Destroying Coal to Save It

April 11, 2016

On the eve of primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky, EPA Administrator McCarthy inadvertently showed why voters are fed up with Washington.

– She bewailed the plight of coal communities as her agency aggressively regulates their primary employer out of business, then offers the victims a taxpayer-funded aid package to mitigate the suffering her agency has caused.

– Her administration destroys coal mining jobs (see chart below) paying an annual average wage of $83,700 with good benefits, then laments the results and growing income disparity. Sounds like the Orwellian logic — “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

McCarthy blames coal field carnage on market forces. But at the climate conference in Paris last year, the administration boasted of its progress in shutting down the American coal industry, then for domestic audiences it shifts blame for coal’s decline to cheap natural gas. Heads we win, tails you lose.

Maybe coal communities wouldn’t need a multi-billion aid package to put thousands of families and businesses back on their feet if EPA hadn’t tried so hard to knock them down.