'Cost of Coal' explores life cycle of the rock and its effects on human health in W.Va., Mich. and Nev.

The Sierra Club has partnered with award-winning photojournalist Ami Vitale to produce a photographic essay for its magazine about the life cycle of coal and its effects on the lives of residents living close to mine sites, power plants and coal-waste disposal areas, most of which are in rural areas.

"Cost of Coal" includes an 18-page photo spread in the November/December issue of Sierra, and an interactive website with more than 100 photos and videos of individuals living near four sites impacted by coal: Blair, W.Va., Lindytown, W.Va., River Rouge, Mich., and near the Moapa Band of Paiutes Reservation in Moapa, Nev. Slide shows and videos are organized by location and story on the website, where readers can donate to the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, Living Green Magazine reports.

Here's a video overview of the project:

National Science Foundation funds U. of Montana's rural environmental reporting initiative

University of Montana (Brooke Andrus)

The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Montana’s School of Journalism $250,000 to improve the quality and quantity of environmental science news as it affects Montana's most rural communities. Martin Kidston of The Missoulian reports that this type of reporting is needed at a time when access to local news has decreased and when "the debates surrounding key environmental issues facing the West often take place in a vacuum, where choices are shaped by one’s political orientation and the opinions generated by the local rumor mill."

Alison Perkins, adjunct journalism instructor at UM, told Kidston that "the grant will help develop a model for reporting environmental science news, using student reporters who are studying environmental science and natural resource journalism at the graduate level as writers. 'I think there’s a climate that’s not really open to environmental stories because there’s the fear that they come from an advocacy position,' said Perkins."

The new program, dubbed Science Source, will be modeled after The Associated Press, working with editors in print, radio, online and television to identify and produce stories that fit the media’s specific needs and that reach the largest audience possible. (Read more)

Scientists' survey of last year concludes that Fox, Wall Street Journal misled on climate change

A new study contends that Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have greatly misled their audiences about climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that 93 percent of Fox broadcasts and "Wall Street Journal Editorial Report" TV programs about climate change from February through July, and 81 percent of Journal editorial pages from August 2011 through July 2012, were misleading.

The survey defined inaccurate information about climate change as citations that "questioned either the reality of climate change or the fact that recent climate change is largely due to human activities, or they advanced other arguments that dismissed established climate science."  Tim McDonnell of Mother Jones writes, "The climate change debate in America is still mired in bickering over whether the problem even exists or not." (Read more)

Seminar on covering oil and gas drilling, with a field trip, set Sept. 27 in Youngstown, Ohio

Many rural areas are seeing a boom in drilling for oil and natural gas, which are more complex and perhaps more risky enterprises than ever before. To make sure journalists know enough to cover the subject, a half-day seminar will be held Sept. 27 at Youngstown State University in Ohio to "explain everything there is to know about the subject," say the sponsors: the Ohio Newspaper Association and the local newspaper, The Vindicator.

The program will include how horizontal hydraulic fracturing works, the economic impact of drilling, the environmental debate over drilling, and much more. After the program there will be an optional tour of drilling facilities. We recommend you do the whole day, including the field trip. You won't learn everything there is to know, but you don't have to. The cost to attend is a very reasonable $30, which includes lunch. For more information and registration, click here.

Injection wells getting more scrutiny as result of earthquakes and concerns about hydraulic fracturing

The advent of large-scale horizontal hydraulic fracturing to produce natural gas has focused new attention on injection wells, an old technology that is being used to dispose of drilling fluids after a frack job is completed.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan investigators at ProPublica have produced a four-part series (whichs eems likely to grow) on the subject, available here. Abrahm Lustgarten writes in the mainbar, "Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground."No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia. There are growing signs they were mistaken." (Read more)

Injection wells are increasingly being blamed for earthquakes, usually small but occasionally damaging. Mike Soraghan of Environment & Energy News writes about a 5.6-magnitude quake that hit central Oklahoma last November. Jerri Loveland, who still can't afford to pay for the damage to her home, doesn't blame fracking. "Coming from an oil-industry family, she sees the connection as having more to do with the millions of gallons of salt-laden water that comes up with the oil and gets reinjected in deep wells nearby. In rare cases, that wastewater can lubricate faults and unleash earthquakes." But Oklahoma oil and gas officials have rejected advice against putting injection wells near geologic faults.

Student photo essay has 'poignant illustrations' of resource extraction, development in West

SAGE Magazine, a student-run environmental magazine at Yale Forestry School, recently ran a collection of photographs that amount to photo essay of the West, and High Country News has featured some of those photographs on its website. The photos were submitted by students and people living in the region, and "include beautiful wildlife photography and poignant illustrations of humans' relationship to the natural world," HCN says.

The photographs highlight issues surrounding natural gas extraction, climate change, wildfires, urban development and Superfund sites, and their impact on the vast rural landscapes of the American West. The above picture shows a helicopter battling a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park, which scientists think are increasing in frequency thanks to climate change. (Photo by Benjamin Goldfarb)

Society of Environmental Journalists awards honor work on fracking, agriculture issues, many others

Reporting on hydraulic fracturing of deep shale for natural gas earned several reporters recognition in the 2012 Environmental Journalism Awards competition of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Other rural-oriented winners reported on other extractive industries, pesticide drift and patented seeds.

Photo: Barron Ludlum, Record-Chronicle

Ten reporters at the Denton Record-Chronicle in Texas won the Kevin Carmody Award for in-depth reporting in a small market  for “Citizens of the Shale,” a series that helped prompt the Texas legislature to requiring public disclosure of fracking chemicals and water use.

