In this Dec. 3, 2009 file photo, workers load coal into a truck outside a coal mine in Dadong, Shanxi province, China. China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest energy consumer, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday, July 20, 2010.

Coal Tattoo spent a lot of the week focused on the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, especially with Massey’s release of its theory and the responses to that. If you missed that coverage, I’d suggest the Gazette print story or the Coal Tattoo post headlined PR campaigns, secret probes and preventing disaster as two placed to catch up. And if you missed it, you might also take a look at this commentary by Dan Froomkin on The Huffington Post:

Don Blankenship, whose Upper Big Branch coal mine had been cited hundreds of times for safety violations before it blew up in April killing 29 workers, came to the National Press Club on Thursday to face the Washington press corps — but not in order to express contrition.

Oh, no. There was none of that.

Instead, the Massey Energy CEO, widely considered to be the most arrogant and dangerous man in a dangerous and dying industry, lectured the assembled throng about global poverty, preventable disease, the national debt, highway deaths, physics, the relationship between facts and happiness — and oh, yes, the need for the federal government to get off his back.

In hindsight, is there nothing Blankenship would have done differently before the worst mine disaster in 40 years? No.

Well, maybe one thing.

“What I could have done is be more like I normally am, and sued MSHA [the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration] the first time they turned off a scrubber, instead of waiting until they turned off 43,” Blankenship said.

In what he insisted at the time was not an act of retaliation, Blankenship sued MSHA last month for disapproving the use of scrubbers to take coal dust out of the air.

Blankenship said hesitating wasn’t like him. But, he acknowledged, such lawsuits “get you a terrible reputation of being unreasonable.”

The big national coal-related news was the demise of any efforts by the U.S. Congress to do a darned thing about global warming, at least this year. For a look at coal’s involvement in that story, check out this blog post from this morning.

And here’s a quick rundown of other notable stories from the media world about coal and related topics:

— Salon.com had a nice interview with Senate candidate Ken Hechler, who is running on a platform calling for the end of mountaintop removal coal-mining in his quest to defeat Gov. Joe Manchin for the seat of the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd. Says Hechler:

I’m not really running for the Senate, I’m running to enable the people of West Virginia to register at the polls their opposition to this devastating practice, which hurts so many people in the valleys when they dump the rocks in the soil and all the things that they’re blasting out of the mountains into people’s front yards. Ruining the aquifers so that if they have water wells they run dry and also drying up the streams where people are fishing and using for recreation. And it’s a practice that is so vicious that it outta be abolished. Every time a poll is taken in West Virginia it’s two to one in favor of abolishing it but there’s never been an opportunity for people to put it on the ballot and so I’m saying every vote for Ken Hechler is a vote tantamount to opposition to mountaintop removal. That’s the only reason I’m in the campaign.

— Mining Technology.com had this piece that included quotes from  longtime mine safety engineer Jack Spadaro about the troubled state of mine safety in America.

— A lot of folks sent me this Daily Kos piece about the controversy in Utah over a study about the impacts of that state’s coal industry. The original coverage from ksl.com is here and here.

— Here in West Virginia, there’s more trouble for Dunkard Creek, according to this report from Public Broadcasting.

— There’s been a lot of coverage of this coal industry poster attacking Ashley Judd:

… including a HuffPost piece by Jeff Biggers and a Courier-Journal Op-Ed by Silas House that concluded:

The sign is sexist, ignorant and infantile. The sign shows that the coal industry will stoop to any level to pit Appalachians against one another, and illuminates the fact that some people who support mountaintop removal will try to prop up their argument by misconstruing the facts and quotes.

— The Center for Progressive Reform’s blog had a report on the “fuzzy math” contained in EPA’s new proposed rules on coal ash, and the New Republic had this piece about underground coal-mine fires.

— WVU’s Michael Hendryx had this response to coal industry criticism of his work, which prompted another attack from Roger Nicholson of International Coal Group.

— Finally, Ted Boettner from the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy had this response to coal industry criticism of the report his group worked on with the folks from Downstream Strategies on coal’s impact on the state budget.