Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on Monday blamed natural gas and fracking for the “tragedy” being experienced in coal country.
“It is a complicated problem,” Clinton said. “Some people want to make it all political, but there are market forces, there are global challenges, there’s also the upswing in fracking … which has proved to be a very serious competitor to coal.”
Clinton made the comments while touring through Kentucky, and later West Virginia, as part of a tour to demonstrate her plans for revitalizing Appalachia ahead of primary elections there later this month. Thousands of jobs have been lost by the coal industry in the last year, with a number of companies filing for bankruptcy protection in the Mountaineer State alone.
The shale boom has dramatically increased natural gas supplies, making the U.S. one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world. The increased supply has caused the price of natural gas to drop dramatically, causing more utilities to switch from using coal to using more natural gas to supply the nation’s electricity.
The Energy Department says natural gas has consistently provided the bulk of the U.S. electricity supply over the last year, as the switch from coal to gas has taken hold. Critics say the Obama administration’s environmental regulations have forced much of the U.S. coal fleet to retire in its bid to spur more renewable energy development over fossil fuels, which has forced utilities to replace them with gas-fired power plants.
Clinton is using her tour partly to roll back comments she made during a March town hall in Ohio, where she said more coal mining jobs would be lost if she were elected president. The comments raised the ire of coal supporters in those states, including lawmakers and industry officials. On Tuesday, she will wrap up the two-day tour by addressing miners and other workers in Ohio.
She is using the stops to emphasize her plan to create a $30 billion “Marshall Plan” to revitalize and bring jobs to the region, making the comparison between helping coal country and rebuilding Germany after World War II.
“That’s why I think we need a national effort to help, and that’s because I think we owe people in this part of the country a lot, and I don’t want to walk away,” Clinton said, calling the downturn in the region’s economy nothing short of a “tragedy.”
