Just three months after Arch, the nation's Number 2 coal mining company, filed for bankruptcy, Number 1, Peabody Energy, has followed suit. Five of the industry's largest firms have now gone bankrupt in the past 12 months.
Two Associated Press stories on Peabody this week managed to avoid mentioning the name of President Barack Obama, whose hostility toward the industry has been obvious since his first presidential campaign, or to directly cite his administration's Environmental Protection Agency as a factor in the firm's trip to bankruptcy court.
AP's Wednesday story on Peabody's bankruptcy filing was quite vague, and from all appearances deliberately so, while reporter Jim Salter waited until the second-last of his 21 paragraphs to tell readers how many employees now work for a company which may or may not emerge from bankruptcy (bolds are mine throughout this post):
PEABODY, LARGEST US COAL MINER, SEEKS BANKRUPTCY PROTECTION
Peabody Energy, the nation's largest coal miner, filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday as a crosscurrent of environmental, technological and economic changes wreak havoc across the industry.
Mines and offices at Peabody, a company founded in 1833 by 24-year-old Francis S. Peabody, will continue to operate as it moves through the bankruptcy process. However, Peabody's planned sale of its New Mexico and Colorado assets were terminated after the buyer was unable to complete the deal.
... The bankruptcy filing comes less than three months after another from Arch Coal, the country's second-largest miner, which followed bankruptcy filings from Alpha Natural Resources, Patriot Coal and Walter Energy.
New energy technology and tightening environmental regulations have throttled the industry and led to a wave of mine closures and job cuts.
... New drilling techniques have allowed U.S. energy companies to free enormous amounts of natural gas, driving prices lower.
(Paragraph 20 of 21)
The company was founded in Chicago and moved to downtown St. Louis in 1957. Peabody had about 7,600 employees at the end of last year and has ownership stakes in 26 mines in the U.S. and Australia. Its U.S. mines are in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, New Mexico and Wyoming.
There's no doubt that hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, has hurt the coal industry immensely. But certainly a large part of coal's competitive disadvantage against natural gas is due to environmental requirements imposed on coal-fired plants which have caused many power companies to move away from coal. An additional irony here is that envirozealots also want to put a halt to fracking. If they actually succeed in doing so and the bankrupt coal companies liquidate instead of emerging from Chapter 11 protection, the fossil fuel industry will shrink severely. Replacing the energy produced with brutally expensive, extremely unreliable "renewable" energy would create an economic disaster only an envirozealot or leftist politician could possibly love.
President Obama's and the EPA's direct involvement in bankrupting much of the coal industry is beyond dispute, thanks to regulations issued in September 2013:
(West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe) Manchin said the proposed rule, which would impose strict pollution standards requiring future coal-burning plants to capture and store about 40 percent their carbon emissions, holds the coal industry to “impossible standards.” To meet the rule’s emissions limits, future coal plants would have to install expensive technology to capture and store their carbon dioxide. And that technology has not yet been adopted on a large scale.
“Never before has the federal government forced an industry to do something that is technologically impossible,” Manchin said.
Because complying remains "technologically impossible," anyone trying to build a new coal-fired plant won't be able to complete the task. Any firm attempting to do so would bankrupt itself, bringing President Obama's January 2008 statement made to the San Francisco Chronicle during that year's presidential campaign — "if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them" — to "mission accomplished" status. The Chronicle failed to report Obama's statement when he made it, even though it did a 2,500-word story on their interview with him; it wasn't exposed until just a few days before Election Day in 2008.
Mead Gruver's AP story this morning on Peabody is full of tough talk about reclamation of closed mines by people who are surely otherwise thrilled over the company's problems:
PEABODY CHAPTER 11, HELPS DRAW ATTENTION TO COAL RECLAMATION
The bankruptcy of yet another major coal company helps draws attention to plans for financially troubled coal companies to cover the potentially huge costs of filling and restoring to a natural state mines that sooner or later might permanently close amid the industry's downturn.
... Advocacy groups, however, warn the recent bankruptcy of several companies including St. Louis-based Arch Coal and Bristol, Virginia-based Alpha Natural Resources could leave taxpayers responsible for billions in reclamation costs should a wave of coal-mine closures come to pass.
"Bankruptcy should never be used as a haven for a huge corporation to escape its obligations to clean up its mines," Bob LeResche, chairman of the Powder River Basin Resource Council said in a statement.
Gosh, who would have thought that there might be a significant cost involved in causing the near-overnight bankrupcy of much of an entire industry? You've got to love Bob LeResche's igorant bluster about "huge corporations." If they end up liquidating, which has been envirozealots' cherished dream for decades, there likely won't be any money to do the cleanup, and all of LeResche's lamentations won't change that. Maybe he and his comrades should have considered those costs before declaring their all-out war on coal.
The main point here, though, is that AP kept President Obama's and the EPA's fingerprints out of a situation which is largely of their doing. That's why they're deservedly nicknamed the Administration's Press.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
