It’s uninformed people like you that enable Obama to get away with it.
Obama is only waging a war against coal in the Eastern half of the country, real coal that is, from mines on privately owned land. While Obama fights coal in the East, he is facilitating and subsidizing the sub-bituminous coal in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, which is on federally leased land, mostly owned by the Crowe Indians and other tribes. The federal government de-classified sub-bituminous coal as coal, back in ‘92, freeing it from government regulations. Obama doesn’t want to burn the sub-bituminous coal in the US. He wants to send it to China. That’s why he needs the coal ports in WA and Oregon. (California had one, but it was closed down)
China doesn’t really even want the coal, anymore. They told the Goldman Sachs people that the Chinese market for PRB coal was “extremely time-limited, 3.5 years at the outside and dependent on a weak US dollar. They said that if the US dollar increased by $.25 against the yen, it would kill the deal. We are a year and a half into this and no where near close to start up. So, who are they going to sell the coal to, if not to China. Oh, and the price of sub-bituminous coal has been dropping due to the world wide recession. Sub-bituminous coal is used in smelters and cement factories, mostly.
The primary reason coal prices have dropped in 2012 is utilities idling coal plants and running the Natural Gas turbines more. This is due to increase regulation on coal plants and lower natural gas price due to increased production from shale.