Former President Bill Clinton, speaking Monday in Cheyenne, Wyo., at a campaign stop for his wife, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, sought to assure the residents of the nation’s top coal producing state that they wouldn’t be forgotten in a low-carbon future. “In the end, we’re going to be phasing into a new energy future,” the Casper Star-Tribune quoted the former president as saying. “It’s going to be a long time, and Wyoming has the most efficient and lowest sulfur (coal) in the world.”
Clinton, the front-runner in the Democratic primary race, provoked a bit of a backlash last month after stating during a town hall in Ohio that her proposed energy plan would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
Under Clinton’s energy plan, more than half a billion solar panels would be installed across the country by 2021 and by 2027 the nation would generate enough clean renewable energy to power every home.
She went on to state that “we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was fast to respond, calling Clinton out on the Senate floor the following week. “Miners in Kentucky and across the country know that coal keeps the lights on and puts food on the table. What they want is to provide for their families, but here’s how more Democrats seem to view these hardworking Americans and their families: just statistics, just the cost of doing business, just obstacles to their ideology,” McConnell said.
