Young Coal Activists Shut Mountaintop Mining for Four Hours - Green Living Ideas

Young Coal Activists Shut Mountaintop Mining for Four Hours

Posted on Jul 23, 2010 by Susan Kraemer.

Four protesters in their 20s who succeeded in briefly halting mountaintop removal on Coal River Mountain in West Virginia are now in jail on a collective bail amount of $12,000.

They had chained themselves to a piece of mining equipment, and were briefly able to shut down operations of a Massey Energy subsidiary in Western Raleigh County, West Virginia for several hours in hope of bringing attention to the losses sustained if mountaintop removal continues.
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One Way Climate Change Will Change the Way We Build

Posted on Jul 19, 2010 by Susan Kraemer.

A village in Alaska has had to find a way to counteract the effects of an ongoing permafrost melt that has destabilized the ground beneath homes in the village. New building techniques may be the result.

With a 3.3° C rise in the region’s average air temperatures over the last twenty years, some buildings have cracked and slipped in the Alaskan village of Salluit on the Hudson Strait, because the permafrost beneath the village is melting. Ground temperatures have risen a third as much.

These structural problems are due to the permafrost melt as the result of global climate change that has already begun. Alaska is one of those regions that has warmed by more than the global average.

Although climate change so far averages out to just 1° C or so worldwide, that world average is the sum total of all the regional increases in some places, and in other places; decreases, forming the new global average temperature.

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Great Green Wall of Trees for Africa

Posted on Jul 15, 2010 by Zachary Shahan.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF), in an effort to lessen desertification and drought in Africa, is helping to plant a living wall of trees across Africa. The “wall” will be huge — 9 miles (14 kilometers) thick and 4,400 miles (7,081 km) long.

The “Great Green Wall” will go through 11 countries in the Sahel-Saharan region.

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WorldWatch Institute Closes Shop with a Bicycle Bang

Posted on Jul 05, 2010 by Zachary Shahan.

The WorldWatch Institute is a stellar independent research organization helping to create “an environmentally sustainable society that meets human needs.” When I was doing research for my Master’s thesis on the relationship between bicycle facilities and bicycle travel, I ran across a great WorldWatch Institute publication from 1989 (before bicycling was so hip) titled The Bicycle: Vehicle for a Small Planet that contained lots of useful and hard to find information on the benefits of bicycling and bicycle statistics from around the world.
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Coal Mining Costing West Virginia $97.5 Million

Posted on Jul 02, 2010 by Susan Kraemer.

Despite the PR campaigns by the coal lobby that imply that the state relies on coal income, an analysis by The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy finds that actually coal cost the state of West Virginia more than it took in.

Only the direct costs to the state were tallied. The report did not attempt to estimate individual health or environmental “legacy costs” not borne by the state directly. Individual health costs caused by coal mining are carried by private insurers or individuals, as are the costs to repair damage to private land. The permanent loss of economic potential for tourism or fishing due to environmental destruction is not easily tallied and was not included.
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