Knight Hawk Coal Mine in Percy, Illinois
Republicans want to save the coal industry, and that fact alone could pull betrayed middle-class Democrats to the right, said Stephen Moore in a Washington Times op-ed, "The Death of American Coal" last week:
There was a time in America — and it wasn’t even so long ago — that liberals actually cared about working class people. They may have been misguided in many of their policy solutions — i.e., raising the minimum wage — but at least their heart was in the right place.
Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago. The radical left wing environmentalists took control of the Democratic Party. These are crazies who care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class. The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these radicals and now they — and all of us — are paying a heavy price.
The latest evidence came last week when another coal giant in America, Peabody Energy Corp., declared bankruptcy. This is the same fate suffered by Arch Coal Inc., Alpha Natural Resources Inc. and other coal producers that have filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors.
This isn’t a result of free market creative destruction. This was a policy strategy by the White House and green groups.
They wanted this to happen. This was what Clean Power Plant rules from the Environmental Protection Agency were all about. The EPA set standards by design that were impossible to meet and even flouted the law that says the regs should be “commercially achievable.” This was a key component of the climate change fanaticism that pervades this White House.
The rest is HERE.
