Coal industry threatened by stringent new EPA standards

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Fox News:

The next time you turn on a light, ride an elevator or charge up your cell phone, you might want to thank John Toth or 86,000 others like him still working today to dig the coal that fuels 40 percent of the electricity in the most productive nation ever.

 

Toth, a heavy-set West Virginian, toiled for over 25 years as a miner and a worker in other coal related industries. He bears the scars - short of breath and hard of hearing from loud machinery - but laments the demise of America's most abundant source of energy.

 

"My son makes his living by doing some contracting work in coal industry. I have a couple grandchildren, one going to West Virginia University to get a mining engineering degree. Hopefully the coal industry will be around," he says.

 

But the warning signs are ominous. On the far bank of the Ohio River, across from Moundsville, West Virginia where we interviewed Toth, sits the Burger Power plant.

 

Once a source of tremendous tax revenue for the Shady Side Ohio, it now sits idle, as do 130 others, or one-sixth of the coal-fired plants in the U.S. Most are victims of stringent new EPA regulations that sealed their fate.

 

The Obama administration has rejected accusations it has launched a "war on coal." But it presses ahead with yet more carbon regulation.

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Slow death.