In this photo provided by China’s Xinhua News Agency, a relative of miners waits at the site of the accident in Shuicheng County, southwest China’s Guizhou Province, Wednesday, March 13, 2013. China said 21 coal miners have been killed and four more are missing following an accident inside a mine in the southern province of Guizhou. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Ou Dongqu)

 As the photo caption above says, 21 coal miners in China and four more were listed as missing following an explosion and roof collapse.

In other international news, Gardiner Harris at The New York Times touched on coal-mining in this story about new child labor rules in India:

After descending 70 feet on a wobbly bamboo staircase into a dank pit, the teenage miners ducked into a black hole about two feet high and crawled 100 yards through mud before starting their day digging coal.

They wore T-shirts, pajama-like pants and short rubber boots — not a hard hat or steel-toed boot in sight. They tied rags on their heads to hold small flashlights and stuffed their ears with cloth. And they spent the whole day staring death in the face.

Just two months before full implementation of a landmark 2010 law mandating that all Indian children between the ages of 6 and 14 be in school, some 28 million are working instead, according to Unicef. Child workers can be found everywhere — in shops, in kitchens, on farms, in factories and on construction sites. In the coming days Parliament may consider yet another law to ban child labor, but even activists say more laws, while welcome, may do little to solve one of India’s most intractable problems.

“We have very good laws in this country,” said Vandhana Kandhari, a child protection specialist at Unicef. “It’s our implementation that’s the problem.”

The story goes on:

Suresh Thapa, 17, said that he has worked in the mines near his family’s shack “since he was a kid,” and that he expects his four younger brothers to follow suit. He and his family live in a tiny tarp-and-stick shack near the mines. They have no running water, toilet or indoor heating.

On a recent day, Suresh was sitting outside his home sharpening his and his father’s pickaxes — something he must do twice a day. His mother, Mina Thapa, sat nearby nursing an infant and said Suresh chose mining himself.

“He works of his own free will,” she said. “He doesn’t listen to me anyway, even when I tell him something,” she added with a bittersweet laugh.

Ms. Thapa said that three of her younger sons go to a nearby government school and that they would go into the mines when they wanted to.

“If they don’t do this work, what other jobs are they going to get?” she asked.

India’s Mines Act of 1952 prohibits anyone under the age of 18 from working in coal mines, but Ms. Thapa said enforcing that law would hurt her family. “It’s necessary for us that they work. No one is going to give us money. We have to work and feed ourselves.”

The presence of children in Meghalaya’s mines is no secret. Suresh’s boss, Kumar Subba, said children work in mines throughout the region.

“Mostly the ones who come are orphans,” said Mr. Subba, who supervises five mines and employs 130 people who collectively produce 30 tons of coal each day.

He conceded that working conditions inside his and other mines in the region were dangerous. His mines are owned by a state lawmaker, he said.

“People die all the time,” he said. “You have breakfast in the morning, go to work and never come back. Many have died this way.”

Closer to home, there was a big court hearing in Washington in the U.S. EPA’s appeal of a ruling that threw out its veto of the Spruce Mine permit.  Greenwire explained:

Skeptical appellate judges put tough questions today to both U.S. EPA and a major coal mining company as the two argued over the agency’s 2007 Clean Water Act veto of a federal strip-mining permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers for a sprawling West Virginia mine.

The stakes are high in the battle over Mingo Logan Coal Co.’s Spruce No. 1 mine — one of the largest-ever mountaintop-removal mining projects — as the mining company challenges one of EPA’s most potent regulatory weapons, its Clean Water Act veto.

EPA’s use of that veto in 2011 effectively revoked the 4-year-old mining permit issued under the George W. Bush administration. The agency cited its authority under the pollution law’s Section 404, which empowers the EPA administrator to scrap a “specification” in a corps permit “whenever he determines” a potentially unacceptable environmental damage.

As mentioned here in Coal Tattoo earlier this week, this case drew a very conservative panel of judges, and from the Greenwire story, it shows:

EPA appealed the decision to a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where Judge Thomas Griffith today asked EPA why it used its veto power so many years after the permit had been issued.

“EPA came late,” Griffith said. “Doesn’t that create the instability that Congress wanted to avoid?”

He also asked whether EPA effectively negated the Army Corps’ permitting authority.

Matthew Littleton of the Department of Justice replied, “There is no temporal limitation to EPA’s authority.”

But the story also reports:

Arch Coal attorney Robert Rolfe faced similarly aggressive queries as judges probed the meaning of technical language in the Clean Water Act.

Rolfe contended that EPA is only allowed to withdraw a “specification,” meaning a condition on which a permit is issued, and only during the permitting process.

But Griffith acknowledged EPA has a “strong textural argument.”

“That is exactly what the statute allows them to do,” Griffith said, arguing that EPA vetoed a specification that in effect nullified the permit.

But Rolfe battled on.

“‘Withdrawal’ means withdrawal of a specification, not a permit. Congress used the term ‘specification.’ It did not use the term ‘permit,'” he said.

