CHARLESTON, W.Va. - A strong overseas market for West Virginia coal continues to reap dividends for the state's government finances.

Tomblin administration officials credit coal exports for much of the economic health reflected in October's general revenue tax collections.

Last month's general revenues totaled nearly $337 million. That's $25 million more than expected.

Sales and personal income taxes beat their October estimates by a combined $10 million. These are key sources of general revenue, and are also signs of economic activity.

The state's main business taxes also brought in more than expected last month. So did taxes on coal and other extracted natural resources.

Deputy Revenue Secretary Mark Muchow says coal experts were up 42 percent for the calendar year as of August.

A scathing new expose on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change -- which sets the world's agenda when it comes to the current state of the climate -- claims that its reports have often been written by graduate students with little or no experience in their field of study and whose efforts normally might be barely enough to satisfy grad school requirements.

Grad students often co-author scientific papers to help with the laborious task of writing. Such papers are rarely the cornerstone for trillions of dollars worth of government climate funding, however -- nor do they win Nobel Peace prizes.

By Rich Trzupek

Lisa Jackson still doesn’t get it. The EPA Administrator is stuck in 1970 and refuses to acknowledge the environmental and economic realities of 2011, as her rambling, misleading Op-Ed that ran in the L.A. Times last week so clearly demonstrates.
Jackson claims, for example, that House Republicans are conducting an "…assault on our environmental and public health protections will mean the difference between sickness and health — in some cases, life and death — for hundreds of thousands of citizens."
She refers here to the proposed "Boiler MACT" and "Utility MACT" (MACT stands for Maximum Achievable Control Technology) rules that the EPA is trying to ram down the nation’s throat at a time we can least afford such pristine luxuries. The fact is that the nation has made enormous progress in cleaning up the air over the last forty years and EPA’s claims that it’s vital to crank down on the thumbscrews in the industrial sector once again are both self-serving and highly dubious. Consider a few facts that Jackson failed to mention:

Congratulations to Alpha Natural Resources on the opening of their new corporate headquarters in Bristol, Va.The five-story, state-of-the-art, 130,000-square-foot building sits on 31 acres overlooking Sugar Hollow Park, near Exit 7 on Interstate 81 and will house about 325 employees.

By Rep. Ed Whitfield
FoxNews.com 

Economists call it "the jobs multiplier effect" – each new job created in turn supports other new jobs. A new pool of workers means new salaries being spent in local economies for everyday needs at places like the supermarket, the car dealer, or the dentist.

The jobs multiplier can also work in the opposite direction when people are laid off, causing a domino effect of job losses due to decreased spending in local communities. And that’s exactly what’s happening today. The regulatory attack of President Obama’s EPA on affordable electricity is unleashing a negative multiplier effect that is resulting in lost jobs and hurting local economies all across the country.

This is puzzling, to say the least, in that the president himself has spoken of the need to draw on all of our energy resources to meet our electricity needs. But his Environmental Protection Agency clearly has a different agenda.

Since 2009, EPA has been rolling out an unprecedented wave of new regulations targeting the coal-fired power plants that provide nearly half of the nation’s electricity and support thousands of jobs both directly and indirectly.