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Sierra Club pranksters have posted on Craig’s List an all-too-honest job description for anyone hoping to apply for the CEO job at Massey Energy to replace retiring CEO Don Blankenship.  Think you’re qualified to fill the shoes of one of the worst polluters in America? 

Here is the Craig’s List job description:

Massey Energy Seeks CEO

Date: 2010-12-06, 5:33PM EST
Reply to: job-a32nw-2098801382@craigslist.org ^{[Errors when replying to ads?]}

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A group of the nation’s leading environmental scientists is calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop issuing new mountaintop mining permits, arguing that the ecological and human health costs of the controversial mining practice are “pervasive and irreversible.” 

The group of scientists published the first comprehensive assessment of the ecological and health impacts of mountaintop removal mining today in the journal Science, describing how the impacts of current and former mountaintop removal operations will be felt for centuries, with major implications for water quality, biodiversity, and human health.  Shockingly, there’s never been a comprehensive assessment of MTR impacts until now.

Published only a few days after the Obama EPA misguidedly approved the expansion of Hobet 45, part of the largest mountaintop removal coal mine in West Virginia, the paper concludes that mountaintop removal’s impacts are much too steep to justify.  The authors’ analysis of peer-reviewed research unequivocally confirms irreversible environmental impacts from mountaintop removal, a practice that also exposes local residents to a greater risk of serious health problems.

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Readers have asked us to take a look at a West Virginian organization calling themselves the "Friends of Coal."

According to their website, the Friends of Coal is a "… volunteer organization that consists of both West Virginians and residents from beyond our borders." Sounds all very grassroots. Just a group of citizens joining together to cheer on the glories of coal.

For a volunteer organization Friends of Coal are very well-heeled - how many volunteer groups have a sponsored race car, run television ads and send logo-ed frisbees to the troops in Iraq?

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Forget "clean coal." Energy giant General Electric thinks coal is downright sexy.

This "coal-is-so-clean-its-sexy ad" was pulled by General Electric a while back, but it goes to show just how far some will go to sell clean coal.

Strange choice of music for the ad -  "Sixteen Tons" by Merle Travis is a song about the misery of coal mining.  

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The U.S. Interior Department last week proposed new regulations aimed at permanently legalizing high-altitude strip mining of coal, a ruthless process that has thus far ruined 1,200 miles of streams and hundreds of square miles of forests. Due to the financial might of the coal industry, neither Democratic nor Republican administrations have made a serious effort to curb this serial decapitation of Appalachian coal seams, but the Bush people have been especially resourceful in perpetuating it.