[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 14389-14390]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2150
                          STOP THE WAR ON COAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentlewoman from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito) is 
recognized until 10 p.m. as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mrs. CAPITO. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  We have 10 minutes here, and I am very proud to be here tonight to 
talk about a bill that is on the floor on Friday, and that is the Stop 
the War on Coal Act of 2012. I hail from the great State of West 
Virginia, one of the largest coal-producing States in this Nation. 
Quite frankly, I am here for three reasons.
  The first reason is that I am extremely concerned about the job loss 
and the economic devastation that this war on coal is having on our 
State of West Virginia. We had really sad news just yesterday. Alpha 
Coal announced that 1,200 coal mining jobs in the region were going to 
be cut. Now, that sounds like a lot of jobs, but then when you think 
about it, that's 1,200 families, and that's 1,200 men and women who 
will come home tonight and who came home last night. So we say we're 
going to have to do something.
  And why is it? We don't have enough time to get into all of the 
details, but I do think it is part and parcel of the regulatory 
environment of this administration, that it's the philosophy of this 
administration that coal is not good for the country, and it's a lack 
of education, really, on the acknowledgment of the base load energy 
that coal brings to this Nation.
  I am here to stand up for the families and businesses that are going 
to see a rise in their electric bills. I am also here for the 
reliability of the electric grid to make sure that we have affordable 
energy.
  I would like to bring my friend from Pennsylvania in. We've been 
waiting a while. The Stop the War on Coal Act is coming up on Friday, 
which the President's energy plan is destroying, if you can even call 
it a plan. I mean, we're from an all-of-the-above plan. We've worked 
together on this, Mr. Murphy and I. We've already lost over 2,000 jobs, 
and 55 units are going to retire across America, in large part, due to 
EPA rules and regulations. How many jobs is that? These Boiler MACT 
rules, these Utility MACT rules, coal ash rules are all job killers.
  I would like to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania, since we're 
on limited time, and ask him to give his perspectives on what we know 
is a war on coal.
  Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentlelady from West 
Virginia. Thank you also for your tireless advocacy for coal as we are 
here fighting the war on coal.
  It's interesting. I remember when I was attending college at Wheeling 
Jesuit University. Oftentimes, for charitable activities, we'd go into 
the mountains of Appalachia and help families where coal mines had shut 
down because they were played out, and we'd seen the incredible poverty 
there. We also know that, over the last century, miners toiled for 
years in those coal patch towns and tried to make things safer, and 
they accomplished that. They worked for better wages, and they 
accomplished that. Now they're fighting for their very existence and 
their jobs and livelihoods.
  To add to what you're saying about the jobs here, this is not just 
coal miners. It's the manufacturers who make the longwall equipment--
the continuous miners, the rails, the wire, the ventilators, the 
elevators, the safety equipment. They are fighting for their jobs. It's 
the railroads, the trucks, the barges, the workers who make the rails, 
the hopper cars, the barges, the trucks who are there, fighting for 
their jobs.
  Where will they go? Really, this is not just an attack on some of the 
power plants. We may lose 175 or so initially. The goal is to shut down 
400 power plants altogether. What will happen then?
  Now, this keeps the President's pledge that, if you want to use coal, 
it will bankrupt you, but it's also going to bankrupt these families 
when they can't pay their bills when their electric rates go up. 
They're already paying $3,000 more per year for their gasoline for 
their cars. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told the Democratic National 
Convention:

       Under President Obama's leadership, the U.S. moved forward 
     with an all-of-the-above energy strategy--oil, gas, nuclear, 
     hydro, biofuels, wind, geothermal, solar. All of it, he said. 
     What's missing is coal.

