Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell called President Obama’s anti-coal agenda “immoral” on Friday, while vowing to continue the fight against job-killing regulations even after the president has left office.
“They would have you believe it’s immoral to use coal,” the Kentucky Republican said Friday in an op-ed published in the Appalachian News-Express in eastern Kentucky. “Here’s what’s immoral: pursuing ideological policies that will have little meaningful impact on the environment, but will have a very negative impact on our economy, on jobs and on our way of life.
“It’s immoral to put people out of work who only seek to make a decent living, to provide for their families, and to provide a reliable source of energy for us all,” he said.
He vowed to keep fighting Obama’s “war on coal” and excessive regulations in the next administration, no matter who is elected to the Oval Office in November.
“I’ll continue to fight for eastern Kentucky every way I can, whether it is securing funding to projects to support the region, or continuing to hold the line in the war on coal,” McConnell said.
“The good news is this president has only four months left in office,” he added. “Whoever the next president is, I intend to make clear to him or her the importance of a few key items,” he added, listing items such as repealing the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules and overreaching Clean Power Plan, along with exiting from the Paris climate change agreement that goes into effect next month.
He vowed to “defeat, once and for all,” the Clean Power Plan, which “will devastate jobs while having no appreciable effect on global carbon emissions.” The EPA plan is the centerpiece of the president’s climate change agenda and the country’s ability to meet its obligations under the United Nations’ Paris Agreement. The EPA plan requires states to cut carbon emissions a third by 2030. The emissions from fossil fuels are blamed by a majority of scientists for raising the Earth’s temperature, causing more severe weather, sea-level rise, drought and more flooding.
McConnell said he will make withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement an “urgent need” under the next president, together with any other “international agreements with a left-wing ideological bent, that don’t take into account the needs of Kentuckians.”
The Paris deal was successfully ratified this week and will go into effect next month before the Nov. 8 elections. Observers note that having the rule in effect before the next president is in office will make it harder for the next administration to back out of it. Republican nominee Donald Trump has vowed to exit from the Paris climate change agreement if elected to the presidency.
The Clean Power Plan is being reviewed by a 10-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and is expected to go before the Supreme Court sometime next year, no matter how the appeals court rules.
McConnell also wants to begin gutting agency personnel and “select the right people to lead agencies like the EPA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior — people who understand how the rules their agencies create and enforce affect real people here in the commonwealth.”
Other contentious regulations, like the Water of the United States rule, which greatly expands EPA’s enforcement powers over landowners in his state and others will also remain a priority for repeal, he said.
Other regulations such as the Stream Protection Rule, which makes it harder to mine coal in his state, also would remain a target for repeal, he wrote.
