The deaths of five miners at the Darby Mine in Holmes Mill, Kentucky on May 19th raises the death toll to 31, making 2006 the most deadly year for coal miners since 2001, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Lead administrator for MSHA, Ray McKinney suggests that the the high price of coal (the highest in two decades) has prompted mining companies to place production volume ahead of safety concerns. More then 120 permits have been filed for start-up mining operations. Increased numbers of accidents are being reported as these new operations go into production (Click Here).

Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association. "If we're cranking out more production with the same number of employees, miners may be working six or seven days a week, instead of five, and potentially not getting enough rest." Fatigue cited as factor in rise of mine deaths

Coal executives, government officials, and energy companies have long propagated coal’s virtues as cheap, plentiful, and a homegrown source of energy. At the same time the health, economic, and environmental problems generated by the coal industry have been brushed aside or completely covered up.

Since 2001, Rolling Stone contributing editor, Jeff Goodell has traveled the country, and even to China to examine the faulty assumptions underlying coal’s revival, and shatter the myth that cheap coal is the energy for the twenty-first century. In 2002, after the miracle rescue of nine Pennsylvania miners trapped 240 feet below ground at the Quecreek mine, Goodell traveled to Somerset, PA to interview the miners and their families. As result, he wrote the New York Times bestseller, Our Story by The Quecreek Miners.

The Quecreek experience demonstrated to Goodell that there was much more to this story, so Goodell put the industry under a microscope. In his latest release, Big Coal : The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future" (Houghton Mifflin, June 8, 2006) Goodell blows the lid off the mining industry, exposing environmental, political, and economic issues behind the dark world of coal. 

For most of us, the word “coal” conjures images of sulfurous, chugging smokestacks in a nineteenth-century industrial city, and brings to mind the dark, dank atmosphere of a coal mine. But few realize the major role that coal currently plays in America and nations around the world. President George W. Bush has said that coal is our “economic destiny.” Despite a century-long legacy that has claimed millions of lives and ravaged the environment, how has our nation come to be so reliant on coal?

In his book, Goodell examines how...

• Coal presently supplies more than half the energy needed to power our iPods, laptops, lights — anything we use that consumes electricity
• Coal-fired power plants affect the climate and environment adversely by releasing 40 percent of the carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere each year. 
• In just the last twenty years, air pollution from coal plants has killed more than half a million Americans.
• Mountaintop-removal mining has permanently destroyed 1,200 miles of streams, polluted groundwater and rivers, and demolished some 400,000 acres of forest in Appalachia alone.

• We burn 20 pounds of coal a day for every American man, woman, and child, just keeping the lights on.