  If we're not going to build a new power plant, that's also jobs not 
just for the miners. It means no jobs for the boilermakers, the 
electrical workers, the ironworkers, the steamfitters, the plumbers, 
the insulators, the carpenters, the laborers, the operating engineers, 
the cement masons, and the steelworkers. That means, down in 
southwestern Pennsylvania, in Greene County, where 43 percent of their 
income is coal, they won't have that income. Washington County will 
also suffer, and so many Americans will suffer.
  We need to be investing in new technologies to clean up coal and to 
clean up these power plants and rebuild them, not to shut them down.
  Mrs. CAPITO. I agree. I think carbon capture and sequestration holds 
great promise, but we've got to make sure that we've got the technology 
available so that we can elongate the life of coal.
  Contained within the bill we're going to vote on on Friday is 
something that I've been concerned about now for years, which is of 
this administration's inability or reluctance or that it will not even 
consider the job and economic impact of the decisions they're making. 
We've passed bill after bill here, saying to the EPA and to the 
President, Mr. President, you've got to weave a balance between the 
economy and the environment. You've got to look at what the job and 
economic impact of these small towns and counties will be.

[[Page 14390]]

  Let's talk about what's happening to the county school systems. When 
these four coal mines shut down in West Virginia, we have a severance 
tax. That severance tax goes to pay the counties, and a lot of that 
money goes to the education of those children. What's going to happen? 
Who is going to fill that gap? Who considered that when they made the 
decisions to make it impossible to get a permit? to make it impossible 
to mine the coal? to make it impossible to burn the coal?
  I mean, we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. That's an old 
and tired term, but if we don't have a base load, cheap energy and an 
abundant energy source--and you and I are both from States that have a 
lot of natural gas. We're all for natural gas. We want the abundance of 
natural gas, and we realize the low price of natural gas is part of 
what's feeding into this. We need an all-of-the-above plan that must 
contain clean coal and efficient coal.
  Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania. I'll add a story here.
  I remember back in the 1970s, in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, where 
a dam broke and wiped out the town. I remember going there to work with 
the Red Cross. In the late evening at Van High School, I was talking to 
a gentleman who had lost his home. He had said that, before the dam 
broke, the police had come down the street, and they'd said, Leave your 
homes. The dam has broken. He said he grabbed his kids, and they ran up 
the hill as fast as they could. As fast as he could run, the water was 
at his feet, and when he turned around, his home was gone; the town was 
gone; there was nothing left.
  In the darkness of that classroom late at night, I could hear him 
beginning to cry, and I said, But you have your family.
  He said, I know, and there is someone else in this town who has lost 
everything. He even lost his family.
  I said, Well, prayers and good luck helped you.
  He said, No. It was also the fact that we heard the same warnings. 
The difference was I listened, and he did not.
  We are at that same point, too. We are hearing about the existence of 
towns all throughout Appalachia and all throughout this Nation. We need 
to be mining American coal and using our ingenuity to clean it up, not 
shut it down, to help all these towns, to help the schools, and to help 
those families.
  Mrs. CAPITO. I want to thank you for joining me tonight at this late 
hour. I have just a few more minutes left, and I'd like to spend a 
little bit of time on what I think is a large overreach on the part of 
EPA into making law where Congress should be making the law.
  We should be deciding how to legislate on the Clean Water Act. We 
should be deciding how to legislate on the Clean Air Act. We should be 
deciding how to move forward on permitting in our Nation because we 
consider jobs and the economy across party lines, and those are 
important considerations for a lot of the bills we put forward.
  But this administration has decided to do an end around. They're 
making regulation after regulation. And what has happened? The Federal 
courts have said on at least two or three different occasions--and 
maybe more--that this administration is in an area where they don't 
belong. It's a legislative area. It's not a regulatory area. It's an 
area that needs to be addressed through legislation by the Congress 
because that's the proper place for these decisions to be made.
  So I hope that the President is listening, and I hope his 
administration is listening because, with thousands of jobs lost, 
higher electric bills, less reliable energy, fewer manufacturing jobs, 
this all feeds into an over 8 percent unemployment--folks who have quit 
looking and others who have given up.
  If we don't have a full-out energy plan that includes everything and 
our most basic and our longest living energy resource--coal--and use 
the properties there and enhance them through research and development, 
we are going to find ourselves with over 8 percent unemployment, and we 
are going to find communities wiped out. States like mine--that are 95 
percent reliant on coal production for our electricity--are going to be 
severely disadvantaged. I don't want to live in a country where the 
regulatory environment and the President are picking winners and losers 
across this country, and that's what has happened.
  So I look forward to joining my colleague in voting for this bill on 
Friday. I thank you very much, and I thank the staff for staying so 
late, too.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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