Federal judge rules that the Army Corps of Engineers is violating its own laws when it approves the coal-mining operations known as mountaintop removal.
One thing that's always important to keep in mind is the lifecycle of energy costs--not just the monetary costs, but the total impacts across the lifecycle of an energy source. Now, one thing that you hear with (for example) oil is that rising costs leads to greater exploration and makes it possible for oil companies to get oil that was too expensive to extract at a lower price. Often times, one of the reasons that oil is too expensive is that you have to do more stuff to get it out--dig deeper, process more--and those things, generally speaking, increase the environmental impacts of oil production. Metal mining in Montana, for instance, releases enormous amounts of toxic pollutants into the environment simply from the massive amount of discarded material that ores are extracted from.
The same pattern holds for coal. The coal rush that we're still in the middle of is pushing mining companies to go for ever-more complete extraction strategies. And thus you get things like mountaintop removal and longwall mining, where there's simply no reasonable way to do it without ruining the land.
To be sure, I don't think any source of energy is exempt from this. Wind farms can be, in their own way, public "bads"--not nearly as bad as coal, but not perfect. Which is why increasing our efficiency is so important. It's also why including as much of our energy-extracting infrastructure on-site is important--it's easier to blend solar panels into a roof than it is to hide a wind farm, and of course geothermal pipes are entirely hidden.
GO WATCH A MOVIE: For an earlier example of this kind of problem, check out Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider, which is set in the context of Them Dastardly Corporations mining hydraulically--literally, blasting away mountainsides with water cannons in pursuit of cheap gold.
UPDATE: GO WATCH AN INTERNET MOVIE: Grist links to an internet TV investigative series on mountaintop removal in West Virginia.