Free Republic

The Obama administration is set to roll out a series of climate and pollution measures that rivals any president’s environmental actions of the past quarter-century — a reality check for Republicans who think last week’s election gave them a mandate to end what they call the White House’s “War on Coal.” Tied to court-ordered deadlines, legal mandates and international climate talks, the efforts scheduled for the next two months show that President Barack Obama is prepared to spend the remainder of his term unleashing sweeping executive actions to combat global warming. And incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have...

Sen.-elect Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) pledged on “Fox News Sunday” to be “extremely aggressive” in trying to rollback some regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency. “Extremely aggressive,” she said when asked how aggressive she would be in the Senate in trying to rollback some of the EPA regulations. “That is my promise to West Virginia. We have lost over the last two years, 5,000 jobs. Those are just coal jobs. “We had several thousand other miners who are what are called a warn notice, meaning they're potentially going to be losing their jobs. That doesn't even count the transportation job,...

Dems Realize “War on Coal” Cost Them Coal Country by Daniel Greenfield People are funny that way. They cling to their bibles and guns. And then if you declare war on them, they don’t want to vote for you. Coal-heavy districts in West Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois that had been steadily moving away from Democrats in recent elections appear to have completed that shift Tuesday, when they overwhelmingly backed Republicans who vowed to oppose what they call President Barack Obama’s “war on coal.”In West Virginia, once a long-time Democratic stronghold, Republicans will take control of both houses of the state...

Demonize coal. Keep the poor in the dark. And, above all, keep pushing the fantasy that U.S. government action (with or without the approval of Congress) is essential to dealing with climate change. That — in a nutshell — is the climate-change strategy of the Obama administration and its environmentalist allies. Evidence of the third point can be found by looking at the “Clean Power Plan” — the 645-page set of rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency last June that, if it withstands legal challenges, will effectively outlaw the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States....

Bowie Resource Partners says it has eliminated 150 jobs at the Bowie #2 coal mine near Paonia. ... Last year the shutdown of another mine in the region caused nearly 300 people to lose their jobs. That coal mine is in Somerset. In the release, Bowie says it will provide the 150 laid off workers with 60 days of wages and benefits.

After warning in August that hundreds of miners could lose their jobs, Boone County-based Coal River Energy has laid off 130 mine workers. Coal River Energy spokesman James "Skeets" Loving confirmed the layoffs Tuesday. In August, the company warned that 280 mine workers could be out of jobs. Loving said the company laid off 130 employees on Oct. 11, while keeping 94 workers and finding other work for 56 others. The affected mining areas are located near the border of Boone and Kanawha counties. Some are underground and some are surface mines. The company pointed to poor coal markets and...

Demonstrators gathered outside the Public Service Commission to protest against a requested rate structure change by the local utility company, Madison Gas and Electric (MG&E). During the protest, they decried the use of "dirty coal" and called for more renewable energy. To make their point, they had a blow-up coal power plant that was running on a fan powered by wind and solar charged batteries. Before the protest was over, however, the batteries died and their solar panel could not produce enough energy to keep the power plant standing upright.

DULUTH, Minn. -- Minnesota's leaders want federal help to ease railroad delays. U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken and Gov. Mark Dayton on Monday sent a letter to the head of the Surface Transportation Board saying that rail delays are hurting many parts of the economy. "As we watch winter come to the state of Minnesota, we have become increasingly alarmed by the service failures of several railroads that serve critical industries in our state," the three Democrats wrote to board Chairman Daniel Elliott. And on Tuesday, Dayton holds what is expected to be the last of a series...

“Renewable” energy is unreliable, and can never replace secure base load sources like coal, natural gas, and hydro. And now a bunch of greenies have embarrassed themselves and proved the point. Attempting to show how wonderful solar power is, a band of self-righteous greenie demonstrators in Madison, WI, the Berkeley of the Midwest, instead demonstrated that reliance on renewables means brownouts and blackouts. Protesting a proposed rate increase by the local utility, Madison Gas & Electric, they made utter fools of themselves, and showed by reliable power from hydrocarbons is the only way to have secure energy supplies. The MacIver...

