Raul Grijalva: Republicans keep embracing dirty coal industry

Republicans in Congress like to blame what they call President Obama’s “war on coal.” In particular, they single out for scorn the president’s Clean Power Plan, which will set first-time emissions standards for carbon dioxide on coal-fired power plants by 2022. Many old, dirty plants will close as a result.

The industry’s self-described defenders seem to assume that without these rules, American coal would be financially sound into the foreseeable future because Americans — and people everywhere — still need cheap energy. If a hypothetical Republican president forgoes carbon regulations, they believe, the industry’s problems will be solved and we can get back to business as usual.

It’s not that simple, and my colleagues help no one by pretending otherwise. Coal companies are struggling largely because domestic coal is not economically competitive with the country’s cheap and abundant natural gas. That would be true no matter who was president or what climate quality standards we had in place.

The “blame Obama” argument essentially boils down to ignoring economics and pretending that the implementation schedule for the Clean Power Plan, which requires mandatory emissions reductions beginning in 2022, is a bureaucratic overreach rather than the compromise it represents.