This story was originally published by the Guardian
as part of their two-year series, This Land is Your Land, examining the threats facing America’s public lands, with support from the Society of Environmental Journalists, and is republished by permission.
The Biden administration has put the brakes on a controversial land exchange that would have given a sacred Native American site to a multinational mining company by March 11.
Parts of the handover had been rushed to completion in the waning days of the Trump administration, in an effort to give Resolution Copper control over Arizona’s Oak Flat region before or soon after Trump left office. Oak Flat sits atop one of the largest untapped copper deposits in the world, estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.
Blackjewel’s Bankruptcy Filing Is a Harbinger of Trouble Ahead for the Plummeting Coal Industry
The company wants to walk away from almost 200 mining permits in four states, potentially leaving thousands of acres of environmentally damaged land.
March 3, 2021
Unemployed Blackjewel coal miner David Pratt holds his daughter Willow as he walks across railroad tracks that lead to one of the company s mines near Cumberland, Kentucky in 2019. Blackjewel miners found themselves unemployed when the company declared bankruptcy and the workers final paychecks bounced, leading them to blockade the tracks to prevent the train carrying the mine s final shipment of coal from leaving until they were paid their wages. Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Senator “It’s Time to Wake Up” Whitehouse drops his climate change mic
Image courtesy of the office of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
A few weeks ago, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) literally dropped the mic, after a nearly eight-year streak of weekly speeches in which he called for action on climate change. Whitehouse explained that with a new administration in the White House, the conditions were in place for what he called a “new dawn… there’s no need for my little candle against the darkness.” It marked the 279th and last time that Whitehouse would carry a “Time to Wake Up” poster to the Senate floor but not the end of his efforts to deal with climate change; his home state is the site of the first offshore windfarm in all of North America a milestone in renewable energy that has been closely followed not only by environmentalists but by Wall Street analysts.
Navajo Generating Station shut down in 2019 and is now being dismantled. The Colorado River water that cooled the plant is part of a broader legal impasse.
The three smokestacks at Navajo Generating Station were demolished on December 18, 2020. Photo courtesy of Salt River Project
By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue
An emblem of coal power in the United States and a symbol of coal’s tight bond with water is being dismantled, piece by piece.
Navajo Generating Station was the largest coal-fired power plant in the American West, a testament to the political bargaining generations ago that divvied up the region’s land, minerals, and water. But the facility’s time is now up. In November 2019, the power plant stopped producing electricity. In December 2020, the trio of 775-foot smokestacks came tumbling down. Six weeks ago, the precipitators that prevented fine coal particles from being emitted into the air were dynamited, crumbling to the desert floor like felled beasts.
A Legacy of the New Deal, Electric Cooperatives Struggle to Democratize and Make a Green Transition
FDR program to electrify rural America is now beset by expensive coal plants and often-hidebound governing boards, as members clamor for transparency and renewables.
President Roosevelt delivers a speech at the dedication of the U.S. Rural Electrification Project. Credit: Getty Images
Related
Share this article
What began three years ago as a campaign to stop the spraying of weedkiller under power lines near homes in the Appalachian mountains of northeast Tennessee, has become an example of a more democratic process at electric cooperatives across the country.