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Reckoning comes to western US coal country
Posted by Nation: Zoë Carpenter on October 29th, 2013
Nation: It's Friday night in the "energy capital of the nation,' a sprawled-out strip mall in Campbell County, Wyoming, called Gillette. In a bar on Highway 59, the liquor bottles are backlit in neon green, and a bartender covered in glitter slings Budweiser Selects to small groups of big men. Various iterations of dudes beating the daylights out of each other occupy the television screens. The man feeding the jukebox chooses rock, never country. In Gillette, coal is king, and the cattle boom is long over....
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The war on coal Obama isn’t fighting
Posted by Nation: Zoë Carpenter on July 21st, 2013
Nation: As the pending decision on the Keystone XL pipeline dominates the climate focus in the United States, an even bigger carbon bomb is ticking quietly in a remote region of the American West.
Big Coal and Republican lawmakers are pushing to expand mining operations on federal lands in the Powder River Basin, which straddles eastern Montana and Wyoming and holds the bulk of the country's coal stocks.
If they're successful, railways in the Pacific Northwest will soon transport an annual cargo bound...