SHOW YOUR SUPPORT FOR KENTUCKY COAL

At the request of the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the United States EPA will conduct hearings in Frankfort on June 5 and in Pikeville on June 7, regarding EPA’s specific objections to 36 individual KPDES permits for new or expanded surface coal mining operations in eastern Kentucky.

The EPA objections have prevented the issuance of all individual Clean Water Act (CWA) for more than two years. The economic effect of the EPA’s objections has been significant in that the 19 most recent objections alone are estimated to have cost Kentucky some 3,800 coal-related jobs and more than $123 million in lost coal severance taxes.

The 2012 Friends of Coal Auto Fair is set for July 20 – 22 at the Beckley YMCA Paul Cline Memorial Sports Center.  Saturday Night Concert line-up is Ronnie Dunn with special guest James Wesley and is being sponsored by Alpha Natural Resources.  For Concert tickets, pre-registration for the car show and vendors, please go to:  http://www.friendsofcoalautofair.com/

The Energy & Mineral Law Society will be hosting a panel discussion on surface mining regulations on October 30, 2012 at 4 p.m. at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, VA.  Speakers will include Paul Patton, Governor of Kentucky, Vaughn Groves, VP & General Counsel for Alpha Natural Resources and Jack Spadaro, mining engineer and activist.  Open invitation to the public is extended.

The Friends of Coal Ladies Auxiliary has a new web site and are asking everyone to visit the new web site www.friendsofcoalladies.com as many times as you can.  For each time you visit, the web site moves up so when you type “coal” into your search engine the web site will be one of the top listed in your search.   The site also hosts a full store for purchase of FOC items and wearing apparel.

• At the very same time that U.S. electricity producers are slashing their use of coal for economic and environmental reasons, countries around the world are dramatically increasing their use of the fuel. A look at coal and electricity demand in locations from Hanoi, Vietnam to Dusseldorf, Germany shows that the rest of the world is not going beyond coal. In fact, just the opposite is happening.
• Between 2001 and 2010, U.S. coal consumption fell by 5 percent and domestic carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 1.7 percent. But over that same time period, global coal consumption soared by 47 percent, or the equivalent of 23 million barrels of oil per day. Put another way, over the past decade or so, global coal consumption increased by about the same amount as the growth in oil, natural gas, and nuclear combined.
• Coal use is soaring because demand for electricity is soaring. Between 1990 and 2010, global electricity production increased by about 450 terawatt-hours per year. That’s the equivalent of adding one Brazil (which used 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2010) to the electricity sector every year. And the International Energy Agency expects global electricity use to continue growing by about one Brazil per year through 2035.
  
  Read more: The Coal Hard Facts