Startup Alphabet Energy has its first product: what it says is the world’s largest thermoelectric generator. Power plants waste huge amounts of energy as heat—about 40 to 80 percent of the total in the fuel they burn. A new device could reduce that waste, cutting fuel consumption and carbon emissions by as much as 3 percent and saving companies millions of dollars. (Three percent might not seem like much, but for context, air travel accounts for 2 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.) The generator makes use of a novel, highly efficient thermoelectric material discovered recently at the University of...

Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply. Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out. Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output. The...

(CNSNews.com) – Power plants generating 72 gigawatts (GW) of electricity in 37 states have either closed or are scheduled to shut their doors to comply with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, according to the Institute for Energy Research (IER). The loss of generating capacity is “over seven times the amount originally predicted by EPA modeling,” IER’s updated report, released October 7, noted. “Originally, EPA calculated that only 9.5 GW of electrical generating capacity would close as a result of its MATS (Mercury and Air Toxics Standard) and CSAPR (Cross State Air Pollution Rule) rules,” the report stated. “Before President Obama’s...

(CNSNews.com) - The United Mine Workers of America held a rally Tuesday in Washington, D.C., to protest Environmental Protection Agency regulations that they claim would destroy the nation’s coal industry and coal-related jobs while doing nothing to address climate change. On Tuesday, current and retired workers convened at Freedom Plaza, then marched to EPA offices to protest EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, part of President Obama’s larger climate-change agenda, which aims to cut carbon pollution by imposing state-by-state emissions standards and fines for failure to meet those standards. CNSNews.com asked protesters, “If you could tell President Obama anything about these...

The EPA is poised to “do an IRS” — similar to what the tax agency had to do with dismissed top official Lois G. Lerner — and officially notify the National Archives that it may have lost key electronic records, according to a think tank that’s suing to get text messages under an open-records request. Justice Department lawyers told a federal court on Tuesday that the alert will be coming soon, in a case that’s shaping up as a significant battle over whether government agencies are required to keep cellphone text messages as “official” records. In this case, researcher Chris...

Just how deceptive is Alison Grimes' campaign commercial attacking Senator Mitch McConnell for supposedly being "anti-coal?" So deceptive that even fact checker Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post has awarded it four Pinocchios for extreme mendacity. To make matters worse for Grimes, this four Pinocchios award comes at the same time that James O'Keefe's Project Veritas released two videos showing Grimes campaign workers and a big financial backer stating on hidden camera that Grimes is only pretending to support the coal industry in order to get elected. First up, let us look at the Alision Grimes 4 Pinocchio campaign commercial:

<p>James O’Keefe has turned his talents towards the Senate midterm elections, secretly interviewing supporters and volunteers of the Alison Grimes campaign, the Democratic opponent to Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.</p> <p>In the latest undercover video, investigators secretly filmed a Harvey Weinstein fundraiser, speaking with one individual who insists that Grimes will "fuck" the coal industry after she is elected.</p>

The rules put in place by the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency have dealt a severe blow to the economy of the Appalachian region. The most recent proposal could be the death knell if they are enacted. More than 500 active and retired coal miners from West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia delivered that message to Washington Tuesday. The protest is the most recent demonstration against the clean power rule which would change the rules for emissions on existing coal fired power plants in the United States. The rally, led by the United Mine Workers Union, called on the...

Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Alison Grimes has vehemently and repeatedly claimed to oppose President Obama’s coal and environmental policies in what has become an increasingly significant campaign issue. A team of investigative journalists, led by Project Veritas Action’s founder James O’Keefe, went undercover in multiple Grimes campaign offices to determine if her opposition to the core principles of her own political party is genuine or an intentional deception.

New James O’Keefe undercover video shows Grimes supporters acknowledging she’s being deceptive as to coal. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas Action has gone undercover with various Democratic campaigns, and is beginning to roll out video.First up, supporters of Alison Grimes, who is challenging Mitch McConnell. Grimes supporters in the Democratic Party do not seem to have any doubt that Grimes is just playing the political game with the coal industry during the campaign, but will help take it down once elected.Via Free Beacon: U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes is lying about her support for the state’s coal industry according to...

U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes is lying about her support for the state’s coal industry according to Kentucky Democrats, including members of her campaign team, who were captured on a hidden camera video. The video, produced by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, shows five employees of the Grimes campaign and local Democratic Party affiliates speculating that the Democratic challenger to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) is only professing her support for the industry out of political expediency. “If we can get her elected do you think she is going to do the right thing and she’s gonna try...