mining and natural resource extraction

Blowing up mountains to mine coal

Salon.com: We still blow up mountains to mine coal: Time to end the war on Appalachia. The dying coal industry’s last gasp is “mountaintop removal” mining — and it’s even worse than it sounds.

On Earth Day this year, as President Biden assembled world leaders to a climate summit to focus on a “clean energy future,” retired coal miner Chuck Nelson hunkered down in the green hills of West Virginia, recovering from a recent stroke and with one remaining kidney, as thousands of tons of explosives from mountaintop removal strip mining operations detonated nearby with a toxic haze of coal dust.

Yes, Greta (Thunberg), we still blow up mountains in the United States to mine deadly coal.

While coal mining has decreased dramatically in recent years, state permits for reckless mountaintop removal operations by absentee corporations, which involve only small numbers of non-union heavy equipment operators and explosives, in contrast to labor-intensive underground mines, continue to be doled out in central Appalachia in a desperate attempt to shake down the region for a final coal tattoo.

There Are Massive Chemical Dumps In The Gulf We Know Almost Nothing About

Huffington Post: There Are Massive Chemical Dumps In The Gulf We Know Almost Nothing About. In the 1970s, the EPA allowed chemical companies to dump toxic waste into the deep sea. Now, oil giants are drilling right on top of it.

Seventy miles off the coast of Louisiana, among a maze of drilling platforms and seafloor pipelines, thousands of 55-gallon drums containing hazardous industrial chemicals litter a vast, dark swath of the ocean floor. They’ve been sitting there for nearly 50 years.

Charles McCreery was a few months into a new job as an oceanographer and water quality expert at the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management when he first learned of the dumping ground. It was 2014, and he was tasked with reviewing oil giant Shell’s exploration plans in an offshore leasing area known as Mississippi Canyon, in the north-central Gulf of Mexico. Deep in the document, he came across the company’s internal policy for steering clear of toxic waste barrels, and what to do should their operations puncture or disturb one.

“The content, and its toxicity, of each individual barrel is not known,” the Shell document reads. “Within the area there are/could be many hundreds of waste barrels. Many of the barrels may have released their contents over time.”

The Daily Climate, April 20, 2021

Articles include: Exxon & carbon capture; offshore wind; glaciers melting in the Andes; coal financing; cities hardest hit by climate change; Biden trying to reinstate US climate change leadership; shrinking sea meadows and GHGs; Canadian budget; Euro lawsuits derail clean energy; DOI heads towards clean energy; climate change and coffee; melting Arctic & Russia.

The Daily Climate, April 13, 2021

Articles include: Reactions to ‘Fracktured’ investigation; Native communities and rising waters; Losing ‘gods’ to climate change; American Jobs Plan; climate change, wildfires, and Elk; California, oil wells, and groundwater pollution; NFTs fueling climate change; Pacific heat wave & the Gulf of Mexico; burning pig poop; polluting SUVs; laws aimed at pipeline protestors; moms battling climate change.

The Daily Climate, April 12, 2021

Articles include: Flood survivors; Biden’s infrastructure plan; California expands O&G drilling; battery makers; Canadian energy jobs; nuclear power plant shutting down; Russia & the arctic; Maine laws & solar investment; Brazil; home buying and climate change; offshore wind; Navajo farmers.

The Daily Climate, April 7, 2021

Articles include: Gretta Thunberg; racism; green goals and the power grid; old batteries & electric vehicles; outdated rainfall data; Canadian coal mine; sea meadows; Chevron climate goals; Antarctic ice shelves collapse; Florida & sea level rise.

How an election in Greenland could affect China — and the rare-earth minerals in your cellphone

Washington Post: How an election in Greenland could affect China — and the rare-earth minerals in your cellphone.

Sitting on vast, untapped reserves of uranium and rare-earth minerals, Greenland holds the keys to massive wealth.

But many Greenlanders have grave doubts about whether they should allow the world to exploit those resources, given the risk that mining could pose to the Arctic territory’s fragile environment.

The remote, snow-covered island sent a clear message to global mining interests this week when voters handed a rare victory to Inuit Ataqatigiit, a democratic socialist party with a 34-year-old leader and an environmental bent. The party, whose name translates to “Community of the People,” had campaigned on halting what was on track to become a massive mining operation in southern Greenland, led by an Australian company and backed by Chinese investment.

Will Future Electric Vehicles Be Powered by Deep-Sea Metals?

Wired: Will Future Electric Vehicles Be Powered by Deep-Sea Metals? Mining companies and marine scientists want to know whether harvesting blobs of useful materials from the seafloor harms ocean life.

THE PUSH TO build more electric vehicles to combat climate change rests on an inconvenient truth: The metals used in EV batteries are pretty dirty. From exploited child laborers digging cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo to toxic waste leaking from nickel mines in Indonesia, the sources of key ingredients to power climate-friendly transportation have been assailed by activists and led to lawsuits against the tech firms that use the metals.

US and European carmakers have been looking for alternative sources of these materials that would allow them to bypass some of these troublesome practices, while avoiding having to buy batteries produced by global competitor China. They also want a piece of President Joe Biden’s new plan to spend $174 billion to promote electric cars and build new charging stations.

“Someone Decided It Was Okay to Poison Us”

Mother Jones: “Someone Decided It Was Okay to Poison Us”. Small firms drill for oil in California neighborhoods with few restrictions.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nalleli Cobo was nine years old when her nose started bleeding, off and on throughout the day, and often into her pillow at night. Then came the headaches and heart palpitations; for a while, her doctor had her wear a heart monitor. “I got to the point where I couldn’t walk,” Cobo, who is now 20, says. “My mom had to carry me from place to place.”

Doctors were stumped as to what was wrong. “I’d always been a healthy little girl,” Cobo recalled. “And then all of a sudden I’m meeting cardiologists and neurologists and all these other -ologists, and no one could figure out what I had.” Only after being sick for four years, in 2013, did she get a possible answer. Physicians for Social Responsibility, a public-health nonprofit, sent a toxicologist to Cobo’s South Los Angeles community to talk about how certain chemical byproducts of oil extraction, among them benzene and hydrogen sulfide, can cause symptoms similar to what Cobo was experiencing.

The Daily Climate, April 2,2021

Articles include: climate change stunting farm production; activists doubt transportation plan; Arctic sea ice loss and major snowstorms; coal mining in Canada; EV sales; cheaper and cheaper solar power; California drought and wildfires; Australia fire and flood; reversing efficiency rules; Texas activists fighting natural gas project overseas.