Enviros Say Coal Money was Ineffective in Tuesday’s Races
Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
11/9/12
Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s campaigns spent considerable time and money trying to woo voters in the coal-heavy battleground states of Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania, and industry and environmental groups spent tens of millions in ads trying to influence public opinion. But on Tuesday, Obama swept all three states, causing many in the environmental world to declare victory for clean energy and climate change mitigation and a striking defeat of coal interests. “A lot of people poured a lot of money into coal-reliant states and they still wound up losing big time,” said Robert Gee, a former assistant secretary for Fossil Energy during the Clinton Administration who now runs a D.C.-area consulting firm. “Both Ohio and Virginia went for Obama. I don’t care what happens in Congress, the fact is that all that coal money had no impact at all on the presidential outcome.”
Heather Taylor-Miesle, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund, estimated in a blog post this week that the fossil fuel industry spent upwards of $200 million on campaign ads this election cycle. She said the ads, though, did not appear resonate with voters given Tuesday’s election results. “Polluters spent hundreds of millions of dollars and have nothing to show for it today,” she said. “Our polling very clearly shows that voters didn’t buy what the polluters were selling. This is a decided issue. The public stands with us from clean energy to addressing climate change. This election and our polling indicate a mandate from the American people on the environment and public health.”
The day after the election, stocks from coal producing companies notably declined. By close of business Wednesday, Arch Coal saw its stock sink by 11 percent. Alpha Natural Resources’ plunged by 10 percent, and Peabody’s fell by 9 percent by the end of the day in anticipation of what many analysts said would be a continuation of the Obama Administration’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. “It’s pretty black and white,” John Coequyt, director of the Sierra Club’s international climate programs, said in an interview. “There were a number of really prime targets that the coal industry had in the Senate, and they lost virtually every single one.”
NMA: Romney Still Won Coal Country
While Romney did not win any of the prized coal battleground states, he easily swept coal-reliant Republican states such as West Virginia, Wyoming and Kentucky. Many in the coal industry also emphasized his victories in the majority of coal-producing counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In many counties, according to the National Mining Association’s Carol Raulston, Romney carried a higher percentage of the vote than Republican John McCain did in 2008. “If you look at the returns on district-by-district basis, we do see that more people came out to vote in support of coal and Gov. Romney during this election than the margin that was enjoyed by Sen. McCain in 2008. So we certainly have more supporters,” Raulston, senior vice president for Communications at NMA, told GHG Monitor.
Perhaps more important for the coal industry, Raulston added, is the fact that most of the industry’s champions in the House survived reelection. House Energy and Power Subcommittee Chair Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) easily cruised to victory, as did his coal-friendly colleagues Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) and David McKinley (R-W.Va.), who earlier this summer introduced legislation that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from finalizing greenhouse gas emission performance standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants until carbon capture and storage technology is deemed economically and technically feasible by at least three government agencies. That leadership on the House Energy and Commerce Committee over the last two years has spearheaded a steady stream of legislation over the last two years aiming to increase coal production and stymie EPA from regulating the industry.
End of ‘War on Coal’ Rhetoric?
While some energy analysts indicated that broader cooperation on energy and climate issues could be possible under a second Obama Administration, many environmental policy experts interviewed this week by GHG Monitor said they still expect the so-called “war on coal” rhetoric to continue in Congress. “I think that the House will continue to hammer away on that and hide their attacks on the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act behind the ‘war on coal’ narrative,” Coequyt said. “It serves a very important function for them, and that is to disguise real direct attacks on incredibly popular public health safeguards, so I don’t expect that to change.” Gee said he has seen little indication that the rhetoric will change from coal industry supporters in the days since the election. “So far it has not dissipated, at least from the Republicans in the House or Senate, and they still appear to be in their pre-election rhetoric mode and drawing red lines in the sand,” he said. “They may still be sorting out the new reality.”
The “war on coal” moniker was not created as an election tactic, Raulston said. She said the expression come out of the coal-producing regions of Appalachia “organically.” “It really wasn’t part of a tactic we laid out here at NMA,” she said. “But it’s what people [in Appalachia] feel, and it sort of became a common way of expressing what all of the Obama Administration’s proposals taken together do to coal mining, particularly in that region, and we’re now seeing that impact. For them it’s real, not some sort of lobbying tactic.”
Greens Hope Election Can Shift View on Coal
Some clean energy advocates said they hope Tuesday’s election results can lead to a shift in the way many in Washington look at coal. Judi Greenwald, vice president of Technology and Innovation at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said that coal can be incorporated into the discussion of a low-carbon future if the industry begins to invest more in pollution control technologies. “We need a more nuanced conversation about coal,” she said in an interview. “Coal is inherently more polluting than natural gas, but with enough pollution control, including something like carbon capture and storage, coal can be environmentally at least as good as gas and potentially other competing fuels. For me, to think about requiring coal-fired power plants to perform well environmentally doesn’t seem to me to be a war on coal, to me that’s a way to make coal sustainable. There’s some basic confusion about what it means to want a sustainable future for coal.” Whether or not the coal industry will be willing to accept that approach remains to be seen. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) was heavily critiqued by coal advocates in his state after he offered scathing criticism of the industry for not modernizing itself in a floor speech this summer.
How the coal industry fits into a second Obama Administration will depend on the extent to which it is willing to cooperate with the President and Congress, Gee said. “The coal industry needs to decide whether it wants to continue making the Administration their enemy or whether they want to try to find ways to partner with them,” he said.
