Nearly four thousand people turned out Friday in Abingdon,
Virginia, to hear Mitt Romney declare his support for the coal
industry, which has been besieged for more than three years by
President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency. A giant sign
behind the Republican candidate proclaimed “Coal Country Stands
With Mitt,” and many in the audience wore caps or T-shirts calling
for an end to “Obama’s War on Coal,” a war that has escaped the
notice of most Americans outside coal-producing regions like
southwest Virginia.
“The head of the EPA has… said that the regulations on burning
coal are now so stringent it’s virtually impossible to build a new
coal-fired [electrical power] plant,” Romney said at the Abingdon
rally. “Well, I don’t believe in putting our coal under the ground
forever. I believe we should take advantage of it, put American
workers back to work and use a resource that’s abundant and cheap
and can be burned in a clean way.”
The crowd cheered Romney’s words, a message that sounds
eminently sensible to people whose livelihoods are directly
threatened by Obama’s policies, but has been given short shrift in
the national media, seemingly indifferent to the far-reaching
economic consequences of the “green” fanaticism that has dominated
EPA since 2009. This extremist ideology is aimed at destroying the
American coal industry, as was spelled out explicitly by Obama
during his 2008 campaign. He notoriously told the San Francisco
Chronicle that, under his planned cap-and-trade agenda to
reduce carbon emissions, “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered
plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” In making
this vow, the then-candidate acknowledged
what it would mean: “Under my plan … electricity rates would
necessarily skyrocket.”
Cap-and-trade legislation passed the House of Representatives
during Nancy Pelosi’s speakership before stalling in the Senate,
but the failure to pass that law hasn’t prevented Obama from
pursuing his anti-coal agenda by other means, namely the regulatory
authority of the EPA. Under the leadership of administrator Lisa
Jackson, new rules have forced the closure of several existing
coal-fired power plants while making it practically impossible to
build new coal plants. This radical environmentalist policy
enraged Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers,
who said that the regulations represent a “decision by the EPA that
we’re never going to have another coal-fired facility in the United
States that’s constructed.” For a Democratic president so closely
allied with the labor movement, Obama’s abandonment of the mine
workers is stunning, considering that the head of the AFL-CIO,
Richard Trumka, began his career with the UMW.
Even as the EPA’s regulatory squeeze of power plants has had the
effect of reducing demand for coal, Jackson’s agency has suppressed
the supply by enacting new clean-water rules that have brought
permitting for new surface-mining operations to a screeching halt
in Appalachia. As a result, since Obama took office, coal
production has fallen by a third, eliminating hundreds of jobs,
most recently when Alpha Natural Resources announced it would be
forced to lay off 1,200 miners. While stimulus money was squandered
on bankrupt “green energy” boondoggles like Solyndra, Obama’s
anti-coal agenda has destroyed private-sector jobs that were the
very definition of “shovel ready.”
Obama might shrug off the economic hardship his policies have
imposed on those small-town workers he once dismissed as “bitter,”
clinging to “guns or religion,” but perhaps the one job most
endangered by the president’s war on coal is his own. A strong
turnout for Romney in southwest Virginia’s coal country could help
put the Old Dominion’s 13 Electoral College votes out of reach for
Obama, and GOP margins in the coal-mining regions of southeast Ohio
may prove pivotal in the all-out fight for the Buckeye State’s 18
Electoral College votes. But the issue has potential political
reach beyond the coal fields, as nearly half of the electrical
power supply in the United States (and 90 percent in Ohio) comes
from coal-fired plants, making Obama’s war on coal a “pocketbook”
issue for the many millions of voters who would pay higher electric
bills because of the EPA’s squeeze.
The potentially decisive impact of the coal issue helps explain
Romney’s trip to Abingdon last week. The Republican now mentions
the importance of coal in every stump speech across the country.
Romney also raised the issue during last
week’s debate: “And by the way, I like coal… people in the coal
industry feel like it’s getting crushed by your policies.”
Coal-industry groups are now running ads in Ohio and Virginia,
including one
by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity
(ACCCE) that warns “our families struggle [and]
jobs disappear” because of “heavy-handed EPA regulations.”
There was a time, half a century ago, when Democrats stood
firmly on the side of coal miners and enacted programs to help
alleviate the cruel poverty that for so long plagued rural
Appalachia. Now, under the control of environmentalists, the
Democratic Party is the coal miner’s worst enemy and threatens
Appalachia with a new kind poverty, even crueler for being the
result of a deliberate policy. Folks in America’s coal towns have
not yet lost hope, even as they have been betrayed by the president
who famously promised Hope. The end of Obama’s war on coal may now
be within sight, and the people of Coal Country could cast the
deciding votes to end it.
