Our activists have just descended from the 400-ft smokestack of Progress’s Asheville Generating Station and been arrested. Progress Energy and Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) are pursuing a merger that will make them the nation’s largest utility, with the power to either lead us forward with high-tech clean energy investments or throw us back to the industrial age.

And today, I’m officially announcing our campaign to make Duke Energy the clean energy company that North Carolina and the United States deserve.

Maybe Warren Buffett’s purchase of a California solar farm will finally force a recognition of the potential of solar energy from an economic standpoint. Since the dissolution of Solyndra, oil-besotted conservative lawmakers have dismissed this potential, saying that the industry was simply unprofitable. When Buffett makes an investment, that becomes a harder sell.

From Marmet, West Virginia, to Blair, West Virginia, hundreds are marching across the Appalachian region throughout this week to honor the historic labor event known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. This event designed to remember one of the largest battles in US labor history, however, is not just about history. A coalition known as Appalachia Rising is using the five-day march to call attention and protest mountaintop removal coal mining.

Now maybe the EPA will get more coal plants retired as soon as possible. This, incidentally, is why you don’t want their regulatory authority curtailed.

Massey CEO Don Blankenship is back in the news again, and so are the Senators from West Virginia. One still trying to make money and keep unions out of mines, the other fighting for better mine safety regulations. I’ll let you guess who’s who.

Companies that are in the business of wresting ex-plant and dinosaur-based energy-producing stuff out of the ground don’t give a crap about the earth and they don’t give a crap about the people who are doing the dirty, dangerous, health-destroying work that produces their profits.

A coal mine saddled with unsafe conditions. Wealthy mine owners willfully ignorant of safety violations and unventilated toxic gasses threatening miners. And government officials unable to hold the mines to the most basic safety standards. It all led to the deaths of dozens of miners caught in an underground explosion.

But this isn’t the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. It’s a World War Two era mine explosion in Montana.

“Goodbye Wives and Daughters,” by Susan Kushner Resnick, is the thorough account of the 1943 coal mine explosion in Bearcreek, Montana that killed 74 miners.

A new Gallup poll finds that, for the first time in ten years of polling, Americans prioritize energy production over the protection of the environment–but the poll presents a false dichotomy.

Overnight, the explosion at the Massey Energy mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia has gone from six dead to 25 dead, making it the worst mining disaster in over two decades. With only 200 employees, one out of every eight working at the site died in the explosion. And more are feared dead.

Perhaps you’ve missed it, but in the climate / politics world there’s been a bit of a scandal that blew on 31 July: paid by the coal industry, a lobbying firm had sent forged letters to members of Congress against climate legislation. Don’t worry … it was all a ‘temporary’ employee who has been fired. Never mind. Nothing there. Go back to watching TV.