-Climate deal may be terminal for coal, but death will be lingering – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.K. – December 14, 2015)

http://uk.reuters.com/

Dec 14 It’s tempting to take the champagne-fuelled view that the historic global climate agreement reached in Paris signals the death of coal, but even if the dirty fuel is terminal, it will be a long, lingering demise before the final hacking cough.

This is simply because coal is, and will remain for decades, the main fuel in the world’s top and third-biggest emitters, China and India.

While China has changed direction on coal fairly dramatically in the past two years, its pledge at the climate summit that ended last weekend in the French capital is only that its emissions will peak by 2030.

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[Canada] The Coal Bust – by Kelly Cryderman and Brent Jang (Globe and Mail – December 12, 2015)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

HANNA, ALTA., AND VANCOUVER – Tanis Graham is having trouble sleeping.

At night, the shop owner in the small town of Hanna worries about the downturn in the oil and gas industry and how she’s going to afford the Alberta government’s plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

And in the past few weeks, Ms. Graham, 43, has been kept awake by news that the nearby coal-fired generating station will be closed a decade earlier than scheduled due to the province’s new climate-change strategy.

About 110 people from the area are employed at the coal mine that supplies the generating station, including Ms. Graham’s partner.

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The ‘climatecrats’ and their credibility gap – by Konrad Yakabuski (Globe and Mail – December 14, 2015)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The global climate negotiations in Paris, like the schemes some Canadian provinces have adopted to meet their self-imposed targets, have all been predicated on the fib that greenhouse-gas emissions are easily measurable and verifiable. The opposite is true, a fact politicians and climatecrats continue to gloss over as they jet to summits pretending to save the planet.

The climatecrats’ most obvious disconnect concerns China. No one knows how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases the world’s biggest polluter really emits.

The Chinese government’s own estimates are simply not credible, a fact underscored by its recent admission that the country had been burning 17 per cent more coal a year than it had previously disclosed.

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End of an Era: England Closes its Last Deep-Pit Coal Mine – by Scott Patterson (Wall Street Journal – December 11, 2015)

http://www.wsj.com/

KNOTTINGLEY, England—The last deep-pit coal mine in the U.K. plans to shut its doors here next week, heralding the end of a centuries-old industry that helped fuel the industrial revolution and build the British Empire.

The shutdown, targeted for next Friday, represents a victory for advocates of reducing carbon emissions after world leaders gathered in Paris to discuss how to combat global warming, with coal in the cross hairs. It also reflects a glut of energy on world markets, from crude oil to natural gas and coal itself.

Coal mines have been closing around the world in the past year, from the U.S. to South Africa to the U.K. as prices plunged. But in no country has the industry witnessed such a dramatic fall from grace as in the U.K., where coal production was once seen as the backbone of the nation’s industrial economy, the fuel for everything from steamboats to power plants.

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Twilight of the Skeptic: Climate Critics Fume as Talks Near Deal – by Alex Nussbaum and Reed Landberg (Bloomberg News – December 10, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Coal mining CEO Robert Murray looks at the Paris climate talks and sees nothing but a farce.

A two-week parade of world leaders, scientists and corporate executives attesting to the dangers of global warming has failed to persuade the head of one of America’s biggest coal companies, who dismisses the idea as a hoax.

Now, with envoys in Paris inching toward a final agreement, Murray sees nothing but disaster for the world’s poor and for his already beleaguered industry.

“To me, it is a tragedy,” said Murray, chief executive officer of Murray Energy Corp., the biggest closely-held U.S. coal producer, during an interview from his offices in Ohio’s mining region.

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Two thirds of world’s coal output is loss-making, Wood Mackenzie estimates – by Peter Ker (Sydney Morning Herald – December 10, 2015)

http://www.smh.com.au/

More than 65 per cent of the world’s coal production is estimated to be unprofitable as prices for both thermal and coking coal head for their fifth consecutive year of declines.

The estimate, which was provided by commercial intelligence company Wood Mackenzie, applies to both types of coal. It would be even higher if sustaining capital spent by miners on things like engine maintenance was taken into account.

The extraordinary estimate illustrates the parlous state of the coal industry, which has been battling slowing demand in Asia and structural challenges surrounding coal’s place in an increasingly carbon-conscious world.

The Wood Mackenzie data includes coal mined for export markets and domestic energy supplies around the world.

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As World Debates Climate, Czechs Embrace Heavy Pollutant (Associated Press/New York Times – December 7, 2015)

http://www.nytimes.com/

CSA MINE, Czech Republic — While world leaders try to reach a deal to limit climate change, one of the most polluting fossil fuels, brown coal, is enjoying a revival in the Czech Republic, where entire villages are threatened by new plans for mining.

