Look at what the Traitor has done to the coal industry. Korea and Japan are begging for an alternate source of coal besides Manchuria, and President Snowball is working hard to make sure that no coal will be shipped from the West Coast.
The treehuggers and unions here in the Northwest are frantically trying to ban coal and lumber shipping from Portland and Seattle on "enviromental" grounds. That they are cutting their own throats doesn't cross their dim little minds.
From flying and ground surveys of over 6000 oil producing and drilling locations a couple of years ago in ND, looking for dead birds and then charging 7 oil companies in the deaths of 28 individual waterfowl wanting $15,000.00/bird and someone to do 6 months jail time per bird (thankfully thrown out of court by the judge)...
to the incessant PR war on hydraulic fracturing (because they still lack the science to show even one instance of a frac job polluting near surface aquifers (where drinking water comes from), and only a couple of spills and one instance of someone (illegally) polluting any surface water).
Anyhow, the attacks go on, because public perception is key, not reality--and they are spending a fortune in our money to try and prove an unprovable case...If there was a problem, they wouldn't have to look so hard to try to find it.
What really makes NO sense, is that the production of government-owned minerals (oil, metals, rare earths, timber, etc.) only adds to the treasury, without the government having to put up any venture capital, do the work, or take the economic risk. Done on a lease basis with a royalty interest written in, not only does the government get lease money up front (even if no economically viable deposits are found), but they get production royalties from any minerals produced, they get to tax corporate and individual income, excise taxes on tires, etc., and tax every drop of fuel.
The reason North Dakota's individual income tax went down is the oil revenue which has given the State a significant surplus.
His coal laws will affect us as well, and we are an exporter of electricity because of the coal industry here.
Wyoming is in a similar boat, only much of their oil and gas industry has been hurt by being Federal Land, and far harder to lease. The coal mines near Gillette load unit trains which could be going to the coast and overseas if no one wanted to burn it here, still revenue, still employing miners and others.
As for timber, no one knows how many millions of board feet of lumber have rotted on the stump or fueled wildfires when they should have been harvested and replanted, especially in pine bark beetle areas--in states farther west.
In the meantime, prosperity has become dismal poverty for whole towns as a result of policy which did more harm to the environment (not to mention the economy) than good.
We will continue to develop what we can, while we can. When the time comes to rebuild America, we'll need it.