mining

By staff - Amnesty International, August 16, 2016

Since 2012 Amnesty International has commented and campaigned on the serious policing failures that led to the deaths at Marikana, calling for full accountability and reparations for the victims and their families. That work continues.

This report examines abuses of the right to adequate housing of mine workers at Lonmin’s Marikana mine operation. Its primary focus is an examination of Lonmin’s response to the findings of the Farlam Commission.

In this regard it looks both at what Lonmin has done and what the company has said about the situation.

Read the text (PDF).

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, July 12, 2016

A supplement to Eco Unionist News:

Lead Stories:

• Climate change cost for fossil fuel industry: $33 trillion - By Bloomberg, FuelFix, July 11, 2016 
• Emulate to Undermine: Utility Industry Propaganda in Action - By ClimateDenierRoundup, DeSmog Blog, July 8, 2016
• Big Coal Just Saw One Of Its Favorite Loopholes Closed - By Mary Ellen Kustin, Think Progress, July 6, 2016; [related]: Coal’s Decline and New Possibilities - By Kailie Melchior, Clean Energy Footprints, July 6, 2016 | Senator Murkowski Makes 180-degree Turn on Whether Taxpayers Should Get Fair Share for Coal Mined on Public Lands - By Jesse Prentice-Dunn, Center for Western Priorities, July 6, 2016
• An oil crash so deep even Exxon is hurting - By David Hunn, FuelFix, July 5, 2016
• In Venezuela’s difficult times the grassroots are stronger - By Tamara Pearson, New Internationalist, July 4, 2016

Other Carbon Bubble News:

• BG Group to cut more than 150 jobs in Houston, close office - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, July 11, 2016
  
• Drilling ramp up could get snagged on labor problems - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, July 8, 2016
• Deutsche Bank ditches coal investments - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, July 8, 2016
• Fed: Texas cut 35,000 energy jobs in 2016 through April, but outlook improving - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, July 8, 2016
• Judge Approves Alpha’s Bankruptcy Plan - By Leigh Paterson, Inside Energy, July 8, 2016; [related]: Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal near bankruptcy exit deals - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, July 7, 2016 | Alpha Natural Resources bankruptcy plan gets court approval - By Associated Press, Casper Star Tribune, July 7, 2016
• Oil Prices Down, Investment Down, Supply Up, Energy Efficiency Down - By Joshua S Hill, Clean Technica, July 8, 2016
• Colorado school district crisis linked to coal-firm troubles - By Donna Bryson, Casper Star Tribune, July 7, 2016
• Oil completions fell in second quarter, API says - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, July 7, 2016
• Oil tumbles to below $46 after U.S. inventory report disappoints - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, July 7, 2016
• Taking toll of oil’s continued slump - By Chris Tomlinson, FuelFix, July 7, 2016
• By the numbers: Western coal mine layoffs - By Paige Blankenbuehler, High Country News, July 6, 2016
• Drillers write down $200 billion in assets - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, July 6, 2016
• Like many of its members, the World Coal Association is running at a loss - By Bob Burton, EndCoal, July 6, 2016
• Coal baron is trying to elect Trump with old tricks - By Katie Herzog, Grist, July 5, 2016
• Decline in mining sector steepest in state's history - By Matt Murphy, Wyoming Tribune Eagle, July 5, 2016
• New CoalSwarm Report: Collision Course; The Incompatibility of India’s Coal and Renewable Strategies - By Ted Nace, EndCoal, July 5, 2016
• Oil heading to biggest drop in 5 months amid glut - By Bloomberg, FuelFix, July 5, 2016
• US Bank Restricts Future Investment In Coal In Updated Climate Policy - By Joshua S Hill, Clean Technica, July 5, 2016

Utility Death Spiral News:

• Energy incumbents fight changes that could accelerate battery storage - By Giles Parkinson, REnew Economy, July 8, 2016
• Hawaii solar industry reports 39% drop in employment after the end of retail net metering - By Robert Walton, Utility Dive, July 8, 2016; [related]: Large majority of Hawaii solar companies reporting job losses - By Duane Shimogawa, Pacific Business News, July 6, 2016
• Overwhelming majority of Nevadans support ballot measure to overturn PUC NEM ruling - By Danielle Ola, PVTech, July 7, 2016
• California dreaming: Utilities uneasy with regulator's vision to remake their business model - By Peter Maloney, Utility Dive, July 6, 2016

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC; Hashtags: #greenunionism #greensyndicalism #IWW. Please send suggested news items to include in this series to euc [at] iww.org.