The Czech Republic is one of a group of countries that is turning to coal, a cheap but dirty energy source, as its economy slows. Neighboring Poland, which has big deposits, is doing so, as is China, the world’s biggest energy consumer.

The Czech variety of the coal, called brown coal or lignite, is a particularly bad source of greenhouse gases and pollutants.

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Kellingley colliery: The pit that survived Margaret Thatcher prepares for closure – by Dean Kirby (Independent – December 6, 2015)

http://www.independent.co.uk/

The North Yorkshire colliery, Britain’s last deep coal mine, will close on 18 December

The miners look almost otherworldly as they burst from the cage that has carried them from deep under ground – their white eyes shining from faces black with coal dust.

The 40 men are shouting and swearing and appear euphoric at being back in the daylight after eight hours working nearly seven miles from the surface in the dark.

But their only welcome, as they march quickly into the lamp room and remove their lanterns and turn into a cavernous changing room to scrub themselves human again, is a grey December fog that has fallen on the world outside like a shroud.

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Reckoning in Appalachia: Why Coal Mining Outlaw Don Blankenship’s Conviction Matters – by Jeff Biggers (Huffington Post – December 3, 2015)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

The landmark conviction of former Massey Energy CEO and coal baron Don Blankenship today on a misdemeanor conspiracy charge to violate mine safety laws is a small, but historic first step in holding mining outlaws accountable for their reckless operations.

For the first time in memory for those of us with friends, family, miners and loved ones living amid the toxic fallout of the coal industry, this conviction may only serve as a tiny reckoning of our nation’s complacency with a continual state of violations, but it could begin a new era of justice and reconciliation in the devastated coal mining communities in Appalachia and around the nation.

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Ragtag Activists Push Banks to Dump Coal – by Zeke Faux (Bloomberg News – December 3, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

The anti-coal protest outside Morgan Stanley’s 42-story tower in New York attracted only three people—four if you count the infant one of them happened to be baby-sitting.

The few bankers who walked outside to meet restaurant deliverymen appeared to barely notice as the activists sang, “Go tell it on the mountain. Your bank poisons us.” It was all over in 15 minutes.

The Nov. 19 demonstration hardly seemed like the kind of thing that would lead an investment banking behemoth to stop putting money into fossil fuels. But the movement that sponsored it is getting results.

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Former Massey Energy C.E.O. Guilty in Deadly Coal Mine Blast – by Alan Blinder (New York Times – December 3, 2015)

http://www.nytimes.com/

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Donald L. Blankenship, a titan of the nation’s coal industry whose approach to business was scrutinized and scorned after 29 workers were killed at the Upper Big Branch mine in 2010, was convicted Thursday of a federal charge of conspiring to violate mine safety standards, part of a case that emerged after the accident, the deadliest in mining in the United States in decades.

The verdict reached by a federal jury here made Mr. Blankenship, 65, the most prominent American coal executive ever to be convicted of a charge connected to the deaths of miners. He had been accused of conspiring to violate mine safety regulations, as well as of deceiving investors and regulators; prosecutors secured a conviction on only one of the three charges.

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OPINION: Obama’s Appalachian Tragedy – by Paul H. Tice (Wall Street Journal – November 30, 2015)

http://www.wsj.com/

Mr. Tice is a senior managing director and head of the Energy Capital Group at USCA Asset Management LLC.

The traveler comes to the Appalachians in the lovely season. He sees the hills, the streams, the foliage—but not the poor.” That passage comes from “The Other America,” Michael Harrington’s 1962 book that opened the eyes of liberal policy makers to America’s invisible poverty.

The classic work helped provide the intellectual ammunition for President Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty,” announced in his State of the Union address two years later.

Fast forward to today. The latest touchstone of liberal policy, the regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions, is causing economic destruction and pushing poverty higher in the Appalachians.

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Europe’s Coal Curtain Is Complicating the Climate Fight – by Ladka Mortkowitz Bauerova (Bloomberg News – November 30, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

At the Bilina mine 50 miles north of Prague, excavators the size of 10-story buildings claw at the earth and scoop out 2,700 tons of brown coal a day to feed the smoke-belching power station on the horizon. After the Czech government relaxed environmental regulations this fall, they’ll be able to keep going for another 40 years.

Some 130 miles away, in eastern Germany, Vattenfall AB’s Jaenschwalde coal pit is preparing to scale back production as the country shifts away from coal and the oldest units of the adjacent power station are scheduled to shut down by 2019.

The two mines highlight Europe’s growing divide on cutting greenhouse gases as global leaders descend on Paris for the biggest climate conference in history.

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