Cato Institute, Consol Energy, and Joe Manchin Versus the EPA

The Environmental Protection Agency received a triple punch this Halloween.  And none of it came from the superstorm.

Mingo County, West Virginia's unemployment rate was at, as of last August, at an even 10 percent.  That had ticked up almost half of a point since the year before.  Elected leaders from West Virginia worked with CONSOL Energy to come up with a plan that would allow coal mining to take place along the route of a planned expressway.  The King Coal Highway project would have taken a public project and used it for maximum private use. 

Senator Joe Manchin's office and CONSOL estimated that up to 2,500 jobs would have been created.

The EPA, however, had other plans.  It withheld a vital permit needed to start the project on schedule. 

Manchin's fury was vented in a release:

“As a West Virginian, I watched this project come together one partnership at a time for the past two decades,” Senator Manchin said. “As Governor, I made sure that the state supported the project’s permitting and funding requests. Now, as Senator, I am incensed and infuriated that the EPA would intentionally delay the needed permit for a public-private project that would bring so many good jobs and valuable infrastructure to communities that so desperately need them. The EPA has lost court case after court case for its overreach, and it should be using better judgment by now. I vow to work with the Governor’s office, our entire Congressional delegation and members of both parties to make sure that this vital project will move forward.

“Rather than fight this project, the EPA should be embracing it as a model of how to work together,” Senator Manchin continued. “We’ll put the land to good use after it has been mined by building the King Coal Highway. We’ll build a wastewater treatment plant that will clean up millions of gallons of water for people in the Pigeon Creek Watershed – eliminating raw sewage and other pollutants. Not only will we be protecting the jobs of the 145 people working at this project, we’ll be putting hundreds more people to work with good-paying jobs. The EPA’s callousness jeopardized the funding for all these projects. In short, this project is a win-win and the EPA is trying to make it a loser.”

Outrage over the stoppage of this project is a bipartisan affair in West Virginia.  Manchin and his opponent, John Raese have both taken aim at the EPA, as has Senator Jay Rockefeller (D), and Representatives Capito, McKinley (both R), and Rahall (D). Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and his opponent Bill Maloney also support the project.

This comes on the same day as the release of a Cato Institute study that found that the EPA did not include important scientific research into its assessment of fossil fuels and climate change. 

Cato scholar Patrick J. Michaels said:

"After thorough review, I found that the report from the U.S Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which served as the source for the scientific opinions underlying the original endangerment finding in 2009, is unrepresentative of the larger body of scientific research on the topic of anthropogenic climate change and its potential impacts on the United States," said Cato Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels. "Since the new EPA standards would essentially price anyone trying to build a new coal plant out of the market, I am not surprised that we won't see final regulations on carbon dioxide until after the election."

While supporters of the EPA deny that there is a War on Coal, these actions and studies show otherwise.  The EPA engages in psychological warfare of releasing selected information while using its power to obstruct jobs creating projects.