Last Update October 21, 2016
War on Coal Comes for Hillary's Votes
By Edmund Kozak | LifeZette.com
The Sierra Club is planning to spend $5 million on a multi-state campaign against the over 220 new gas-fired power plants the group says are to be constructed in the U.S.
Sierra Club director Michael Thune said the campaign, which will focus its lobbying efforts on agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the EPA, is designed to make Hillary Clinton's attempts to destroy American energy independence a little easier should she win the election.
Democrats have an ideological contempt for the coal industry which blinds them to the crucial realities surrounding it.
"We want to expand [Clinton's] ability to hasten the transition away from fossil fuels," Brune said. The Trump campaign seized on the news to highlight Clinton's hostility to American energy industries and the thousands of jobs the supply to hardworking Americans across the country.
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"Hillary Clinton claims to support American energy jobs, but the truth is that Hillary is fully aligned with anti-coal and anti-shale energy groups and will implement policies, like her trillion dollar climate agenda, that will devastate coal permanently in this country and cut-off access to most of our shale energy resources," Jason Miller, senior communications advisor for the Trump Campaign, said in a statement on Sunday.
"Hillary even issued a campaign statement saying she was 'honored' to receive the endorsement of the same group that runs the 'Beyond Coal' and 'Beyond Natural Gas' campaigns, which celebrate the closure of coal mines and now seek to ban shale energy production in the United States," Miller said.
Both the "Beyond Coal" and "Beyond Natural Gas" campaigns are creations of the Sierra Club. And indeed, in trying to make Hillary's job easier should she get to the White House, the Sierra Club may in fact make it harder for her to get there in the first place. Their campaign -- and tying it to Clinton -- will only remind the electorate of Clinton's staunch opposition to American energy industries and the jobs that they create.
The Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" initiative, backed by such climate change alarmists as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is directly responsible for the loss of thousands of jobs in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
For her part, Clinton seems positively tickled at the thought of thousands of hardworking American men and women losing their jobs and livelihoods. "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business," she bragged infamously in March.
It's not just the coal industry that Clinton wants killed either. That same month she promised that "by the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place."
Even Clinton's running mate Tim Kaine, a Liberation Theology acolyte who spent part of the 1980s palling around with radicals and revolutionaries in South America, was relatively neutral on the issue during his time as governor of Virginia, doing nothing to prevent the construction of a new coal plant in the state.
While many of the country's coal-producing states are safely in GOP hands, Clinton's anti-coal crusade could be a detriment to not just her electoral efforts, but also those of other Democrats. The crucial swing state of Ohio has 19 coal-producing counties that would face economic devastation under a President Clinton.
Not only does Clinton need to do as well as possible in Ohio, but the Buckeye State was also once thought of as crucial contest in the battle for control of the senate. GOP Sen. Rob Portman however has run up a consistent lead on former Gov. Ted Strickland, no doubt in part thanks to ads tying Strickland to Clinton's energy comments in Ohio coal country.
In Pennsylvania, the northeast of which has a vitally important coal industry, the issue maybe enough to keep Sen. Pat Toomey in office. According to the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, the coal industry generates over 36,000 jobs, and average coal mining wages are roughly $30,000 higher than the state's private sector average.
Much like with guns, Democrats have an ideological contempt for the coal industry which blinds them to the crucial realities surrounding it. As of now, coal generates about 33 percent of all the electricity in the country. The fact is that the U.S. is currently decades away from a viable energy replacement to make up for losing a third of the country's electricity output. Of course, the closest, cleanest coal alternative is natural gas -- which radical environmentalists, like those at the Sierra Club, also oppose.