By Heffa Schücking - Urgewald, Future in our hands, and Greenpeace Norway, Summer 2016

(in 2015), the Norwegian Parliament took a historic decision to move the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) out of thermal coal. The Parliament determined that companies should be excluded if they “base 30% or more of their activities on coal, and/or derive 30% of their revenues from coal.”1Thiswas an important break-through as the 30% threshold established a new benchmark for divestment actions of large investors. Only months after the Norwegian decision, the world’s largest insurance company, Allianz, undertook a coal divestment action of its own based on the GPFG’s 30% threshold.2And other investors such as KLP and Storebrand, which had already undertaken divestment actions, have now tightened their thresholds to keep up with the trail blazed by the Norwegian Parliament.

This briefing provides a “snapshot” of how the world’s largest coal divestment action (was progressing by 2016). To this end, we have analyzed the GPFG’s holdings list from December 31st 2015 as well as the implementation guidelines laid out by Norway’s Finance Ministry. Although the divestment action is not due to be completed until the end of 2016, we wish to draw attention to some weaknesses that could diminish the scope and impact of the Storting’s decision if they are not addressed.

Read the text (PDF).

By Clark Williams-Derry - Sightline Institute, June 17, 2016

This report documents massive exports of federally owned coal from 2000-15. The US Bureau of Land Management sold private companies the right to mine this coal for a pittance—in some cases, for less than 20 cents per ton. And when Asian demand was red-hot, these companies made massive profits selling millions of tons of federal coal overseas. Nonetheless, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has essentially ignored export economics when setting the “fair market value” that it will accept for federal coal leases. Now that the Department of Interior has placed a three-year moratorium on new coal leases pending a thorough review of federal coal policies, BLM has an ideal opportunity for a thorough review of the economics of exports. And our report points to evidence that by ignoring exports, the BLM has been selling many federal coal leases at just a fraction of their true economic value.

Read the report (PDF).

By Keith Griffith - Equal Voice News, May 3, 2016

Harlan County, Kentucky -- On his first shift in the coal mine, Brandon Farley closed his eyes to steady his nerves as the powered cart he was riding disappeared into the mountainside. A third-generation coal miner in this Appalachian corner of Eastern Kentucky, Farley began working in the mines right out of high school and kept at it for 15 years, until he was laid off in late February.

Farley, now 32 and a married father of two, worked his way up in the Appalachian coal mines to a job as an underground electrician, running the high voltage cables that power heavy, specialized equipment at the mining face. Mining is the only work he knows.

In 2010, Farley was working at the Abner Branch mine when the roof collapsed, killing his friend Travis Brock, who was 29. Farley escaped serious injury in his own years as a miner, but his hands bear a miscellany of scars from minor accidents. 

"The juice is worth the squeeze," he says, glancing at his palms with a chuckle. "I never did look at the dangers as much as I did the money."

The money, for a while, was very good. Farley was making $25 an hour in the mines. With plenty of overtime -- Farley often worked 60-hour weeks -- experienced miners like him routinely made $80,000 to $100,000 a year. In Harlan County, which has about 28,000 residents, the median household income is $25,000.

Over 50 years ago, in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson toured Appalachia to kick off his "War on Poverty." Harlan County's poverty rate, which tracks roughly with the region's, was then 55 percent. It remains more than double the national average, at 32 percent, although those numbers typically don't account for government transfer payments, such as Social Security, safety net and veterans' benefits. (In 2014, Eastern Kentucky received $13.4 billion in government entitlements, making up more than a third of the region's income.)

