Al Cross: Kentucky Political Friends Of Coal Often Squeal Loudly, Generating More Noise Than Sense, More Heat Than Light.

Clear the air over the EPA's actions
Written by Al Cross

FRANKFORT, Ky. — To hear Kentucky politicians of both parties tell it, the Environmental Protection Agency should be renamed the Economic Destruction Agency. But their recent rhetoric has gone far beyond reality and obscured it.

At issue are EPA's tougher enforcement of the Clean Water Act against strip mines, particularly those on Eastern Kentucky mountaintops, and its new regulations under the Clean Air Act, which will force utilities to rely less on coal and charge more for electricity.

That's a double squeeze on the coal industry, involving significant issues for the state as a whole, not just in its two coalfields. Low electric rates allowed by handy coal reserves have helped Kentucky's economy, and the Appalachian forest, biologically unique to this continent, is where our rivers and water supplies begin.

Those issues deserve rational, fact-based discussion. But when the coal industry is squeezed, its political friends often squeal loudly, generating more noise than sense, more heat than light.

Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell did that June 1 in a red-meat speech to the Kentucky Coal Association, in which he declared, “The EPA's real goal here is not to see the Kentucky coal industry comply with its boatload of regulations and red tape. It is to see the Kentucky coal industry driven out of business altogether.”

There's no probative evidence of that. Under President Obama, who made clear in his campaign that he would get tougher on coal, mainly because of its contribution to global warming, EPA is enforcing laws and regulations that have long been on the books but circumvented by the industry and friendly regulators.

EPA's approach is open to some questions, because it created an uncertain regulatory environment during a recession, and its tough, new water-quality standard may encourage mining of Eastern Kentucky forest that has only been timbered, never strip-mined, thus discouraging re-mining and better reclamation of old mine sites.

But such significant details are usually obscured in the debate over mountaintop removal and other coal-related issues such as human-caused climate change (a scientific reality, we were told again last week, this time by three groups of agricultural scientists). That was most recently illustrated by nominally Democratic state Rep. Jim Gooch of Providence, in the state's western coalfield. ...

We will have to keep using coal, and try to make it cleaner. But spare us the simplistic poppycock.

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