DOWN AND DIRTY IN BECKLEY, BEREA AND BITTER CREEK

People don’t slip. Time catches up with them. ~ Nat King Cole 

Has time caught up with our utterly ungreen president? Democrats avoided potential calamity in Tuesday’s primary elections – overblown by the media – by voting for “electable” candidates to run in November’s general elections. Bernie Sanders’ favs, once again, weren’t that successful. Perhaps the Dems success will be an omen for the president. Can we expect the November election results will verify that Nat King Cole’s adage applies to the president and his chaos? Here’s hoping.

And speaking of king coal, the president and his con-men minions are continuing to create environmental havoc for Beckley, West Virginia; Berea, Kentucky; Bitter Creek, Wyoming and everywhere else. Last week President Trump ordered the Department of Energy (DOE), with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) compliance, to change their policies and extend the lifetimes of aged coal-fired and nuclear power plants. He wants to feed the gorilla of global warming. Specifically, the president instructed his fossil-focused Energy Secretary Rick Perry to “prepare immediate steps” to stop mothballing unprofitable, older coal and nuclear plants around the country. This policy change will reverse the greening of electric power and will reward his lumps of carbon (aka, coal) loving men who provided significant financial support to his campaign. This change will provide the rest of us with darker and dirtier air and water.

I specifically mention Beckley, Berea and Bitter Creek because they are cities located in the three states that are most dependent on coal for producing electric power. West Virginia produces 95.6% of its electricity from coal-fired power plants; Kentucky kWh's have a 92% coal dependency; and Wyoming has 87.3% coal-centric electricity. These states aren’t typical; but at least 10 states have coal-powered electricity greater than 60%. Nationally, the share of electricity produced from coal has steadily declined for the past 30 years. Over 90% of the coal consumed in the US is used to generate electricity. In 2014 39% of US power generation was coal-fired, by 2017 dirty coal’s share dropped to 30.1%. Electricity generated from-renewable sources now represents 17.1% of all kWh generated.
It's been a very long time - since Ronald Reagan was president - that old king coal was merry. Thus when Donald Trump vowed to end the misnamed “war on coal” coal barons rallied to his side with bucket-fulls of cash. Trump’s campaign received at least $240,000 from employees or PACs of coal companies. The president and his grifter-infested administration have been attempting to pay them back for their fiscal largesse ever since.

In September 2017 Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that regulates the electricity industry to adopt a new policy that would bail out the coal and nuclear industries at the expense of increasing the cost of electricity for all customers. The FERC wisely rejected this costly “lame idea” subsidy in January. But the President came back last week with a second attempt to reward his coal baron friends. As mentioned above, this time he ordered Sec. Perry to keep aging coal and nuclear plants running. The proposed plan would require operators of the nation’s electricity grid to continue buying power or generating capacity from unprofitable coal and nuclear plants that are now scheduled to be retired. Who would pay the extra expense? Every electric utility customer in the US.

Under the guise of “national security” these plants would allegedly ensure in the president’s mistaken view that domestic power plants are available if a national emergency happens. But “national security” is simply an unconvincing pretext for offering fiscal largesse to his brown power buddies. The Trump administration seems fixated on using “national security” to justify taxpayer/consumer payments to the president’s chums. It’s a recurrent motif of this administration to weakly disguise their ultimate motive, this time to subsidize coal and nuclear power plants through non-market, administrative means and put our money in coal barons’ pockets. As you may recall, Trump also used national security to contemptibly justify increased tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from our allies. OMG.

This scheme to keep Beckley’s (and many other communities’) air and water polluted by old coal-fired power facilities is both misbegotten and ill-conceived. As King Coal should be biting the dust, wannabe king Donald bites the DOE and EPA to our detriment.