Free Republic

A judge has ordered federal regulators to quickly evaluate how many power plant and coal mining jobs are lost because of air pollution regulations. U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey in Wheeling made the ruling after reviewing a response from outgoing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy. McCarthy had responded to the judge’s previous order in a lawsuit brought against her by Murray Energy Corp. that the EPA must start doing an analysis that it hadn’t done in decades. […] The judge said the EPA is required by law to analyze the economic impact on a continuing basis when...

A new report has government officials considering setting 10 million acres of across six states in the American west off limits to mining and development to protect the chicken-like Greater Sage Grouse, which is not an endangered species. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report found that much of the Sage Grouse’s habitat sits on top of extremely valuable deposits of minerals including gold, copper, lithium, silver, uranium and many others. The USGS report means that the government’s most restrictive grouse protection plan could kill even more than 31,000 jobs and lead to more than $5.6 billion in reduced annual economic...

It is difficult to imagine such levels of poverty existing in the most powerful nation on earth - but it does in McDowell County, West Virginia. Abandoned shops, closed schools and neglected homes are visible on almost every corner in every distressed community. Whole families are plagued by the consequences of unemployment and widespread drug abuse. The average life expectancy for men is 64 - the same as Namibia.But it was not always like this. McDowell was once a hustling and bustling town, thriving off the riches of the coal industry. The reliance on one industry proved fatal and...

This Labor Day, America has 83,000 fewer coal jobs and 400 coal mines than it did when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, showing that the president has followed through on his pledge to “bankrupt” the coal industry. A 2015 study found the coal industry lost 50,000 jobs from 2008 to 2012 during Obama’s first term. During Obama’s second term, the industry employment in coal mining has fallen by another 33,300 jobs, 10,900 of which occurred in the last year alone, according to federal data. Currently, coal mining employs 69,460 Americans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Much of...

Environment: President Obama's "Clean Power Plan" is on pause, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in March after more than two dozen states filed suit to stop it. A new report shows why the plan should be scrapped entirely, and the EPA sued for fraud.

"It was a misstatement." Back in March, former first lady and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said at a CNN town hall that she wanted to put coal miners and the coal industry "out of business." At the event Clinton said she was the only candidate who "has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business," she said. But now that Clinton is campaigning in West Virginia, her tune has changed. "What I said was totally...

The downward slide continued for Colorado's coal industry in 2015, highlighted by production at Routt County's Twentymile Mine, which was down 38 percent. Statewide, production in Colorado was down 18.5 percent, with 18.7 million tons, the lowest amount of coal mined in 23 years. ... Colorado Mining Association President Stuart Sanderson said the drop in production is a result of lower demand, but it was not caused by natural market forces. What we are seeing is the direct result of government regulations that are designed to drive coal out of the energy mix," Sanderson said. He called Colorado's 2010 Clean...

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - U.S. taxpayers could be left with multibillion-dollar liabilities if large coal companies are pushed to bankruptcy, the Interior Department Secretary said on Wednesday. At issue is a practice known as self-bonding, allowed under a decades-old mining program, in which some of the country's biggest coal companies forego insurance on a portion of future mine cleanup costs.

I predicted in this column last week that the left wasn’t going to kill off the coal industry so much as it was going to steal it. That prediction is already becoming true courtesy of billionaire George Soros. U.S. Securities and Exchange Act filings indicate that Soros has purchased an initial 1 million shares of Peabody Energy and 553,200 shares of Arch Coal, the two largest publicly traded U.S. coal companies. As pointed out last week, both companies have been driven perilously close to bankruptcy by the combination of President Obama’s “war on coal” and inexpensive natural gas brought on...

Gov. John Hickenlooper has pledged that Colorado will comply with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, but this effort to cut so-called “CO2 pollution” could come at a dear price to the state’s coal industry. ... Colorado is among the top states in coal production and consumption. In the year 2013, 64 percent of energy produced in Colorado came from coal, 20 percent from natural gas, and around 15 percent from various renewables including hydroelectric, biomass, solar and wind. The history of Colorado’s coal mining industry stretches over the past two centuries. Not to mention, coal jobs have a multiplier effect...

Industry blasts suggestion as harmful to the country. A conservation group that has succeeded in dealing recent legal setbacks to western Colorado coal mines called Thursday for a phase-out of federal coal leasing to help combat climate change. “It’s time for the Interior Department to shut it down,” Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a news release. The group outlined a plan for ending the federal coal program over 10 to 25 years through a moratorium on leasing publicly owned coal, retiring existing leases that aren’t producing, honestly reporting the climate impacts of the...

Mountain Pact Campaign Targets Coal Companies Seeks compensation for global warming By: The Editors Ten western mountain towns hit hard by climate change are launching a campaign against the coal industry, seeking hundreds of million of dollars in compensation per year to help their communities adapt, the Denver Post reported earlier this week. In February, Outside covered how the nonprofit advocacy group Mountain Pact is rallying ski resort towns around the country to stem the effects of climate change. In a letter being sent this week to federal officials, lawmakers, and the White House, the towns—which include Aspen, Telluride, and...

For the pro-coal senator, the "war on coal" begins at home. ... while McConnell presents himself as a defender of Kentucky coal mining, a member of his own family who serves as a key campaign surrogate is taking a role in an organization that funds one of the most aggressive anti-coal campaigns in the country. McConnell’s wife, former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, sits on the board of directors of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has plunged $50 million into the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal initiative, an advocacy effort with the expressed goal of killing the coal industry. In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies...

Marine veteran-turned-country crooner Jimmy Rose brought down the house Tuesday night on America’s Got Talent with an original song honoring his Kentucky coal miner roots. Rose’s rendition of his song “Coal Keeps The Lights On” may have done more to humanize President Barack Obama’s war on coal workers than a boatload of advocacy ads ever could...

Normally when I see somebody upset with the EPA, it’s because they’re shoving their regulatory boot down on the throat of somebody else. That’s why it came as something of a surprise to learn that the agency may be facing a lawsuit from a coalition of very blue states. What on Earth, I wondered, might the EPA have done to these guys? Nothing, as it turns out, and that’s why they’re upset. The EPA has, in the opinion of the complainants, dragging its heels on ramming through new energy production standards which will effectively exterminate construction of any new coal...

(CNSNews.com) - Lisa Jackson recently left her job as EPA administrator amid an investigation into her use of alias email accounts. She apparently used those secret accounts to shield official agency business from Freedom of Information Act requests. In one of those emails, recently obtained by a free-market think tank, an EPA employee mocked proposed coal ash regulations, joking that Jackson "knows which landfill's leaching, She knows which pond might break, She knows they all lack liners, Close 'em down, for goodness sake!" The Competitive Enterprise Institute says it has now received thousands of heavily redacted emails sent by or...

For reasons known only to him Barack Obama has worked diligently to cultivate an ongoing state of war between his Administration and America’s business community. This is a clear and established fact. As naïve as Obama seems to be, it is possible that he will now start getting pummeled by the enemies he has made and not realize it until after Election Day. Obama never held a real job in his life. Like most Democrats he knows nothing about how profits are made and payrolls are met. All he “knows” about business is that it is the “root of all...

If Obama is counting on winning Pennsylvania, he may have a little surprise coming to him. According to Business Week, Alpha Natural Resources is closing down mines in West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania IMMEDIATELY. A total of 1200 people will be without jobs. Is this the hope and change Obama was talking about? Or was it his promise a few years back that coal regulations would cause energy prices to “necessarily sky-rocket”? Not only are you going to have a bunch of angry, unemployed people, but those same folks won’t even be able to afford to turn their own lights...

In obscure, blue-collar towns across Appalachia -- places that most Americans have never seen -- generations of coal miners have toiled away at back-breaking labor to power American homes and industry. Now, as many as 200,000 of them who dig, process, transport and burn America's most abundant fuel are threatened by EPA's latest coal rule. It imposes a standard for emissions that is all but impossible for many plants to meet. It requires coal-fired plants to release no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. The only means for many older plants to attain that standard is...

Editor's Note: Murray Energy Chief Executive Officer Robert Murray has been called the most controversial CEO in America. He doesn't hold back on his views of America's current political climate -- and the Ohio Valley's future- as he joins us for this month's Sunday Sit-Down. -- Many people believe the federal government, through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is waging a war on coal. How concerned are you that your business could be regulated to such an extent that it would make coal mining unprofitable in the near future? Murray: I am 100 percent certain that will happen, the way...