As viewers of PBS and the major network and cable channels know too well, the onslaught of "clean coal" advertisements over the past year has reached a tipping point. In the face of the actual news headlines, the relentless barrage of television daydreams about coal's zero carbon dioxide emissions and...

"Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue." --Martin Luther King, Jr., to the eight fellow clergymen who opposed the civil rights action, "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We...

While Peabody Coal, one of the prime sponsors of the FutureGen boondoggle in Illinois, announced an eightfold increase in profits in their fourth quarter reports for 2008, the Senate Appropriations Committee just approved legislation for $4.6 billion in handouts to the coal industry as part of the stimulus...

When President Barack Obama's staff turns on the lights to the Oval Office this week, a signal will be sent from the Potomac Energy Company to the Chalk Point Generation Station, where the coal handling facility service of the power plant will shovel in coal strip-mined from mountains of West...

As we celebrate the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama on Tuesday, Ella Baker's legacy will shine like an enduring beacon of the intergenerational and massive organizational effort that has brought Obama to the White House.

Like so many unrecognized women in the Civil Rights movement and presidential campaigns,...

President-elect Barack Obama could make an extraordinary statement this Friday, when he visits a factory in Bedford Heights, Ohio, that produces parts for wind turbines, as part of his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan: En route, he could easily fly over the Tennessee Valley Authority's disaster zone, and a coal...

Impeachment notwithstanding, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich signed a bill this week that will send another $18 million down the "clean coal" rabbit hole in Illinois.

The delusional symbolism couldn't be more obvious. In fact, the Chicago Tribune captured the carbon truth of the story:

"But coal is relatively...

While the TVA hand-wringing went on at Senate hearings in Washington, DC, another coal pond broke this week at the Widows Creek Fossil Plant in Jackson, Alabama.

Not that we didn't know: Widow Creek was listed in a recent Environmental Integrity Project report as one of...

A network of over 250 Native American organizations recently issued an important challenge to the Obama administration for any Green Recovery plan: Look to the First Nations.

"The reality is that the most efficient, green economy will need the vast wind and solar resources that lie on Native American lands....

No one is watching the fall out over last week's TVA coal ash disaster more closely than Kentucky attorney Tony Oppegard. As the former Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Mine Safety & Health Administration (U.S. Department of Labor ) and former general counsel for the Kentucky Department of Mines...

An estimated 500 million gallons of coal ash sludge are seeping along the I-40 Knoxville-Nashville corridor in eastern Tennessee today, after an earthen wall gave way on December 22nd at the TVA Harriman coal-fired plant. While no casualties were reported, the coal ash spill -- the refuse left over after...

The late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, jailed as a "Freedom Rider" during the Civil Rights Movement, issued an open letter to the Roman Catholic Bishops in 2000 on the role of gays and the Christian Church. Coffin passed on in the spring of 2006, but his open letter remains an...

President-elect Barack Obama, energy/climate point person Carol Browner, and DOE nominee Stephen Chu face a historic decision: To commit to non-fossil fuel energy sources and effective action on climate destabilization, or remain quietly beholden to the dirty realities of coal.

Al Gore's visit with Obama in Chicago last week could...

For the sake of a deliberate and balanced approached to mining, indigenous rights, and environmental concerns, let's hope U.S. Representative Raul Grijalva takes the reins at the Department of the Interior for President-elect Barack Obama's administration.

Take this week's startling announcement that the George W. Bush administration might quietly...

Their underground campaign classic--"Booties for Obama"--notwithstanding, the new live album released this week by the Atlanta sister duo R.I.S.E. (formerly known as Rising Appalachia) just might be the green soundtrack of the year.

"Evolutions in Sound: Live" showcases Chloe and Leah Smith's extraordinarily powerful and natural polyphonic range, drawing...

Dear Al Gore:

Two months ago at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, you declared that, "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where...

On the 40th anniversary of the Farmington coal mine disaster, when the tragic loss of 78 coal miners in West Virginia ultimately forced a begrudging President Richard Nixon to sign a long overdue Federal Coal Mine Health & Safety Act of 1969, I hope President-elect Barack Obama's transition team...

I've been on tour in the swing states of Appalachia these days -- southern Ohio, West Virginia, southwest Virginia -- having crisscrossed through Indiana, Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, where I saw an Obama sign adjacent to a neighbor's Confederate flag, guided all the way by intrepid Appalachian radio stations playing Stevie...

With our attention focused on the Wall Street crisis and the presidential election, the George W. Bush administration took an extraordinary step last Friday to give coal companies a couple of departing gifts before the end of this year.

This is the really dirty side of coal we rarely...

Three more retired coal miners died of black lung today. Over 105,000 Americans have suffered and died from black lung related diseases; 10,000 miners, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, have died from black lung in the last decade.

Despite a recent spike in black...