Though it's long been a region of economic hardship, Appalachian Kentucky now faces a crisis of alarming proportions. Since the end of 2008, the region has lost more than 10,000 coal mining jobs, a decline of more than two-thirds. Kentucky's coal production is now at its lowest level since 1954, according to the state government. Other coal mining regions have been hit by the national decline in coal production, but none as hard as this one.

Locally, the collapse of coal is often blamed on President Barack Obama and environmental safeguards, which some residents say are needed to protect water, air and families. "This all began when Obama started his 'war on coal' -- and he did," says Farley, the laid-off miner. "If they are gonna do away with coal, why not put

Experts believe that the coal industry's decline in Kentucky has more to do with the abundance of cheap natural gas and drastically cheaper coal from surface mines in Wyoming. Regardless, there is a growing sense in Harlan County that coal isn't coming back.

After his latest layoff, Farley is now reluctantly looking for other kinds of work. "That's all we ever done is mine coal, though," he says. "It's the best job I ever had."

Farley finds the prospect of taking a significantly lower-paying job unpalatable, though even finding one is a challenge. After getting career counseling from the Harlan County Community Action Agency, Farley applied for work with railroad shipper CSX. But coal makes up the bulk of CSX's shipping business, and the company announced new rounds of layoffs the week that Farley applied.

"It's strange to hear the lonesome horn of a train anymore," says HCCAA Executive Director Donna Pace. "Used to be, that's all you heard."

By Ben Caldecott, Gerard Dericks, Daniel J. Tulloch, Lucas Kruitwagen, and Irem Kok - Oxford, May 2016

Deploying a ‘bottom up’ asset-level methodology, we analysed the exposure of all of Japan’s current and planned coal-fired power stations to environment-related risk. Planned coal capacity greatly exceeds that required for replacement - by 191%. This may result in overcapacity and combined with competition from other forms of generation capacity with lower marginal costs (e.g. nuclear and renewables), lead to significant asset stranding of coal generation assets. Stranded coal assets in Japan would affect utility returns for investors; impair the ability of utilities to service outstanding debt obligations; and create stranded assets that have to be absorbed by taxpayers and ratepayers.

Read the report (PDF).

By various - Re:Common, April 2016

By presenting the horrors suffered under the domination of multinational companies, this work by Re:Common will dispel any lingering doubt that the current economic system based on extractivism is a war against the poor (what subcommander Marcos called the “Fourth World War”).

If someone who trusts the mainstream media and academic analyses thinks that at some point colonialism disappeared from the face of the Earth, this work, based on documents and testimonies, demonstrates otherwise.

For those who believe that progress is the most striking characteristic of our times, starting with the post-World War II period, the voices of the missing that populate these pages will convince you that present-day capitalism is a just a revamped version of the Spanish conquest of five centuries ago.

Throughout this work, all the variables of extractivism can be seen: from occupation of the territory and displacement of people to the role of the offshore banking and financial system, as two complementary and inseparable parts of accumulation by theft/dispossession. In the occupied territories, the displacement occurs in the form of war, with the participation of military, paramilitary, guerrilla and the greatest variety of imaginable armed actors.

The victims are always the weak: poor women and their children, elderly men and women, peasants, Indians, blacks, mestizos, the “wretched of the Earth,” as Frantz Fanon calls them. I want to emphasize, though it may seem anachronistic, and without reference to academic sources, how the extractive model coincides with colonialism, despite the different eras. This is not only due to the violent occupation of territories and the displacement of populations, but also to the salient features of the model.

Economically, extractivism has generated enclave economies, as it did in the colonies, where the walled port and plantations with slaves were its masterworks. This colonial/extractive model held populations 6 hostage in both 1500 and 2000.

Extractivism produces powerful political interventions by multinational enterprises, often allied with States, which manage to modify legislation, co-opting municipalities and their governors. It is an asymmetrical relationship between powerful multinationals and weak states, or better, states weakened by their own local elite who benefit from the model.

Like colonialism, the extractive model promotes the militarization of the territories, because it is the only way to eradicate the population, which, recalling Subcommander Marcos, is the real enemy in this fourth world war. Militarization, violence, and systematic rape of women and girls are not excesses or errors; they are part of the model because the population is the military objective.

