Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin blasted the Obama administration Thursday for killing off job growth in his state with anti-coal policies, telling the energy secretary, “don’t keep beating the living crap out of us.”
“It just seems this administration is so insensitive to the damage it has done economically without trying to help us transition,” the senator from the big coal-producing state of West Virginia told Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz at a Thursday hearing on the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2017 budget proposal.
“We’re not arguing against technologies, renewables, we’re for all that. But if you are going to be needing a baseload of power … then there has to be some support,” Manchin said.
He said his state lost 19,000 jobs as a result of waning coal use between 2014 and 2015. “I got schools closing, sir. Teachers losing their jobs. There are no more kids in these schools,” Manchin said.
Manchin said that instead of helping coal country, the Energy Department has proposed to cut its clean coal program in half. He said the clean coal program would be funded by pulling $240 million from a clean coal project in Texas, which is considered one of the leading projects for lowering emissions from coal-fired power plants.
“It doesn’t seem like you all are committed,” Manchin said. “It looks good on paper, but the $240 million project will be pulled from a job … in Texas,” he said. “The administration has the appearance that it supports clean coal technology,” but “nothing is happening,” the senator said.
Moniz responded by saying, “we very much appreciate the social impacts of that kind of job loss.” He said there are administration-wide programs designed to help “transition communities,” noting the Power Plus Plan, which is included in the budget to help coal workers train for new jobs.
Moniz said it may be prudent to do something more to fund the agency’s energy jobs program, which in the past had been funded from various offices in the department.
The money for that has been “rather modest,” but the program has done a good job, Moniz said. It has been successful in Virginia, for example.
Manchin said Virginia “has never been considered coal country.” Moniz said “consider it our practice run,” but I would “be happy to do that for West Virginia.”
“I want you to come,” Manchin said, but the “bottom line is this: If the United States of America needs West Virginia to do the heavy lifting to produce the energy that this nation has always counted on … we want to do it. If you’re projecting through 2040 you need 40 percent, give us some certainty. Don’t keep beating the living crap out of us, where you say ‘we really need you but I don’t want you’.
“That’s what’s happening, and the uncertainty is killing us, sir,” Manchin said.
Republicans joined with the Democratic senator in criticizing the administration. Energy committee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said it “hurts to hear when a state is losing 19,000 jobs … and the response from the administration is that we are going to send you some job training folks to help out.”
“Boy, that’s not the answer,” she said. “It’s how we access our resources in a way that is responsible, that provides for the economy, for a resource that we all need.
“My heart is with you, because the answer is not to send more job training.”