Mike Soraghan of Energy & Environment News won third place in outstanding beat reporting in a large market for his stories in Greenwire and The New York Times on the shale drilling boom. The entries were "Baffled About Fracking? You’re Not Alone;" "Big Mac Is King in N.D. Energy Boom, but Other Businesses Struggle to Keep Up;" In Fish-Kill Mystery, EPA Scientist Points at Shale Drilling;" "Earthquakes Erode Support for Drilling, but They're Nothing New;" and What EPA Really Said About Wyo. Fracking Pollution."

Second place in the small-market category went to Shauna Stephenson of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle for reporting on the Niobrara oil play; third place went to Clare Howard of 100 Reporters for "Downwind: Big ag at your door," about pesticide drift.

First prize for outstanding beat reporting in a small market went to Matthew S. Frank of the Missoula Independent and High Country News; second place went to Sandra Hausman of WVTF, the public radio station at Virginia Tech, for a wide range of stories, including one on fracking. The Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard won third place for a series titled "Environmental Journalism Under Fire." For links to those entries, click here.

In feature reporting, Paul Salopek won third place for “Closed-Source Crops” in Conservation magazine, which the judges called "a frightening and thought-provoking story that explores how multinational corporations have become the equivalent of the 'new seed oligarchy' in the agricultural world and how their practices and controls threaten biodiversity and food security." This category was won by Meera Subramanian for “India’s Vanishing Vultures” in the Virginia Quarterly Review. It "tells the story of an important but little-known ecological event, the sudden and rapid collapse of vulture populations in India in recent years." The story is here.

Scientists confirm human role in climate change, and become more forceful in challenging skeptics

Some of the weather extremes recently witnessed around the world have become far more likely because of human-induced global warming, researchers reported Tuesday.  Justin Gillis reports in The New York Times that a new study found "that global warming made the severe heat wave that afflicted Texas last year 20 times as likely as it would have been in the 1960s. The extremely warm temperatures in Britain last November were 62 times as likely because of global warming," the report found. The findings, writes Gillis, "especially the specific numbers attached to some extreme events, represent an increased effort by scientists to respond to a public clamor for information about what is happening to the earth’s climate. Studies seeking to discern any human influence on weather extremes have usually taken years, but in this case, researchers around the world managed to study six events from 2011 and publish the results in six months." The study was released along with a broader report on the state of the world’s climate. Both are to be published soon in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Gillis, The Times' environmental reporter, meanwhile, is among the targets of The American Tradition Institute (ATI), a conservative group that is using public records requests to publicize emails between reporters and climate scientists to suggest "collusion" between the media and environmental establishments, reports Greenwire (behind a pay wall, but a free trial can obtained by clicking here).

Scientists are beginning to argue more forcefully to the public that climate-change skeptics are ignoring well-established scientific facts. A dozen scientists at the University of Kentucky Wednesday what is known about the human role in climate change for readers of The Lexington Herald-Leader. The professors list what is recognized among scientists today: Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have increased steadily in the atmosphere since the mid-19th century; that increase is "well-correlated" with fossil-fuel consumption and changes in land use, and the gases trap increasingly more heat, so the surface, oceans and lower atmosphere are warming. (Herald-Leader photo by Charles Bertram)

"Multiple surveys of credentialed climate scientists show at least 96 to 98 percent agreement with these fundamentals," the scientists write, They note that the National Academy of Sciences has published a position statement affirming the fundamentals of human-induced climate change, as have over 100 other scientific societies, including the academies of all major democracies and the American Meteorological Society. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and many other federal departments and agencies have been studying climate change for years. An international, interdisciplinary collection of thousands of expert scientists has summarized the evidence for the central role of human activities in causing climate change, in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"As professors and publishing scientists, we are trained skeptics, and we look for credible evidence that refutes the fundamentals on climate change. However, it simply isn't there," the scientists write. "What about all the skeptical 'science' on the Internet? If those authors have the evidence to support what they say, they should submit a manuscript to a credible scientific journal, or present their ideas at a major scientific conference." (Read more)

Rumor EPA was using drones for surveillance of pollution from farms, fed by Fox, is shot down

"The Environmental Protection Agency isn't using drone aircraft -- in the Midwest or anywhere else," David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post reports, in an effort to quash rumors that the agency was using the same drones used to kill terrorists to spy on Midwestern farmers. The rumor filled airwaves this month, and Fahrenthold writes this reveals "something hard to capture in American politics: the vibrant, almost viral, life cycle of a falsehood."

The lie was born out of true reports about EPA inspectors flying in small planes, something they've done for more than 10 years, looking for clean-water violations. The flights are legal, says the EPA, under a 1986 Supreme Court decision, and only cost about $1,000 to $2,500 instead of the $10,000 it costs to do the same inspections on the ground.

Nebraska ranchers have recently become concerned about the effects of the flights, calling them an invasion of privacy. A coalition of Nebraska's congressional delegation wrote a letter to the EPA asking about the planes and the flights. They never mentioned drones, but Fahrenthold reports that soon after the letter was sent, someone did start mentioning drones and the rumor quickly got out of hand. "In the days since, the truth has begun, slowly, to rouse itself and stagger after the lie," Fahrenthold reports. (Read more)

The rumor was fed by Megan Kelly of the Fox News Channel, which issued a "clarification" after Farenthold's story.

Coal critic Jeff Biggers posts an online archive

Author and journalist Jeff Biggers has written extensively about coal mining in Central Appalachia and other coalfields for several national media outlets, including Salon, The Nation, The Washington Post and National Public Radio. His work focuses on the anti-mountaintop removal movement and the cultural and environmental impacts of strip mining. An online archive of all his coalfield writings has been compiled. "His work is often polemical, but all great causes need a polemicist," said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. You can access it here.