Obama's War on Coal

JayVols · Mar 8, 2017

Not sure where to put this, but we're talking about the environment here.

Some truth about Obama's War on Coal:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/the-obama-administration-idea-to-save-coal-country-214885

The Stream Protection Rule, and “a wave of environmental regulations” like it, according to a spokesperson for the American Public Power Association, have long been the source of Republican anger towards Obama-era energy policy, which conservatives contend is the reason that 40,000 coal miners have lost their jobs, 11,000 in Kentucky alone, since 2011. That was the year the EPA announced a stricter air standard that had the effect of forcing coal-fired power plants to shift to natural gas at a time when the price of gas had fallen to historic lows.

“This tragedy in central Appalachia is a direct result of government action,” said former governor of Kentucky, Paul Patton, a Democrat, and currently the chancellor of the University of Pikeville in Pike County, which has lost 80 percent of its coal jobs over the past five years. “I can tell you that we’re paying the price for it.”

But since that much-ballyhooed vote in early Feburary, this is how many new coal jobs have been created in Appalachia: Zero. And there are no signs there are any coming any time soon: Tyler White, president of the Kentucky Coal Association, couldn’t say how many jobs he thought the repeal of the Rule would create, “but I can tell you that it definitely will help stop the bleeding.”
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Even if every one of Obama’s environmental regulations—the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards; the Cross State Air Pollution Rule; the Coal Ash Rule; the Effluent Limitations Guidelines for wastewater discharge, and section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act —were all struck down tomorrow, the effect on jobs in Appalachia would still be negligible. That’s because global demand for coal is slowing, and coal from Wyoming costs a fraction of the coal from Appalachia. Even without the Stream Protection Rule, the Appalachian economy still needs to be remade.

It turns out that one of the best ideas for how to rescue the region came from the same people who have been reviled for their role in burying the coal industry.

As part of the 2016 budget, the Obama White House created something called the POWER Plus plan specifically to help Appalachian communities that were getting left behind because of the rapidly changing energy market. The acronym stands for Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization, and it proposed a suite of projects including to convert $1 billion from the Abandoned Mine Lands reserve—a pot of money that had been growing since the Carter administration—funding for projects to clean up abandoned mine lands, mostly underground, that are linked to local economic development strategies. For Kentucky alone, that would mean $20 million a year for five years. The money would likely have gone to promote other businesses sectors like manufacturing and tourism and to retrain miners for new jobs like writing computer code.

This potential windfall was met with disinterest, if not skepticism, in the Republican-controlled Congress.
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“When we included the proposal, no Republican member of Congress was willing to touch it at first,” said Jason Walsh, a senior policy advisor at the Domestic Policy Council in Obama’s White House who helped craft the plan. Then someone stepped forward. Representative Hal Rogers, a Republican whose district encompasses all of Appalachian Kentucky, proposed a bill of his own, piggybacking on the White House proposal. He called it the RECLAIM Act.

“I refuse to let the Obama Administration off the hook for its role in systemically destabilizing and dismantling the Appalachian coal industry,” Rogers told POLITICO Magazine. “However, neither Democrats nor Republicans have a monopoly on good ideas, and I’ve always been willing to partner with anyone who wants to create opportunities in Southern and Eastern Kentucky.”

If you’re wondering what happened to this exemplary act of bipartisanship, it was quashed by members of Rogers’s own party. How that happened is a story of political self-interest that challenges some of the standard narratives of the War on Coal. And it remains an open question whether this Congress will finally find a productive use for that $1 billion that is sitting largely untouched in the federal coffers.
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On March 13, 2016, Hillary Clinton fell irretrievably down the mineshaft of the War on Coal when she was asked why poor white people should vote for her. Her response: “I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?”

In her next breath, Clinton said: “And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.” But that’s not what voters heard thanks to some smart editing by Republican ad-makers. Despite the fact that Hillary Clinton was the only candidate with a detailed plan to help coal communities—a $30 billion proposal that’s still on her campaign website—Trump beat Clinton by 30 points in Kentucky, a state her husband won twice. Maybe it just didn’t make political sense for a Republican to be seen holding hands with the party that had become an avowed enemy of the region, but Rogers remained silent as RECLAIM’s chances faded
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“It may be good political rhetoric to say ‘War on Coal,’ but it’s a little more complicated than that,” said Benham resident Roy Silver in a telephone interview. “It’s just propaganda to say if you remove these regulations jobs will come flowing back.”

The question is, where are they going to work in a post-coal Appalachia? The Obama administration’s POWER Initiative has funded a program Hal Rogers created called SOAR (Shaping Our Appalachian Region), which promotes increased broadband internet; teaches former miners to write computer code; and runs other pilot programs to create jobs in manufacturing, farming, tourism and other small businesses. The RECLAIM Act would add an additional $1 billion to the $90 million appropriated for the Interior Department’s economic revitalization pilot program.

That’s only if it can get attention from the same people who let it die last year.

“We fully expect to see RECLAIM 2.0 this Congress,” said Molly Block, spokesperson for the House Natural Resources Committee. But there is concern that discussing opening up debate on the RECLAIM Act could spark a broader reform of money from the Abandoned Mine Lands fund gets distributed and that’s not a debate Rogers and his co-sponsors had bargained for. Never mind the fact that Wyoming was all too happy to take $271 million a year from the Abandoned Mine Lands fund until 2020 for infrastructure projects through the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation, or FAST Act, which was signed into law by Obama in December 2015.

On the Senate side, Mitch McConnell, who was silent last Congress on the specifics of the RECLAIM Act, laid out his six-point pro-coal plan in a January letter to then president-elect Donald Trump. He said he wanted to kill the Stream Protection Rule (done); end the government’s legal defense of the Clean Power Plan (any day now); stop enforcement of the EPA’s Carbon pollution standards for new power plants (a rule which has resulted in fewer coal-fired power plants burning less coal); protect the long-term health care benefits of retired coal miners (a by-product of an employer-based health care model) and invest in clean-coal technology. Number four on McConnell’s list was his intention to fund programs for “job training and education, transportation infrastructure, the reclamation of abandoned mine sites,” essentially what the RECLAIM Act proposes to do. His willingness to push on that item as hard as he has the gutting of environmental regulations matters. Twenty-one gigawatts of old coal-fired plants are scheduled for retirement in the next four years, according to the American Public Power Association, a fact that will not make Appalachian coal any more competitive in the marketplace than it is now.
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droski · Mar 8, 2017

bush was about to do the same thing and then the natural gas price went crazy to the upside and he backed off. with the amount of natural gas now produced in this country, I don't have any objections frankly.

JayVols · Mar 8, 2017

droski said: ↑

bush was about to do the same thing and then the natural gas price went crazy to the upside and he backed off. with the amount of natural gas now produced in this country, I don't have any objections frankly.
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Exactly. Obama was definitely not a fan of coal. However, coal is dying because there are better and cheaper options not because Obama killed coal. I could understand the vitriol if he just wanted to destroy these people's lives, but he had a plan to train them for not just a future but a better, safer, more healthy future. The folks promising to bring their jobs back are the ones that denied the training for that future. Any government program aimed at bringing back Appalachian coal makes as much sense as a government program to bring back the cathode ray tube television. Not to mention it's govt interfering with market forces which those doing the interfering think is a bad thing.

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Obama's War on Coal

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