EPA gets earful about power plan
In coal country, supporters, foes make arguments.
CHARLESTON, W.VA. — Coal executive Robert Murray ambled through the packed hearing room inside the golddomed capital complex here, past reporters and photographers, past environmental activists and energy lobbyists, past more than two dozen of his miners who had filled the seats, wearing their work uniforms and hard hats.
Like the roughly 300 other people signed up to speak about the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to withdraw the Clean Power Plan — Barack Obama’s signature effort as president to combat climate change by limiting emissions from power plants — Murray got three minutes to make his case.
He used them to rail against the regulation and praise EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt for vowing to scrap it. He called the Clean Power Plan the “linchpin” of the “war on coal.” He argued, as he has for years, that it would have killed more jobs in an industry that has been shedding jobs for years, mostly because of automation and the rise of natural gas. He said it was past time to bury the “illegal, excessive” Obama-era regulation.
“God bless President [Donald] Trump and you coal miners. I love you fellas,” he said.
Minutes later, 72-year-old Stanley Sturgill, who mined coal for four decades in the hills of Kentucky, took the seat on the dais where Murray had spoken. He and his wife had risen before dawn and driven several hours from their home in Harlan Cou n t y. He spoke of his own respiratory problems and how emissions from coal-fired power plants and other pollutants had wreaked havoc on the health of friends, family and neighbors.
“We need the EPA’s immediate help and not their abandonment,” Sturgill said. “Do I really think that this administration cares what this old, worn coal miner has to say? I don’t know. I doubt it.”
But Sturgill said as long as he could draw a breath, even a strained one, he intended to push the EPA to put concerns about public health above the wishes of the fossil fuel industry.
“Our health, environment and global climate are actively being destroyed. And it is clear to me that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and President Trump are accelerating and cheering on the damage,” he told EPA officials. “I have come here today to ask you to stop. For the sake of my grandchildren and yours, I call on you to strengthen, not repeal, the Clean Power Plan.”
The opening hours of a two-day hearing here, with testimony spread across three separate hearing rooms simultaneously, encapsulated the controversy that has long engulfed the plan that Obama finalized in 2015 in an effort to slash greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists agree are fueling the planet’s warming.
Industry representatives, elected officials and workers who rely on the coal industry here excoriated it as a textbook example of government overreach that would cost jobs and harm families. To Pruitt’s proposal to ditch it, they had a simple message: Good riddance.
Yet environmental activists, public health groups and a collection of ordinary citizens defended the rule as an essential element in the fight to combat climate change, as well as a key measure to improve air quality and help the nation embrace cleaner forms of energy and the economic potential associated with that shift.
Bobby May, who traveled from Hurley, Virginia, with his brother, called the Clean Power Plan “all pain and no gain” for those who rely on the coal industry.
are survivors of the Obama administration’s war on coal,” said May, who described himself as the son and father of coal miners. “Coal puts food on the table for my family. It puts clothes on the back of my grandchildren.”
That wasn’t the perspective of Nick Mullins, a fifth-generation coal miner from Kentucky. He has no interest in his own son following in his footsteps.
“I don’t want him to be a sixth-generation coal miner,” Mullins testified, detailing the physical toll the work had taken on members of his family. He said he viewed the Clean Power Plan as a pathway to safer, more diversified job options for his children.
Back and forth it went. Kathy Beckett, a West Virginia lawyer and board member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called the Clean Power Plan “unlawful and a bad deal for America.” She argued it would drive up electricity rates and impose billions of dollars in compliance costs for companies “without any significant reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.”
But Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, said the plan’s benefits easily outweigh its costs. “The coal miners I talk to seem to know coal jobs will continue to dry up, with or without a Clean Power Plan,” she said.
She characterized the EPA’s decision to hold a lone hearing in Charleston as a “public spectacle.”
“We’ve been pitted against each other by being told we’ll either have coal, or we’ll have nothing,” Rosser said. “This administration seems to thrive on public anger and conflict. It’s a distraction. When people are fighting, they are not talking ... The clock is ticking to do something different than leaning on a dying industry.”
As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt joined more than two dozen other state attorneys general and an array of industry opponents in suing over the Clean Power Plan. They argued that the Obama administration did not have legal authority to force states to form detailed plans to reduce CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants.