Thomas Peak, center, and Allen Stapleton, right, join others at the United for Coal demonstration in Wise County, Va. on Saturday, Oct. 13, 2012, coming straight from work at a local coal mine. “  Groups of coal supporters that lined up sporadically along this Virginia highway were among thousands of people who turned out in at least three states to put a human face on an embattled industry. Its plight has become an issue in the presidential as well as in local and statewide races. (AP Photo/Debra McCown)

In the last few weeks, Columbia Journalism Review has posted at least two separate pieces (see here and here) that made it clear how the mainstream media – especially political reporters — were bumbling the story of how coal policy fits into the ongoing presidential campaign. Anybody with access to Google can do a quick search to find out the truth about the coal industry’s claims of an Obama administration “war on coal.” I tried in a recent piece for The Nation magazine to explain why the notion that President Obama and his EPA have done all they could to stop coal mining is just a myth. For example:

It’s also worth remembering that on one key issue—a new nationwide standard on smog—Obama personally intervened to stop the EPA from moving forward with a rule that, according to a recent Johns Hopkins study, would have helped avoid 2,450 to 4,130 deaths from heart attacks and respiratory diseases each year. And a promised rule to enact the first federal standards to govern the handling and disposal of toxic ash from coal-fired power plants remains long overdue.

Even on coal miner safety and health, Obama’s performance has been mixed. The president appointed longtime United Mine Workers of America safety director Joe Main to run the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. But his term saw the worst US coal mining disaster in nearly forty years, when twenty-nine miners died on April 5, 2010, in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. The MSHA responded with tougher inspections and a flurry of new rules and proposed legislation. But some of the agency’s key rules—such as one restricting coal dust limits underground in an effort to eliminate black lung disease—remain bottled up, a casualty of the White House’s efforts to avoid appearing too tough on business.

So it’s pretty disappointing with the world’s largest and oldest news-gathering organization — The mighty Associated Press — puts out a story like the one that moved on the wires on Friday afternoon. The story was written by Donna Cassata and AP suggested member news organizations use the headline, “Dems in coal states diverge on Obama policies.” You can read the whole thing online here. This is how it started out:

ST. CLAIRSVILLE, Ohio (AP) — Friends of coal are certain they know the enemy.

They fault President Barack Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency for new clean air rules they deride as a devastating blow to a multibillion-dollar industry that has been the lifeblood of Appalachia for generations. The agency standards imposed earlier this year tightened limits on existing coal powered-plant emissions while guidelines on restricting greenhouse gases could affect new plants as early as 2013.

Along the rolling hills of this tiny Ohio town – population just over 5,100 – campaign signs for judges, state legislators and county officials crowd the neat lawns. As the road curves toward the interstate, one banner overshadows them all: “End the war on coal. Fire Obama.”

Barb Swan, who runs Swan’s Sport Shop on West Main Street, is a registered Democrat and daughter of a coal miner. She won’t be voting for Obama and she won’t back Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, whom she contends puts the president’s energy policies over the interests of his constituents.

“If you have a district that’s coal, you fight for coal,” argued the 67-year-old Swan.

The story goes on like that for eight paragraphs until it bothers to introduce any contrary information and, even then, it’s only a weak denial from a White House spokesman:

The White House, for its part, insists that the criticism of its record on coal is unfounded.

“The president has made clear that coal has an important role to play in our energy economy today and it will in the future, which is why this administration has worked to make sure that moving forward we can continue to rely on a broad range of domestic energy sources from oil and gas, to wind and solar, to nuclear, as well as clean coal,” said Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman.

The administration points to a 31 percent increase in coal exports and greater flexibility in enforcing the new standards. The economic prospects for coal, Stevens said, “reflect the independent, financial decisions that utilities are making in response to the increase in cheap, abundant natural gas.”

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The folks at the Columbia Journalism Review had another interesting piece yesterday about how the politics of coal has been covered in the media, this one focusing on our neighboring state of Virginia (they previously looked at Ohio coverage). Looking at the latest CJR piece got me thinking about the latest commentary from Hoppy Kercheval over at West Virginia MetroNews.

Hoppy did a takeoff on GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s remark — “… I like coal … ” — in the first presidential debate, writing:

Coal claims President Obama and his EPA have waged a “war on coal” over the last four years. One can disagree with the analogy, but it’s clear the President’s all-of-the-above strategy plays favorites–green energy and natural gas over coal.

The drop in natural gas prices, slack demand and the toughened regulatory approach by the EPA are the trifecta that have triggered industry layoffs and pessimism about the future.

My first thought was to be thankful that Hoppy appeared to have toned down his typical breathless rhetoric about the coal industry and President Obama, and acknowledged that there are a variety of factors at work in coal’s current decline: Low-priced natural gas, for example, and slack demand. But then Hoppy went on to write:

Economists at The Brattle Group reported earlier that market conditions and the regulatory environment will cause approximately 30,000 megawatts (or 10 percent of coal generating capacity) to shut down between 2012 and 2016.

However, Brattle has now updated its findings based on recent market conditions and “ongoing environmental policy uncertainty.” The research group came up with two scenarios–one based on lenient environmental control technology and another based on strict policies.

Even under a more lenient approach by the EPA, the reduction of coal generating capacity will be twice as large as previously believed, around 59,000 megawatts. But if the EPA takes a stricter approach, 77,000 megawatts of generation capacity will likely disappear rather than retrofit to meet tougher environmental standards.

Now, Hoppy wasn’t the only media outlet throwing out references to this Brattle study in a way.  Reuters led its story this way:

More U.S. coal-fired power plants could retire due to environmental regulations and weaker-than-expected electric demand, costing the industry up to $144 billion, economists at consultancy Brattle Group said.

And the Christian Science Monitor ran a “guest blogger” piece that was headlined Study: EPA regulations squelch US coal industry.

But this coverage ignored a central conclusion of the Battle Group report. Fortunately, David Roberts at Grist has already done a pretty decent job of debunking this coverage:

Let’s look at what the Brattle Group did say, which is quite interesting.

The report is an update of its brief from late 2010 on potential coal-plant retirements. The headline news: Brattle is substantially upping its projection of how many coal plants will retire, by about 25 GW. That’s huge. But it’s not happening because of EPA regulations. In fact, say the authors, the change is “primarily due to changing market conditions, not environmental rule revisions, which have trended towards more lenient requirements and schedules” (my emphasis).

Catch that? Relative to the situation in 2010, EPA regulations look like less of a threat. The agency’s new Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) and Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) were finalized with “less restrictive requirements on the compliance deadlines and equipment than previously predicted.” The new rule on cooling towers turned out to be less stringent than industry feared as well. CSAPR was scheduled to go into effect in 2012, but was recently struck down by a federal court. (It’s uncertain whether it will eventually be upheld, altered, or replaced.)

To be clear, here’s the entire paragraph from the conclusion of the Brattle report:

The questions concerning what impact the new air quality regulations will have on power prices and resource adequacy continue to be important and difficult to answer definitively. This 2012 reassessment indicates that  somewhat more retirements are likely (about 25 GW) than we foresaw in late 2010. However, that change is primarily due to changing market conditions, not environmental rule revisions, which have trended towards more lenient requirements and schedules.

You can read the entire Brattle report, which was issued Oct. 1, here. Part of the problem here might be that the explanation of what is behind the increase in projected plant closures wasn’t fully explained in the Brattle executive summary or in their press release — the only documents that many people in the media are likely to ever read (if they get that far).

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Among the stories I missed while I was out last week, and didn’t include in a brief roundup on Monday, was this interview that Alpha Natural Resources CEO Kevin Crutchfield did with The State Journal. Taylor Kuykendall reports:

The coal industry is undergoing sweeping and significant changes, bringing challenges coal companies are attempting to navigate without collapse.

Alpha Natural Resources, America’s second-largest coal producer by revenue, generated $7.1 billion in total revenue in 2011. The company is the largest supplier of metallurgical coal in the nation.

