Word: coal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...right, it is yet another example of how the Bush Administration has managed to get what it wants on the environment. For two years, the President has found ways to bypass restrictions on oil and gas drilling, mining, logging and coal-fired power generation. Within days of the Republican gains of last November's elections, the Administration stepped up what critics view as an all-out assault on the environment with a series of pronouncements: that snowmobiles could operate in Yellowstone National Park, oil drilling could expand in Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, the National Marine Fisheries Service would...
Guinier, who spoke extemporaneously, used the metaphor of “the miner’s canary,” discussed in her recent book by the same name, to describe the black experience in America. Coal miners used to bring the songbird into the mines to measure the level of toxicity in the atmosphere. The failure of a canary’s fragile respiratory system signaled danger to the miners...
Longshan's residents are not given to complaining, though they inhabit one of the world's most inhospitable corners. Here, in this frozen stretch of wasteland in Heilongjiang province on the Chinese side of Siberia, the scenery is so desolate that its most notable features are heaps of coal piled so high they look like mountains. Many of the townspeople are laid-off coal miners, hopelessly cut off from the fruits of China's heralded economic boom. Still, hardship has taught them not to gripe about their lot in life. "What pleasant weather we're having," says the local bathhouse...
...even folks as hardy as these can be pushed only so far. When the Youbao No. 2 Well Company started mining coal beneath their homes and the town school in 1993, they quietly endured the racket of underground dynamite blasts and watched the cracks spread in the walls of their brick houses. By the beginning of last year, however, part of the school had to be demolished because its foundation had become too unstable, and the walls of many houses had split. Finally, the locals determined to speak out, never figuring it would cost some of them their jobs...
...chance, a national crackdown on China's infamously dangerous mines had recently gotten underway, with Beijing requiring the mines either to close or meet more-stringent operating standards. So officials from the local coal safety-inspection department arrived in Longshan in late April to check the town's six private mines. Youbao shut down for two months during the inspection, and the locals thought their problems might be coming to an end. It wasn't to be. By late June, Youbao had secured a license to operate?and Longshan's houses started to shake again...