\nindustries have been making themselves look so bad lately, it’s almost as if
\nthey want to help out their
\nclean-energy competitors. It’s time for another damage report:<\/p>\n
About 42,000 The full tally The crash Of course, these <\/p>\n There’s an odd parallel here to the national Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n World’s first taxis with easily swapped batteries hit Tokyo<\/a><\/p>\n A near thumbs-up for Joe Romm’s ‘Straight Up’<\/a><\/p>\n Obama blandly invokes ‘American Dream’ in tribute to miners who were denied it<\/a><\/p>\n
\ngallons of oil a day are leaking into the Gulf of Mexico<\/a> after an explosion
\nsunk the oil rig Deepwater Horizon<\/a> and left 11 workers missing (the rescue search for them has been
\ncalled off) and three others critically injured. Responders are trying three
\nmethods to stop the flow—one that would take hours, one that would take months,
\nand one that would not plug the leak but would capture the oil. Officials are
\nwatching the 600-square-mile surface sheen to see if it will strike the coast
\nof Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida (map<\/a>).
\nIn the wake of the coal-mine
\nexplosion<\/a> that killed 29 workers, West Virginia’s Massey Energy shows it
\ncares about its workers by … hiring a top-dollar PR firm to protect its image<\/a>.
\nIt’s using the Austin, Texas, firm Public Strategies, which is run by senior
\ncommunications specialists from the Bush White House and campaigns. The West
\nVirginia Gazette‘s Ken Ward Jr. details<\/a> Massey’s PR game plan, which includes an argument that the Upper Big
\nBranch mine had “about an average number of violations in 2009-2010,” though it also concedes it had “a very large number”
\nof more serious enforcement violations.
\nAt another West Virginia coal mine, a 28-year-old
\nworker died after being pinned against a mine wall<\/a> last Thursday.<\/p>\n
\nfor recent fossil-fuel accidents also includes:<\/p>\n
\nof a coal freighter<\/a> into the fragile Great Barrier Reef as it tried to take
\na shortcut from Australian mines to Chinese furnaces.
\n The Tesoro oil refinery
\nexplosion<\/a> that killed five workers in Washington state.
\n The spillage
\nof 18,000 gallons of crude oil<\/a> from a Chevron pipline into a canal in the Delta
\nNational Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana.<\/p>\n
\nare only the most dramatic costs of fossil-fuel burning. The health effects
\nwrought by climate change and mercury and soot pollution have a much larger
\ncumulative effect, reaching people who don’t have family members working in energy
\nindustries.<\/p>\n
\nstruggle over immigration policy. Arizona’s depraved new immigration law<\/a> has
\nthe effect of showing the country just how broken our immigration system has
\nbecome. The string of fossil-fuel industry disasters should be making clear just how broken
\nour energy system has become.<\/p>\n