Coal Mining Debris Rule Is Approved is the story from the "NY Times" earlier this week.  National environmental groups and regional groups like the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition were, understandably, up in arms.  The NRDC, for instance, said in their release:  "The EPA's concurrence and approval of this defective rule governing coal mining is ecologically and economically indefensible."  OVEC said here the administration's last-minute rule is " destroying even more of our streams, and by extension, our mountains, our communities and our culture."

I've written about this a number of times, including in The Crime of Mountaintop Removal Mining.  The impact is enormous and the crime great.  I want you to stop for a minute and watch this trailer from the superb documentary Burning the Future: Coal in America.  Forget for just a moment what the untrammeled burning of coal is doing to the planet minute by minute and think of the devastating environmental and public health impacts of the mining.

Okay.  Got it?  The carbon loading from the industrial and electric power plants burning coal is, to be sure, inexorably heating up our atmosphere, but the mining is a nightmare.  It's long past time to wake ourselves up.

Bank of America, for one, has figured it out.  I wrote here in June about how they've taken a leadership role in the financial community.  For one thing, in April, BofA signed the Carbon Principles, "to evaluate and address carbon risks in the financing of electric power projects."  Now the "NY Times" reports at their blog on the confluence of business, energy and the environment, Green Inc.:  Bank of America to Stop Financing Mountaintop Mining.  See the Bank of America Coal Policy which says they "will phase out financing of companies whose predominant method of extracting coal is through mountain top removal."

Serious opposition to unregulated coal mining and coal burning is growing.  (See Baby, It's Coal Outside and other posts at the blog.)  A new coalition of groups has just formed.  "The Reality Coalition is a project of the Alliance for Climate Protection, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the League of Conservation Voters, and tells the truth about coal today ‚ it isn't clean."

Finally, I've written about "carbon capture and storage" (CCS) a number of times, here, here and here for instance.  I want to highlight an article from the fine "Nature Reports Climate Change" that makes it quite clear that even if you can capture the carbon dioxide at anything approaching some sort of reasonable cost, keeping the gas safely sequestered over time is still-another incredibly daunting task.  Going underground notes the difficulties.

Coal mining and burning have, shall we say, a few "externalities."  Where would you go next year if you were Barack Obama, Henry Waxman or Barbara Boxer?   

*To fully appreciate this allusion, see the first video here.