27Aug

Trump’s Coal Plan Works for West Virginia

Via The Journal: Earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it followed through on President Donald Trump’s executive order to review and repeal the Clean Power Plan. From its inception, the CPP was a total overreach of the federal bureaucracy. That’s why West Virginia led 24 states in fighting the rule in court, arguing […]
23Aug

Fixing the Clean Power Plan is Sensible First Step

Via The Piqua Daily Call: Washington loves controversy. And critics are undoubtedly clucking right now about the Trump administration’s plan to replace the Clean Power Plan (CPP) with a modified effort. But the administration deserves credit for updating the plan, rather than scrapping it entirely. For starters, the CPP envisioned by President Obama represented a […]
22Aug

From Illegal Overreach to Thoughtful Restraint

The Obama administration’s environmental agenda can be neatly summed up by the word “overreach.” No order from the administration better defined this overreach than the Clean Power Plan (CPP), better known as the Costly Power Plan. It was nothing if not ambitious. With one stroke, President Obama’s EPA shrugged off 45 years of legal interpretation […]
22Aug

Trump Administration Proposes Rule to Relax Carbon Limits on Power Plants

Via The Washington Post: The Environmental Protection Agency officially put forward on Tuesday its proposal for replacing the Clean Power Plan, the heart of President Barack Obama’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases from the nation’s power plants. But folded into the Trump administration’s latest rollback is a change to a permitting program little known outside of industries that have to contend with it, such as the power […]
21Aug

EPA Head Signs Proposal to Undo Restrictions on Coal Plants

Via The Wall Street Journal: The Trump administration moved to overturn Obama-era environmental rules on power-plant emissions, a long-telegraphed action designed to help coal-burning plants compete with natural gas and other cleaner alternatives as a national energy source. Andrew Wheeler, President Trump’s acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, on Monday signed a proposal to scrap environmental restrictions on […]
21Aug

Power Plan Replacement Rule Restores Federal and State Balance Mandated by Law

See the Press Release here. Hal Quinn, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Mining Association (NMA), issued the following statement in response to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) proposed replacement rule. “Through the replacement rule, the EPA has returned to a lawful framework for regulation of power plant emissions. The Clean Air Act […]
20Aug

Trump Set to Roll Back Restrictions on Coal-burning Power Plants

Via The Wall Street Journal:  The Trump administration is escalating an effort to revive the flagging U.S. coal industry with a planned move next week to replace restrictive Obama-era climate policies with new rules designed to help coal-burning plants run harder and stay open longer. The proposed new rules, which the Environmental Protection Agency plans […]
15Aug

Perspective and Optimism

Appreciating the optimism that now permeates the coal industry requires a little history. After all, context matters. Rewind to 2011, the year the Mine Health and Safety Administration (MHSA) reported a highwater mark of 143,940 coal miners. Just five years later, by the close of 2016, there were just 81,875 of those miners left employed. […]
15Aug

Bank of the West’s Climate Change Mission Fuels Coal Country Backlash

Via The Washington Times: If Al Gore started a savings-and-loan, it might look something like the climate-conscious Bank of the West, and that’s become a source of friction in the coal-mining counties of Colorado and Wyoming. State and local officials are seeking to close their accounts with the San Francisco-based bank over its recently publicized decision to withdraw […]
14Aug

The One Market That’s Sure To Help Coal

Via Forbes:  As still the world’s leading source of electricity (most critically, overwhelmingly so in all-important China and India) at 37-40% of all supply, and still generating 30% of U.S. power, coal is obviously not dead. But beyond electricity, coal is much more essential to another market than the anti-coal business may realize: the very steel that builds our cities. Apparently, […]