The Republican leadership and industry representatives are coming out in force to condemn Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s comments about shutting down the coal industry ahead of the Ohio primary election Tuesday.
Clinton made the comments Sunday night at a Democratic townhall in Columbus, Ohio hosted by CNN.
“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity, using clean, renewable energy as the key, into coal country,” she said. “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” Her plan is to replace the lost coal and fossil fuel jobs with renewable energy jobs. But its unclear how that would work.
Ohio is a battleground state that is dependent on coal-fired power to fuel its industry, while it also has been transitioning its older fleet to more natural-gas combined cycle power plants due to the shale gas boom.
“Coal has played a tremendous role in powering homes and developing communities for generations of Ohioans. By flippantly writing-off the well-being of countless coal miners, their families and all of those involved in the coal-based electricity industry, Secretary Clinton is showing Ohio’s voters her true colors ahead of tomorrow’s primary,” said Laura Sheehan, spokeswoman for the pro-coal group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.
The group is working with the Ohio Coal Association to support continued use of coal. Recent polling shows the majority of the American people still support coal as an affordable, reliable source of electricity.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, addressed the Senate floor Monday decrying leading Democrats for making their top priority making coal miners unemployed.
“This is callous. It is wrong. And it underlines the need to stand up for hard-working, middle-class coal families,” he said.
He said Democrats view hard-working Americans and their families as “just statistics, just the cost of doing business, just obstacles to their ideology.”
Hal Quinn, the head of the National Mining Association, said he found Clinton’s statements strange and “deeply troubling” to listen to a “prominent” presidential candidate boast of putting thousands of working people out of work.
Sheehan points out a national poll conducted by news group Morning Consult over the weekend that showed 52 percent of Americans favor the continued use of coal in the United States.
“The poll concluded that a more than half of voters support the use of coal to generate electricity,” Sheehan’s group said in a statement.
Morning Consult polled 2,033 registered voters between March 11 and March 13 at a 2 percent margin of error.
The poll asked “Do you support or oppose the use of coal to generate electricity?” Fifty-two percent, or 1,057 voters, said they support its use; 31 percent opposed its use, or 636 voters; and 17 percent were undecided, or 340 voters.