Just last week, however, Alpha had some bad news for Central Appalachia. It is “reshaping mine operations.” That move included mine idlings and production curtailments but also about 1,200 jobs lost by early 2013.

The move reflects an attempt to re-focus on metallurgical coal and to “tap into new thermal markets overseas.”

The reduction represents the elimination of about 9 percent of Alpha’s current workforce.

Alpha Natural Resources CEO Kevin Crutchfield was in Charleston last week and spoke with the State Journal about some of the challenges faced by Alpha and the industry itself. Crutchfield said that at the national level, coal has had a hard time selling its merits to the consumer. The result has been extreme pressure on an industry that many are not upset to see on the decline.

An April survey by Rasmussen Reports found that 53 percent of likely U.S. voters favor new regulations restricting emissions and only 29 percent oppose the regulations.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt” the industry has had difficulty selling itself to the public,” Crutchfield said. “Coal’s punched above its weight for a long time. Up until recently, we were 50 percent of the nation’s electricity; it came from coal. April of this year it was down to 32 percent. We’ve got to do a better job of telling our story – what we’ve done on the coal mining side and what the utilities have done, frankly.”

Crutchfield continued his previous struggle with understanding the pretty basic and clear science of global warming:

“Is something going on with the climate? It feels like it at times,” Crutchfield said. “Does man contribute to it? Most likely – it’s what we do. We’re impacting things just by our very existence. Are we the direct cause of it? That’s the question I have. I don’t really know, and more importantly, can we change it?”

Large-scale emissions reductions, Crutchfield said, are possible.

“It can be done. We have the technology,” Crutchfield said. “The question is do we really have the will, as a nation, to support it, or is this really something bigger than just coal.”

And he had some interesting remarks about the driving forces behind coal’s current decline in our region:

Coal, particularly coal mined from the Central Appalachian basin, has been on a long-term decline. Recently, dramatic drops in use of coal for domestic energy have some worried that this is not part of a cycle but the beginning of the use of sufficiently less coal regardless of the outcome of political debates.

“This one is a little different,” Crutchfield said of recent market decline. “The cyclical stuff we deal with. The economies go up and they go down. Natural gas prices go up and go down. The weather is hot; the weather is cold. We’re used to that in this business. What we’re not used to is the structural changes we see occurring through the manifestation of these regulations coming our way designed to restrict the use of coal for electricity.”

That’s not the only problem coal faces in Central Appalachia.

“Coal miners are pretty smart guys. They mine the good stuff first and save the rest for later,” Crutchfield said. “Over 100 years, what’s left are the thinner seams, seams that have more inherent ash in them, deeper, under drainage, harder to get to. It takes more capital to get to them, so when you’re talking about geological challenges, it’s actually more of a function of a deterioration along a continuum of really high quality coal and good conditions degrading over the passage of time.

“You still have a lot of great reserves, but they’re more costly to mine today just giving some of these physical and geographic characteristics.”

Alpha has exposure in three coal basins, including the Powder River Basin where coal seams, while containing lower-quality coal, are thicker and easier and cheaper to mine.

“Look, Central Appalachia, at its peak, was mining 300 million tons per year. It’s probably on pace this year to mine 160 million tons. It’s almost half of what it was back in 1997,” Crutchfield said. “That’s a function of a globally competitive marketplace and these deteriorating mining circumstances.”

But perhaps the most interesting parts of the story were one about politics and about the industry’s anti-Obama/EPA rhetoric:

It may be too late to reverse the decline of coal with political action. Would there be a full recovery under Mitt Romney as a president?

“I think under a Romney administration, the perception is that things would probably improve around coal,” Crutchfield said. “I think that’s probably right. I’ve read his energy policy. I believe he does understand the importance of coal and an all-of-the-above energy strategy not being just a bumper sticker but something we can put into practice. But then again, there’s been a lot of regulations put in place that are going to permanently alter the landscape.

“We can’t be fooled into thinking that this whole thing is going to get turned on its head … because it won’t.”

