This is an excerpt from a 1966 article in Mining Congress Journal indicating mining interests were already aware of the potential for climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions.

Circuit Court ruling: Private emails on public servers don’t always equal public records

KNOXVILLE — A Knox County judge ruled in a lawsuit that spun off from the “Coal Knew, Too” scandal that emails sent or received by a University of Tennessee professor aren’t public records.

Circuit Court Judge William T. Ailor turned aside a bid made by Knoxville-based writer Kathleen Marquardt to review the emails of Chris Cherry, a professor with UT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, according to court records. 

Marquardt filed the Public Records lawsuit four years ago, but the case didn’t actually make it into a courtroom until a pair of hearings held earlier this year. 

According to Judge Ailor’s opinion, the bare fact that Cherry and freelance reporter Élan Young (who was also employed by UT at the time and currently writes for Hellbender Press) exchanged emails using their UT accounts “does not raise the emails themselves to the level of being public records.” 

The origins of the lawsuit date back to 2019, when Cherry rescued some old coal industry trade journals that a colleague was about to toss in a dumpster after cleaning out an office.

In one of the discarded issues of the Mining Congress Journal was an article from 1966 that contained a statement from the then-president of a coal mining organization explaining that fossil fuel use was causing an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that would cause vast changes in the Earth’s climate through global warming. 

A novel technology developed by ORNL keeps food and beverages refrigerated with an advanced evaporator, phase change materials, metal foam, direct-contact defrosting technology and a low global warming refrigerant.  Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

OAK RIDGE — A technology developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory keeps food refrigerated with phase-change materials, or PCMs, while reducing carbon emissions by 30 percent.

More than 100 million household refrigerators in operation across the United States consume up to 2 kilowatts of electricity daily. These refrigerators contribute to energy consumption and carbon emissions by using compressors that cycle on and off day and night, pumping refrigerants across evaporator coils to maintain low temperatures for fresh and frozen compartments. 

(Hellbender Press previously reported on the development of new coolants and systems at ORNL).

ORNL’s innovation uses advanced evaporators with PCMs installed in each compartment for cold energy storage. PCMs are useful for heating and cooling because they store and release energy when changing from solids to liquids or vice versa. Researchers applied porous metals, direct-contact defrosting technology and a refrigerant with low-global-warming potential to enhance performance and minimize environmental impact.

“PCMs are integrated with evaporator coils to keep temperature constant, requiring one operating cycle and allowing refrigerators to operate almost 100% at nighttime, when energy use is lower,” ORNL’s Zhiming Gao said. “This reduces electricity demand, saves costs and maintains efficiency.”

— Oak Ridge National Laboratory

KNOXVILLE — John Nolt, a member of the Sierra Club’s Harvey Broome Group executive committee and professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Tennessee, will present a program about cryptocurrencies and their detrimental long-term effects on the environment. Cryptocurrency “mines” (data centers, really) pull enormous quantities of power from the electrical grid.

Thus they are attracted to states like Tennessee where electric power is relatively cheap.

The event is set for 7-8:30 p.m. June 11 at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, 2931 Kingston Pike, Knoxville.

Peery’s Mill Dam on the Little River is slated for removal by the Army Corps of Engineers for environmental and public safety reasons.  Elan Young/Hellbender Press

Army Corps still committed to Little River dam removal for ecological and safety reasons, but timeline uncertain 

TOWNSEND — The remainders of two low-head dams on the Little River in Blount County, Rockford Dam and Peery’s Mill Dam, are slated for removal by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) following the release in July 2023 of a Project Report and Environmental Assessment that investigated the lower 32 miles of the Little River.

The Corps confirmed this week that plans are moving ahead to remove the two dams. 

Peery’s Mill Dam was the site of 4 separate drownings in the last 15 years, giving it the notorious reputation as the deadliest dam in Tennessee in the past quarter century. Late last month, three women had to be rescued from the churning waters there, prompting questions from the community about the status of the Corps’ removal effort. 

Little River Watershed Association president Andrew Gunnoe says that watershed advocates are eager for the dam removal project to move forward because doing so would provide both ecological and community benefits.