To understand extractivism, we must consider it not as an economic model, but as a system. Like capitalism. Certainly there is a capitalist economy, but capitalism is not just the economic aspect. Extractivism (as stated by Re:Common) is capitalism in its financial phase and cannot be understood only as an economic variable. It implies a culture that promotes not work but consumption, which has (systemic) corruption as one of its central features. Put in another way, corruption is the extraction mode of governing.

Therefore, extractivism is not an economic actor; it is a political, social, cultural, and of course also economic actor. At this point, it’s crucial that the central part of this work describes human beings and the Earth as the subjects for looting, which is much more than the theft of the commons. Understanding dispossession only as robbery places property ownership at the center of the matter, in the place of people and land; e.g., life.

Read the text (PDF).

By Nick Mullins - The Thoughtful Coal Miner, December 30, 2015

I tend get flak from both sides of the argument surrounding coal. Environmentalists distance themselves from me because I am often critical of them, and some even hate me these days. Pro-coal folks tend to dislike me for my stance against coal companies. It only goes to show that telling the truth has never been popular, or easy.

So let’s get to it.

Coal mining families are not very receptive to environmentalists—and that’s putting it lightly. Why should they be? In what way have environmentalists approached coal mining families over the past two decades? In what way have environmentalists presented themselves to the public?

Though most environmentalists have their hearts in the right place when it comes to helping other people, I’m afraid they’ve done a poor job of translating it to the public. So when the knee jerk reaction of coal miners and their families is to identify environmentalists as “out of touch,” I am not entirely surprised.

Decades of outside media infiltration has portrayed our people (Appalachians) in a negative way. The “War on Poverty” brought thousands of people from outside the mountains to tell us how to live (like we were to stupid or something). Let’s not forget that the first outsiders to come into the mountains were the land agents and coal companies who would lie, cheat, and steal to take our lands and mineral rights, and would then force us into a mono-economy making us dependent on mining coal to survive. Appalachian people have had enough of outsiders and for good reasons. That being said, I am very skeptical of many outsiders myself, and will gladly tell anyone who even remotely appears to be looking down their nose at us to go &#*^ themselves, no matter how “well intentioned” they think they are. But I digress.

For the longest time, unions helped us remind ourselves that coal companies were the outsiders, but when the unions were busted, the industry seized the opportunity to re-image themselves as part of our communities. Through industry public relations organizations, we were told that Appalachia was “coal” (see Bell & York, 2010) and that any threat against coal was a threat to our pride and heritage. They have even pointed to environmentalists as the new outside threat. Since the coal industry has the money to promote their message (see Friends of Coal), and they have the coal miner’s ear at work and through paychecks, they can paint a picture of environmentalists as being “out of touch tree hugging idiots” who support the “War on coal.” Many environmentalists have played right into this portrayal, sometimes so perfectly that I’ve wondered if it was intentional. Let me repeat that last statement. Many environmentalists have played right into the negative stereotypes, sometimes so perfectly that I’ve wondered if it was intentional. If the coal companies infiltrated the unions, you know they infiltrated the environmental movement.

Edward P. Louie and Joshua M. Pearce - Energy Economics, 2016

Although coal remains the largest source of electricity in the U.S., a combination of factors is driving a decrease in profitability and employment in the coal-sector. Meanwhile, the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry is growing rapidly in the U.S. and generating many jobs that represent employment opportunities for laid off coal workers. In order to determine the viability of a smooth transition from coal to PV-related employment, this paper provides an analysis of the cost to retrain current coal workers for solar photovoltaic industry employment in the U.S. The current coal industry positions are determined, the skill set evaluated and the salaries tabulated. For each type of coal position, the closest equivalent PV position is determined and then the re-training time and investment are quantified. These values are applied on a state-by-state basis for coal producing states employing the bulk of coal workers as a function of time using a reverse seniority retirement program for the current American fleet of coal-powered plants. The results show that a relatively minor investment in retraining would allow the vast majority of coal workers to switch to PV-related positions even in the event of the elimination of the coal industry.

Read the report (PDF).