The sky is falling?

I've often written here and elsewhere about how the coal industry and its allies have been doing their best to create a climate of hysteria over the Obama administration's approach to mining, mountaintop removal, and climate change. These have sometimes been portrayed as an outright war on coal.

The recent EPA ruling on the Hobet 45 mountaintop removal mine permit shows that this rhetoric is out of touch with reality. What the agency did was basically grant a permit after getting the company to reduce the damage that would otherwise have been done. This may be a sign of what we can expect from the administration in the coming months.

While this obviously won't please opponents of this type of mining, it does show that the Chicken Little hissy fit, aside from being dangerous, is just plain wrong. But as Ken Ward noted in a Coal Tattoo post yesterday, West Virginia's more coal-friendly media outlets haven't exactly been tripping over each other to tell the tale.

That's too bad, because a responsible media could help tone down what could become a very ugly situation.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS will be on the top of the US Senate's list when it returns later this month.

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IT'S A WRAP. El Cabrero apologizes for this late post, but I stayed up late last night to finish watching the very last season of The Sopranos. I can now put "Mission Accomplished" on my aircraft carrier.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED