Thanks to the good work of the Sierra Club and a large coalition of
western and Utah organizations, the phrase ‘No New Coal’ may have gone
WAY out of style today. The Environmental Appeals Board of the EPA just
ruled that the EPA has the authority to establish a Best Available
Control Technology (BACT) limit for carbon dioxide.

The Beehive Collective, a Maine-based artist collective known for creating beautiful pieces of movement related visual art, are in the process of making a graphic about "The Story of Coal."  After months of research, travel, conversation, sketching, deliberating and head-scratching, the Beehive Collective began to put together a complicated visual narrative that begins with coal 360 million years ago, travels through the streams and earth right into the global crisis known as climate change. 

A few years ago, I took some time to travel through Australia. While there I made friends with a number of Aussie climate activists and did a bit of organizing with them. They are beautiful people doing brilliant work.

Australian coal amounts to about 30% of the emissions coming from coal worldwide. They are selling it like crazy to East Asia. Australia is also deeply impacted by climate change (drought, rising sea levels etc).

Check out this smokin' hot youtube video posted yesterday in which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) states that "coal makes us sick."

Here's a quick transcript of the Reid video:

Reid: "We talk about cost competitiveness, but one this we fail to talk about is the costs that you don't see on the bottom line. That is, coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. And this global warming is ruining our country, it's ruining our world.

You've got to stop using fossil fuels. We have for generations taken it out of the earth, carbon out of the earth and put it in the atmosphere and its making us all sick. Its changing our world."

Last week, the state Air Pollution Control Board in Virginia aproved pollution permits for the $1.8 billion, 585-megawatt power plant in Wise County - granting Dominion Virginia Power the final go-ahead to begin construction on the plant.

Sometimes, we all get a little caught up in talking and arguing about politics.

November 7, 2006 was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for a lot of Republicans.