When the major networks declared last night that
President Obama had carried Ohio and had thus
clinched the White House, the analyses concluded
that it centered on the auto bailout, not the coal
industry.
As it turns out, the president didn’t need to carry
Ohio to win a second term, having secured enough of
the battleground states to give him a comfortable
margin of victory. But the state still represents a
cross-section of voters that any candidate would
love to have in their column. To that end, President
Obama focused on the revival of the auto industry
that is integral to the region while Mitt Romney
pounded Obama for his administration’s “war on
coal.”
The president, obviously, made the more persuasive
case. CNN reports that allowing
General Motors and Chrysler to fail would have
cost the federal treasury about $28 billion in lost
tax revenues and in unemployment assistance over a
two-year time frame. Instead of 400,000 lost jobs,
113,000 such positions were recovered-- all
consisting of real people who voted.
Here, the electorate had a clear choice between one
candidate who spearheaded the bailout and the other
who felt that allowing the auto companies to bottom
out and then naturally recover was the healthier
economic choice. In essence, it’s Candidate Obama
opting for a government-led solution compared with
that of Candidate Romney who favored a free market
revival.
The same thinking went into the coal argument.
President Obama got elected four years ago on the
promise of implementing a clean energy agenda. An
extension of that was and remains tougher
regulations on coal, which releases more pollutants
than any of the competing electric generation fuels.
His policies, which include tougher rules for
mercury, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and
greenhouse gases, are blamed by opponents for
injuring coal’s status in the utility market place.
Romney then sought to fill that void, saying that he
would attempt to rollback such rules and to let free
markets reign. The laissez-fair argument is in line
with his thinking, although it does contradict his
earlier positions on the issue. Nevertheless, he
used it to rally the coal constituencies in Ohio,
and across Appalachia.
Path Forward
In the end, that strategy fell short. The coal miner
unions didn’t endorse Obama but they didn’t back
Romney either. Perhaps, though, Ohio’s coal
communities didn’t buy the position that coal’s
relegation in the market is solely attributed to
tougher rules and regulations.
“There is no war on coal, period,” says Senator
Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who won re-election. “There
are more coal jobs and more coal produced in Ohio
than there was five years ago, in spite of the
talking points and yard signs.”
PolitiFact says that he is right, although the
increased economic output is attributed to more
exports headed to China and India -- not because
more U.S. utilities are using coal to create
electricity. With that, the U.S. Energy Information
Administration says that coal production is up about
2 percent from the year before while 2,570 people
held coal mining jobs in 2011 compared to 2,010 in
2007, all in Ohio.
To be sure, coal mine production is down nationally
by 11 percent during the same time period, says the
energy administration. To that end, Romney’s
coal stance carried the day in such states as
Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. But is the
decline because of stricter oversight or is it
because natural gas has become more accessible and
less costly? The price, right now, is on par with
that of coal.
"I can tell you there will not be any new coal
plants built, with the current price of gas and the
forecast for the future for gas,” says Nick Akin,
chief executive of American Electric Power, in a
story appearing in the Charleston, WV Gazette.
It’s not just about the cost of natural gas and the
increased monitoring of coal burning generators. It
is also about diminishing coal reserves in the
Appalachia region. Even the coal companies agree
with that, noting that more accessible reserves are
located in the Powder River Basin that cost less to
dig out. That leaves surface mining as the biggest
reservoir on the East Coast, which has its own set
of controversies.
The path of least resistance is therefore shale gas.
It is abundant and doable in Ohio’s Utica region.
And it could be the next gold mine in the Marcellus
Region that stretches down the eastern coastline.
Both presidential candidates emphasized those riches
and the associated jobs.
When it was said and done, the issue of coal mining
and coal jobs did not carry the election in Ohio,
which had been considered the premier state to win.
It was the auto bailout, all of which gave Obama the
lift he needed to win re-election.
EnergyBiz Insider has been awarded the Gold for
Original Web Commentary presented by the American
Society of Business Press Editors. The column is
also the Winner of the 2011 Online Column category
awarded by Media Industry News, MIN. Ken Silverstein
has been honored as one of MIN’s Most Intriguing
People in Media.
Twitter: @Ken_Silverstein
energybizinsider@energycentral.com
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