While many of us are spending the holidays with our friends and families, activists from United Mountain Defense and Mountain Justice are on the ground in eastern Tennessee providing relief to the coal ash disaster.

On Mon., Dec. 22, at 1:00 am, a coal slurry impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee spilled at least 525 million gallons of toxic coal ash into the Tennessee River and surrounding areas.

Check the Video Here 

Santa Clause was arrested while delivering stockings of coal and bundles of switches to the CEO’s of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Delivering coal is the least favorite part of Santa’s job but when TVA held a public meeting at their office in Chattanooga; Santa knew he had to deliver years of backlog coal first hand.     

This is pretty freaking BIG!!

“Bank of America is particularly concerned about surface mining conducted through mountain top removal in locations such as central Appalachia. We therefore will phase out financing of companies whose predominant method of extracting coal is through mountain top removal. While we acknowledge that surface mining is economically efficient and creates jobs, it can be conducted in a way that minimizes environmental impacts in certain geographies.”

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has approved Massey Energy’s revision of one of the mountaintop removal coal mining permits for Coal River Mountain.

That means Massey may begin blasting at any time.

Read about it here on Grist.

This is too much. Don Blankenship and Massey Energy are the poster
children for mountaintop removal. They not only wreck the planet by
selling the coal they mine to be burned, but wreck Appalachian
communities and landscape in extracting it. It’s a pretty horrible
process and this guy labels us as the crazy ones?

My favorite line in this article is “The greeniacs are taking over the world.”

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 new national poll released today (pdf) finds that 85% of voters in the US are concerned about the destructive practice of mountaintop removal minging for coal.

In one of the first of what will likely be many terrible Bush Administration
last minute decisions as his term comes to an end, they are trying to force
through the Stream Buffer Zone (SBZ) rule change. Last year, you may recall
grassroots groups from across the US teamed up with national groups to send
between 40,000 and 70,000 comments to the Office of Surface Mining,
Reclaimation, and Enforcement (OSMRE) asking them to block the rule change —
which would legalize and expand the worst abuses of mountaintop removal.

Yesterday a group of more than twenty-five activists from
around the country entered and blockaded the construction site of Dominion
Virginia Power's new coal-fired power plant in Wise County, VA
.

Action website

AP Article in the Washington Post