A little more than one month is left before the end of the comment period on the EPA’s proposed GHG New Source Performance Standards Rule. The EPA published its proposed rule last month in the Federal Register, setting New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for greenhouse gases. The 60-day comment period ends June 12. The public can view comment submissions at regulations.gov under the docket ID no. EPA-HQ-OAR-2011-0660.

Less than two weeks remain to submit stories and idea or reserve ad space in the upcoming annual West Virginia Coal Association/Friends of Coal State Journal insert.  If you would like to submit story ideas, photos or complete stories for the section, you can do so by contacting the Association at 304.342.4153 or emailing us at theadley@wvcoal.com. This year’s publication will be in glossy, magazine format with a projected page count of 48 pages.

The Charleston Gazette

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Mine safety is the top priority of three West Virginia Army National Guardsmen who are in Mongolia to share their knowledge of mining with coal mining officials in the Mongolian government.

First Lt. Joshua Poling of Morgantown, 1st Lt. John Sinsel of Grafton and Staff Sgt. Tommy Wolford of South Williamson, Ky., are full-time coal miners, as well as soldiers in the West Virginia Army National Guard.

New research finds that wind farms actually warm up the surface of the land underneath them during the night, a phenomenon that could put a damper on efforts to expand wind energy as a green energy solution.

Researchers used satellite data from 2003 to 2011 to examine surface temperatures across as wide swath of west Texas, which has built four of the world's largest wind farms. The data showed a direct correlation between night-time temperatures increases of 0.72 degrees C (1.3 degrees F) and the placement of the farms.

"Given the present installed capacity and the projected growth in installation of wind farms across the world, I feel that wind farms, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional meteorology," Liming Zhou, associate professor at the State University of New York, Albany and author of the paper published April 29 in Nature Climate Change said in an e-mail to Discovery News.

 

Group issues scathing review of Obama EPA’s record of job destruction

CHARLESTON – A report by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – an association of state legislators – says the Obama EPA is out of control and is “creating regulatory chaos, stagnating investment … [and] destroying jobs.”

“During the past couple of years, the [EPA] has undertaken the most expansive regulatory assault in history on the production and distribution of affordable and reliable energy,” the ALEC researcher team says. “As of 2010, EPA regulations promulgated under the Obama Administration had already surpassed the Agency’s regulatory output in the entire first term of Bill Clinton, which was a period in which the EPA had just been handed broad new powers.  With 30 major regulations and more than 170 policy rules still being finalized in the next five years, the extent of EPA’s actions could surpass its entire 40-year history of regulation.”