In 2010, my friend Chris McGill and I were in West Virginia heading home from a 13-state, 5,500-mile motorcycle trip that took us to South Dakota and back home to Virginia. At the time we both worked for a trade association that represented the natural gas industry (Chris still does), and we were both struck by the number of signs and billboards in West Virginia denouncing President Obama’s “war on coal” — coal mining being integral to the West Virginia economy.
Natural gas and coal, of course, are competitors, and for years natural gas, being the cleaner fossil fuel, has steadily replaced coal as the primary fuel in generating electricity, but the gas industry’s position is that America needs to take full advantage of all energy sources, including coal.
Since our trip, the war on coal has intensified, resulting in numerous coal producers declaring bankruptcy, including, recently, Peabody Energy Corp. As a result, some 5,000 Peabody employees will soon join the ranks of the estimated 31,000 coal miners — but also truckers, engineers and other workers in the coal business — who have lost their jobs since 2010, leaving them and their families wondering how they will survive. Additionally, coal company stock prices have plummeted, adversely affecting many pension plans and 401Ks.
The market expansion of natural gas at coal’s expense has slightly contributed to coal’s demise, but the real threat has been the environmental community, in particular the EPA and the regulations it has put in place that set emissions standards coal can’t possibly meet, while ignoring the provision in those regulations that say such standards must be “commercially achievable,” which in coal’s case they obviously weren’t.
Somewhat ironically, American coal is cleaner than ever, with pollutant emissions declining by around 70 percent since the 1970s, yet for every coal plant America now shuts down, China and India build a dozen, and given the far more lax emissions standards in those countries, there is a net increase in global greenhouse-gas emissions.
Both coal and natural gas today are abundant and cheap, but given that coal currently generates one-third of our electricity, if the coal industry disappears, the resulting increase in demand for natural gas to replace it in generating electricity will hugely increase natural gas prices. Further, relying on renewable energy — the environmentalist dream — to meet energy demand is, at least for the moment, a prohibitively expensive pipedream.
Personally, I support the gradual phase-out of coal — it is a dirty fuel — and I think mountain top-removal mining is an environmental execration. But I do feel for those whose livelihoods and lives today are being sacrificed to prevent the far-off possibility, but by no means the proven certainty, of global warming.
