Battle Worn Coal Industry in the Fight for Its Life

Twilight Earth and others like us are trying to put Coal out of business. We succeeded in getting it out of Washington, but the fight continues.

Thousands of people standing outside dirty coal plants across the country, demonstrating their human right to clean air, may just be the tip of the mountain top in terms of the problems that the coal industry is fighting.

Mining permits have become nearly impossible to obtain.
New limits are coming on where companies can dump debris dynamited off mountaintops.
And Democratic leaders in Congress want to shrink how much coal Americans use.
Coal sees itself under attack from Congress, the Obama administration and the courts.

But where Big Industry loses, the Lobby Industry wins. Potentially huge effects on the industry have accelerated lobbying by both coal and its opponents.

But getting the attention of Congress is a challenge, as lawmakers wrestle with myriad energy issues. Because many states use coal or rely on coal-burning power plants, the industry likely will gain concessions in some areas, analysts said. But there are plenty of places where it faces intense battles.

“Their strength in terms of persuasion comes when they can make an economic case, where they can speak to jobs and economic benefits,” said Kevin Book, a managing director for ClearView Energy Partners, an energy research and consulting firm. “They tend to have some leverage. When the issues are framed as environment issues or labor issues, then they tend to lose those.”

Coal lobbyists argue that anti-coal policies that kill jobs are not a smart approach. Coal advocates also emphasize the country’s reliance on coal for cheap electricity generation. Cut coal, they say, and power prices will surge.

What they don’t like to talk about is the number of deaths that the coal industry causes through air pollution and the economic ramifications of coal against the environment.

Environmental groups, meanwhile, are working to counter coal’s lobbying, and my question is this. Is the coal industry losing more jobs than the renewable energy movement is creating? Would not a transition from coal to renewable energy, take a lot of those workers out of their black collars jobs and put them into green collar jobs? We are starting to see a transition of laid off Autoworkers moving into the Wind Turbine field as auto plants are transitioned into turbine plants.

At the same time, EPA is re-examining a Bush-era regulation that allows mountaintop mines to dump rock and other debris dynamited from mountaintops into valleys, even if it is atop a stream.

Companies that harvest resources such as Coal and Forest’s are are notorius for claiming those resources in there profit side of there ledger sheets. The problem is that there is no one to tally the loss dollars of the results of those harvests in the loss side of the environmental ledger. The money it takes to remove the fill that the coal plants dump into the valleys from their mountain top removal and the dollars it takes negate the adverse effects of deforestation and desertification run into the Trillions of dollars and do not include the toll on human life.

Jobs and economics, proposed and argued by lobbyists and slick add campaigns are not convincing more and more of us. We won’t take what the Coal industry has to say, for granted anymore. It’s time to start thinking for ourselves, our children and our future.

In the mean time, the Coal industry seems to be taking a verse from Dylan Thomas -

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I say; Rage all you like, against the dying of the light. For there is a new light, and that is the light of a renewable energy infrastructure and sustainable future.

Source: NY Times photo credit: Irish Typepad