“EPA certainly has a role” in permitting, he added. “But that role has to be exercised before the permit is issued.”

Judge Brett Kavanaugh expressed reservation about whether there should be procedures for EPA and the corps to resolve permit issues, but he also appeared receptive to EPA’s arguments.

“What Congress may have thought,” he said, “is EPA may have been more sensitive to environmental issues, so let’s make them a backstop.”

Over in Kentucky, as reported by both the Herald-Leader and WFPL, a state panel decided that it would not punish a Harlan County miner who helped federal authorities bring criminal charges against a company and three mine supervisors. The Herald-Leader reported:

Attorneys for Mackie Bailey had said it was not fair for the state to seek to penalize Bailey when he was the one who blew the whistle on the violations.

Bailey, 41, said he felt vindicated by Thursday’s decision.

“It turned out real good,” Bailey said. “You shouldn’t punish somebody for trying to do the right thing.”

Bailey worked at the Manalapan Mining Co.’s P-1 mine near Pathfork, in Harlan County, in the first half of 2011.

Bailey operated a machine that installed bolts in the mine roof to keep it from falling. The machine has a bar that the operator is supposed to place against the roof of the mine as a temporary support to prevent roof falls while installing the permanent bolts.

As employees advanced the mine into the mountain in June 2011, however, they hit a spot where the roof rose so high that the temporary support bar wouldn’t reach it, according to Bailey and court records. That meant the miners using the machine were exposed to unsupported sections of rock, a serious violation that can lead to deadly roof falls.

Bailey said he told supervisors about the problem but was directed to keep working. One supervisor threatened to fire him in late June 2011 when he refused to bolt a section of the mine, Bailey said. The next day, David Partin, 49, of Pineville, was killed when a section of rock nearly 7 feet long and 3 feet wide collapsed on him at the mine, according to a federal investigation.

Though his attorney, Tony Oppegard, Bailey then reported the problem with the roof-bolting machine to Tracy Stumbo, chief accident investigator for the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing.

Bailey said he had not reported problems to authorities earlier for fear of losing his job. Federal prosecutors ultimately took over the case.

A federal grand jury indicted mine foreman Bryant Massingale; superintendent Joseph Miniard; operations manager Jefferson Davis; and Manalapan on charges of violating safety rules. All pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

But Bailey still faced sanctions from the commission for violations, because operating the machine without the safety devices is against the law.

The attorney for the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing argued that it was clear a violation occurred. Bailey and his attorney—Tony Oppegard—didn’t dispute that, but argued that sanctions were inappropriate, because the information Bailey provided was invaluable. Oppegard also worried that prosecuting whistleblowers for the violations they report would have a chilling effect on other coal miners who might consider coming forward.

The three men on the Mine Safety Review Commission ruled in favor of Bailey that no punishment was deserved, even though a violation did occur. Commissioner William Donan also commended Bailey for his actions.

The Washington Post’s WonkBlog, meanwhile, had this piece about what’s going to happen to all of the coal miners who are retired or losing their jobs as the industry continues to decline:

… There’s another aspect to the decline of coal that’s getting less attention — namely, what will happen to the hundreds of thousands of currently retired coal miners who still rely on these companies for pensions and health benefits? Many of these retirees, after all, have crippling ailments after years of working in the mines. And many of the union benefits they’ve amassed over the decades are now at risk of vanishing.

One retiree explained to me in an interview that unionized coal workers had always prized their health benefits above all else — precisely because they knew that mining was an exceptionally dangerous job. “Whenever we negotiated for contracts, there were lots of things we gave up to keep our medical,” says former Peabody miner Bill Lemley, now 65 and at risk of losing his benefits in the Patriot bankruptcy.

Since the mid-1980s, plenty of industries — from steel to airlines — have seen companies go bankrupt and revamp their contracts with organized labor. Pensions and benefits often vanish as a result. That wave has recently started affecting the coal industry, which still has some 80,000 unionized workers and hundreds of thousands of retirees across the United States.

Meanwhile, the media watchdog group Media Matters for America posted 8 Charts That Expose The “War On Coal” Charade, in anticipation of the coming renewal of that campaign when President Obama’s new EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, seeks Senate confirmation. Among the points they make:

The Obama administration has made significant investments to try to make coal “cleaner.” The following chart shows that the stimulus devoted far more funding for demonstration projects to Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), projects that would try to advance thus-far elusive “clean coal” by capturing its huge carbon emissions and burying them underground, than similar projects for solar energy. The Energy Innovation Tracker report that this chart came from called demonstration projects “crucial” because they are “often expensive and underfunded by the private sector,” a phenomenon known as the “commercialization valley of death.” In total the stimulus devoted $3.4 billion to CCS. That is less than it appropriated for renewable generation overall, but it is nevertheless a significant investment in technology that could enable coal power to be compatible with a low-carbon future — a far cry from waging a “war” on the energy source.