Time For The Wall Street Journal To Get Real About The Bogus “War on Coal”

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, mouthpiece of American corporate political interests, ran an op-ed yesterday by two operatives in the Koch Brothers’ political machine, who blamed the cratering coal economies of Kentucky and West Virginia on a fictive “War on Coal.” The Journal editorial page rarely publishes opposing views, so I came to Medium to respond to this tired claim from these two state directors for Americans for (Corporate and Billionaire) Prosperity.

The War on Coal is a fabrication — a public relations gimmick to distract people from the harm coal wreaks on us, and to blame the President for what reality is doing to Appalachian coal, as if politics could cure coal’s problems.

The authors of the op-ed should have checked with their friends in the energy industry out West; they’d see that Wyoming coal is cleaning Appalachian coal’s clock on price. The U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows Appalachian coal costing roughly three times per Btu more than coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. The EIA also reports that average coal production per employee hour is more than 10 times higher in Powder River Basin. Appalachian Power president and CEO Charles Patton told a meeting of energy executives a few months ago, that coal can is losing a long-term contest with natural gas and wind power: “If we believe we can just change administrations and this issue is going to go away,” he said, “we’re making a terrible mistake.”

The authors could check in with their friends on Wall Street, who confirm that the outlook for the global coal market is bleak. Financial giant Goldman Sachs drew the conclusion that “[t]he industry does not require new investment given the ability of existing assets to satisfy flat demand, so prices will remain under pressure as the deflationary cycle continues.” In plain English, market forces drive coal’s decline. And that’s true even with the massive subsidy coal gets by not having to pay for the harms it causes.

As a Senator from Rhode Island, I wish that once — just once — the fossil fuel industry and their paid-for PR machine would concede that burning their product causes real harm to other people. Whether it’s damage to coastal homes and infrastructure from rising seas and erosion; asthma attacks in children triggered by smog; forests dying from beetle infestations and unprecedented wildfire seasons due to climate change; farms ravaged by worsened drought and flooding from disrupted weather; or coral and shellfish losses in acidifying seas, they ignore it all. These are all real costs to Americans, that hit home in Rhode Island and in many other states, but don’t count in the one-sided ledger of the polluters’ “War on Coal” rhetoric.

It’s hard for me to hear complaints from those whose product creates such harm when they refuse even to acknowledge those costs borne by the rest of us. If you look at the casualties, the federal government isn’t waging a War on Coal. If anything, coal is waging a war on us.