Public coal company stock prices are very depressed today when compared to what they have been at times over the past decade. Most of the conversations among coal miners and coal executives’ center around the question of when will the coal prices return.
Another topic is how bad and unfair Obama’s war on coal is. Another is the loss in coal’s market share of electricity generation. Another is the big impact new discoveries of natural gas have had on coal’s future.
All of these coal issues make good conversation. Sometimes they even make good comedy when politicians ranging from Rahall to McConnell exclaim how hard they will fight Obama’s war on coal. These politicians remind me of WWE wrestlers that pretend to hate and fight each other with a vengeance until the spotlight is off and then they sit around and talk about how gullible the fans/voters are to believe that they really dislike each other. McConnell and Rahall say they have been fighting for coal for three decades as its percent of US electricity has declined from 52 to 39 percent. Not very good fighters are they?
But politicians can’t be expected to be good fighters for coal when the coal companies won’t fight for themselves. Coal executives, coal boards, coal users, coal haulers (railroads), coal vendors’ et al have not fought at all, so you can hardly call Obama’s attacks on coal a war. It’s more like what I call it in an essay I did a awhile back. It’s a surrender of coal. The industry only shoots back when they have taken another casualty and then only briefly. They never go on the offensive. The key element of their strategy is to be politically correct. Their thought being that if they have access to Obama and his friends, that they can use their gifts of persuasion to change Obama’s mind about coal. My view of that has always been – Fat Chance.
It is not practical to believe that you can allow the American public to go on believing that the use of coal will destroy the planet and yet expect that a politician will be pro coal. After all he depends on that same public to get re-elected. It is also not practical to do what so many coal people do, which is to sit and wait for someone else to fight for them. I used to routinely push for funding of a national campaign to correct people’s misunderstanding of global warming and the real life impacts the attacks on coal are having on their daily lives. The most common response I used to get at WV Coal Association meetings, National Coal meetings, and other coal organization meetings was that you could not win that battle. But they are wrong. It is a winnable battle. Why?Because the truth is on coal’s side.
The EPA regulations recently issued for greenhouse gases gave the industry yet another opportunity to get the American public’s attention with the truth regarding the insanity of America trying to regulate the earth’s temperature. But yet again the industry comments suggest that America can in fact control the earth’s temperature and that it’s simply a debate over how. Truly its business suicide when Arch Coal says for example – “We strongly encourage the Administration to reconsider its regulatory approach and to focus instead on robust investment in advanced technologies including carbon capture, utilization, and storage. That is the rational way forward for addressing climate concerns.”
In other words Arch isn’t really concerned about working Americans electric bills or American industrial competitiveness but rather only about their industry and their company and their job. Save coal is the slogan they seem to have versus save America. They want to be politically correct and save themselves while the rest of America’s workers drown in a “reg-cession” and helplessly watch their quality of life swept away in a current of nonsensical, “Greeniac”, anti-American regulations. The coal industry and Arch should wake up and join with Jim Inhofe to call manmade global warming what it is – a hoax. They should explain that even if manmade global warming is occurring
transferring American jobs to so-called developing countries does not decrease carbon emissions, it instead increases them along with true pollutants like particulates, sulfur, arsenic, mercury and more.