8-Year Assault on America's Coal Industry

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, today I rise to mark the end of a long, harsh, partisan, politicized campaign, unprecedented in American history. I am not talking about the recent election. No. We are finally at the end of the Obama administration's 8-year assault on Kentucky's and America's coal industry.

In two terms, President Obama's policies have successfully put thousands of coal miners and utility workers into the unemployment line. In 2008, then-candidate Obama pledged that any company looking to build a coal-powered electric plant would be bankrupted. The combined regulations of the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and several other bureaucracies have turned that pledge into a reality, choking off investment in new state-of-the-art, clean-burning, coal-fired electric generation; and it led to the premature closing of existing plants.

If we continue on this path, the other promise made by candidate Obama will also come to pass: electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket. And that would be a disaster for consumers, for whom energy prices are often the second or third largest line item in the family budget.

I also think about industrial consumers and the many manufacturers in my district and around the Nation who depend on affordable, reliable energy that will face skyrocketing costs if we fail to act and reverse these administration policies. However, it is a new day; and voters-- particularly in the Rust Belt and Appalachia--turned out in November to close the book on this legacy of job-killing regulation and to seek a new path forward.

President Obama said that elections have consequences, and this is true; but his administration ignored every electoral outcome since 2010, doubling down on failed policies while the American people called for a different approach.

The inverse is also true: consequences drive elections. The consequences of the Obama administration's unilateral decisions decided last November's election, and no place in this country felt those consequences as acutely as coal country.

National coal production is at its lowest level in 35 years. Pike County, the long leading coal producer in Kentucky, until losing that title in 2012, is down 89 percent since its peak in 1996. Nationwide, consumption of coal has dropped nearly a third since 2007.

In Kentucky, coal employment hit its lowest level in 118 years. To repeat, coal employment in Kentucky is now at its lowest level since 1898. In 2009, 18,850 people were employed by coal. About 73,000 jobs were indirectly supported by that economic activity. Today, only about 6,500 Kentuckians now work in the coalfields, and those losses have rippled throughout the economy. Yet this is the legacy that this administration will earn as it leaves office.

Never in the history of our country has an administration singled out and targeted a lawful industry--in this case, an industry that has provided jobs and opportunities for American workers for generations, an industry that has literally powered America, and, through that overregulation, crushed an entire sector of our economy.

Now, Obama administration apologists will say that depletion in Appalachian coalfields and new competition from natural gas are the primary factors in those job losses, but they don't give the regulators enough credit.
The turnaround in natural gas production on State and private lands has been dramatic, to be sure, but relative price parity with coal does not explain two-thirds of mining jobs in Kentucky disappearing in 7 years.

The administration has targeted coal supply and demand, prohibiting production leases, rejecting mining permit applications, stretching the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts against congressional intent, prohibiting new and existing plants from using coal--the list goes on and on.

Many of these rules have been halted or overturned by the courts, and several more remain subject to challenge by the States and industry; but since the President could not get Congress' support for his agenda of banning the production and use of coal, most of these regulations can be unwound by the courts or the next administration.

I urge the incoming Trump administration to do just that and to engage with Congress in a bipartisan fashion on our Nation's energy and environmental policies. The livelihoods of people in the coalfields, of those working in the manufacturing and rail industries, of families trying to keep their homes warm and their lights on must never again be the collateral damage in partisan warfare.

I must address the issue of climate change. Let the last 8 years serve as a lesson to all of us. Let's never again attempt to solve problems through central planning by punishing innocent Americans whose paychecks put food on their table. Instead, let's address problems like climate change the American way: not through central planning or government, but through innovation, science, technology.

While it will be a tough road back for coal country and it may never be the same after 8 years of regulatory attack, I do look forward to a new day dawning in the coalfields.

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