NEWSCOAL

Renee Hodges is a guest author on Change.org writing about why she created a petition to stop a mountaintop removal mine near her home in Fayette County, West Virginia. Please read her post and then sign her petition, here. This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

This Friday at 10:30 a.m. a meeting of the Fayette County Commission in West Virginia is scheduled in the Commission Chambers at the Fayette County Courthouse. At this meeting people who are concerned about the several new mining permits, proposed by Frasure Creek Mining LLC, will have an hour to voice their concerns and opinions regarding the proposed mountaintop removal (MTR) site.

There are a total of nine permits so far, three active and six proposed. If Frasure Creek Mining LLC is permitted to move forward, that would mean a total of over 3,000 acres of mountaintop removal. They have already received permits for over 1,600 acres and yes, there are houses and communities in this area.

The story of the Battle of Blair Mountain starts in the southern coal camps of West Virginia, a time when King Coal reigned supreme, openly and without apology.

Mining companies owned workers' homes; they owned the schools, the air and water; they owned the police and even private armies. They owned miners' lives.

Which is why murder seemed permissible. When a notorious strikebreaker shot down labor hero Sheriff Sid Hatfield, who refused to be bought by the coal companies, more than 10,000 enraged miners and pro-union forces rose up in Mingo and Logan Counties and converged on Blair Mountain. A private army of management mercenaries shot guns and dropped leftover bombs from WWI—it was the nation's largest armed conflict since the Civil War and the largest labor confrontation ever.

If I had to chose one city in which to climb a smokestack, Chicago—aka "The Windy City"—probably would be low on my list. But what's a death-defying stunt or two, when the lives of 42 people are at stake?

That's what a few brave community activists are proving today, anyway.

This morning, several activists scaled the smokestacks of Edison International's Fish and Crawford power plants, two coal-fired electric stations that produce pollution estimated to kill, every year, 42 people who live in the minority communities near the smokestacks. These plants, at nearly 100 years of age, have become extremely controversial—they are so old that they were 'grandfathered' under the Clean Air Act and lack modern pollution controls. They are so dirty that patio furniture in surrounding neighborhoods is covered in soot. They are the only large coal plants within a major U.S. city and have the largest surrounding residential populations of any coal plant in the country.

So why are they still open? That's what Greenpeace wants to know.

Editor's Note: On Tuesday, I wrote a blog post about a hoax petition posted by Coal Kills Kids as part of a stunt they pulled on Peabody Energy in partnership with The Yes Men. Below is a press release that Change.org is sending out today, after receiving a threat of a lawsuit to remove the petition.

The Yes Men have also posted their own awesome response here to the legal threats they too have received from Peabody Energy.

The press release is below:

The world's largest private-sector coal company has threatened Change.org, the world’s fastest-growing platform for social change, with a lawsuit unless it removes a petition posted by Coal Kills Kids, the activist group that made a splash earlier this week by spoofing coal industry PR tactics in partnership with The Yes Men.

Some people (and companies) are really slow to learn. Facebook had the perfect setup -- over half a million cheerleaders, the help of clean energy experts at Greenpeace, and even the Executive Director of Greenpeace ready to help it go green and ween itself off coal. Supporters of the "Unfriend Coal" campaign creamed the world record for comments on a Facebook post in a 24-hour time frame with over 80,000 comments, showing that Facebook users want the internet giant to cut the coal.

But Facebook dropped the ball. Instead of making big announcements about how it would be cleaning up its own act, it focused on everyone else, with the announcement of a “Billion Acts of Green" Facebook app. Great app! Great project! But no word on switching from coal to clean, renewable energy, and that's what's really needed from Facebook. Facebook also announced its Open Compute Project, which could help other server and data centers to cut their energy use significantly, but with fast-growing energy demands, no amount of energy efficiency is going to make up for the IT industry's or Facebook's addiction to coal.

When Peabody Energy, the world's largest private coal company, unveiled its new "Coal Cares" initiative this morning, the campaign immediately seemed too honest to be real.

Its goal? To 'end the stigma of childhood asthma' and 'asthma-related bullying' by giving away free inhalers to families near coal plants—a unsubtle acknowledgment of the deadly impacts of coal burning on our national public health. The free inhalers even came in Justin Bieber and Twilight themes.

Unsurprisingly, the press release and campaign website were soon revealed to be a hoax in the style of the Yes Men. The famous pranksters-in-the-name-of-progress actually worked with Coal Kills Kids, a newly-formed grassroots coalition, to develop the media campaign and unveil it today, the start of Asthma Awareness Month.

And awareness it definitely did raise, judging by the buzz the story has received this morning.

Recently, Washington's Gov. Gregoire formalized plans to phase out the state's only remaining coal-fired power plant by 2025.  Joining Oregon in its vision of a future without coal, the agreement sets the Pacific Northwest on the path to become the first coal-free region in the country.

This is great news for those concerned about clean air, healthy lungs, and the stability of the global climate system. But what if Washington is just exporting the world's coal problem to China?

This could be what happens if Peabody Coal gets it way. The largest coal company in the world is proposing to send coal through Washington and across the Pacific to booming markets in China and India. Its proposed giant export facility, the Gateway Pacific Terminal, would be built along Washington's scenic coastline and transport by rail 24 million tons/year of coal mined from Wyoming's Powder River Basin to the port.

As I quickly mentioned last week when covering the continued pressure Greenpeace is putting on Facebook to "unfriend coal," Greenpeace recently came up with a plan to go after a Facebook World Record today. Early this morning, it started gathering comments on a post on the "Unfriend Coal" Facebook page with the intention of setting the record for most comments on a Facebook post within 24 hours. Guinness World Records told Greenpeace that it needed to hit at least 50,000 comments to set the record.

I was going to write this post encouraging you all to join in the effort, and it would still be great if you did, but the record has actually already been set!

In just 32 minutes in the early morning, 1,500 comments were already made. And as I'm writing this, there are 55,210 comments on the post. Greenpeace has increased its target in response to the tremendous response and is now aiming to hit 100,000 comments. Help out by adding yours now.

You certainly have to give Greenpeace a lot of credit for persistence and constantly finding new ways to push for big campaigns to help the world. We've been covering Greenpeace's campaign to get Facebook to "unfriend coal" for several months now and it seems that it just keeps getting better and better (of course, not counting the fact that Facebook has still hardly responded).

From a funny video (that probably rubbed Mark Zuckerberg the wrong way but was still ingenious and catchy and has accumulated nearly half a million views) to what seemed like a positive conversation between Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo and Facebook Marketing Director Randi Zuckerberg, Mark's sister, at the World Economic Forum in Davos to a push to get Facebook to "unfriend coal" by Earth Day, Greenpeace is keeping the pressure on and engaging Facebook's top personnel.

At a time when everything from family planning to National Public Radio is taking the rap for our deficit woes, a justice for the federal district court in Washington, D.C. has scored one point for rationality in his decision to question a controversial coal plant that recently won final approval in Kansas.

The coal plant in question is the Holcomb II addition, which for the past five years has been the source of a costly debate for the citizens of Kansas. At times the debate centered around the fact that the plant would not be, as the energy cooperative Sunflower Electric Corp. put it, the cleanest coal plant in the world. At other times the question was largely a practical one for Kansans, who would be exporting almost all of the energy the plant would produce while accepting almost all of the pollution. Justice Emmett Sullivan, it seems, could not ignore a third glaring weakness in the venture: the fact that the company planning the addition still owes the federal government at least $200 million.