And:

Despite using the word “war” himself in reference to agency efforts, Crutchfield said there is a need for less “divisive” rhetoric in the debate.

“I think to characterize it as a, I mean understand that everybody is talking about the War on Coal, but that’s just by its very definition a divisive phraseology,” Crutchfield said. “What we need to do is sit down and work together as adults and solve problems. … We need to sit back and have adult, constructive discussions around solving problems and it doesn’t seem Washington is capable of doing that right now for whatever reason. Everything is so divisive and so toxic, our nation can’t move forward like that.”

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney poses for a photo with coal miners after a campaign event, Tuesday, May 29, 2012, in Craig, Colo.  (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Fresh from Wednesday night’s debate, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is headed back to coal country. He’s scheduled to visit southwest Virginia tomorrow for an event at Carter Machinery in Abingdon.

Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of media coverage of the back-and-forth between the campaigns about coal, so I thought we would just run through some of the more interesting examples.

Under the headline What’s the Deal With All the Coal Miner Campaign Ads, ABC News.com examined why both candidates are paying attention to and talking about coal issues. For example:

Coal miners may make up less than half of one percent of the American electorate, but those blue collar workers’ votes could pack a punch far beyond what their numbers suggest.

The majority of America’s coal production is clustered in a handful of states, three of which happen to be some of the most fiercely contested battleground states in 2012: Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia.

But the 27,000 Ohioans, 63,000 Pennsylvanians and 45,000 Virginians that are employed by the coal mining industry aren’t the only voters this recent coal country push is likely courting.

“The logic for Romney is to find a potential economic problem that is relevant to Ohio voters that can potentially be connected to Obama,” said Justin Buchler, an associate political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. “It’s not just about coal miners; it’s about anyone who is willing to attribute economic blame to the president.”

Unfortunately, the ABC piece cited some pretty questionable and outdated numbers about job changes in the coal industry, while this story from Slate raises some interesting questions about the wisdom of courting coalfield voters, especially in Virginia:

At a morning hang-out with former Rep. Tom Davis, who held part of Northern Virginia for Republicans before his 2008 retirement, I asked how much oomph the coal ads could have. “Northern Virginia is 28 percent of the statewide vote,” said Davis. “Coal country is 9 percent. And the problem is that it’s not a growing vote. The NoVa vote is a growing vote. The Hispanic vote is growing. The Asian vote is growing.” Could Romney benefit from driving up the margins in this smaller electorate? Obviously. But — “We should be buying ads in Asian newspapers. They’re cheaper and they have an impact. A lot of this ad money is wasted.”

Addressing similar issues, The Washington Post reported:

In Virginia, Alpha Natural Resources has been playing the victim’s role as well. On Sept. 18, the $8 billion firm announced that due to a restructuring and bad market conditions, it was laying off 1,200 of its 14,000 workers and closing mines. The announcement reverberated through the political world as more evidence that Barack Obama was trying to kill the coal industry with excessive regulation.

There’s one problem with that. Alpha’s CEO Kevin Crutchfield told me in an interview nearly a year ago that Alpha would be undertaking an assessment of what properties it acquired in the Massey buyout. The takeover brought with it 6,700 Massey employees and some of the richest coal reserves in the world.

Of special interest are reserves of metallurgical coal, almost all of which is exported to make coke for the global steel industry, which is not at all impacted by U.S. air pollution rules. Alpha would be deciding what metallurgical, as well as steam coal for electricity generation reserves, to keep, Crutchfield told me in an interview for a book I was writing. He added that Alpha, like all coal operators, was facing “headwinds” from the unexpected flood of cheap natural gas produced by fracking. That would obviously be a factor in Alpha’s assessment, Crutchfield said.

So, it is indeed curious that after all this time, Alpha chose to announce its layoffs just a month and a half before 2012 elections. To be sure, Alpha said that the layoffs were part of a restructuring to make a better play in world metallurgical coal markets. But its executives certainly knew what the political ramifications would be.

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