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.”

We have an urgent national priority: moving forward with the development and demonstration of energy-efficient technologies that would enable America to burn fossil fuels more cleanly and cheaply.

With the outlook dimming for nuclear power and renewable energy sources, there are growing concerns that efforts to maintain air quality and combat global warming will fail as energy production increases in the years ahead.

Governor Tomblin this week moved to join West Virginia with twenty-one other states in challenging President Obama's EPA and its latest attack on jobs and our nation’s coal industry.

Governor Tomblin has directed West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw to join a Petition for Review in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit challenging the EPA's MACT Rule. This rule has already caused electric utilities to announce plans to shut down coal-fired power plants in West Virginia.