The ad claims John McCain supports clean coal while Barack Obama and Joe Biden doesn't. Now as opponents of Obama's stance on clean coal, those of us here know Obama does support clean coal. That's one of the reasons why Obama has the strong support of our union brothers and sisters with the United Mine Workers of America.
John McCain sure surprised a lot of people when he came out the other day against mountaintop removal mining. You could almost hear the backpedaling and side-stepping going on in coal operators' boardrooms and Republican party headquarters all the way up Cabin Creek. They thought they had a friend of coal in John McCain, only to find out that maybe he wasn't so friendly after all.
It should have come as no surprise. John McCain has been on the attack against the coal industry for years, starting with legislation he proposed in 2003-Senate Bill 139, the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003-that would have just about wiped out the coal industry in southern West Virginia and elsewhere in Appalachia.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration released an analysis of S. 139 in May, 2004, which said the reductions in coal production under the McCain legislation was estimated to be 78 percent by 2025. Since it takes coal miners to produce coal, that would mean a drastic reduction in employment, most of which would have fallen heavily on more labor-intensive mines like we have in Appalachia, especially West Virginia.
But Sen. McCain was just getting warmed up. He teamed up with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) just last year and proposed climate change legislation-Senate Bill 280-that once again took a meat-axe approach to Appalachian coal. In that bill, McCain specifically targeted Appalachian coal production for cuts of 30 percent or more, while encouraging production of coal from Wyoming, according to an analysis done of the legislation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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With the coming development of clean coal technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS), America is on the brink of being able to use coal to generate energy without contributing any more greenhouse gases to the environment. Sen. McCain pays lip service to CCS, but the record shows that coal has a very limited future in John McCain's vision of America. And that's a direct threat to tens of thousands of West Virginia families.
Sen. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is from a coal state and clearly understands the long-term role coal can play in our nation's energy future. He has pledged to fund development of CCS technology so that it can be deployed as soon as possible. He has said that America is the "Saudi Arabia of coal" and that we ought to be working as hard as we can to figure out how to use it for decades to come.
So the choice for coal miners, their families, their neighbors and everyone living in the coalfield communities throughout Appalachia and especially in West Virginia is clear. Barack Obama is for the long-term future of your job and John McCain is not. Keep that in mind when you vote on Nov. 4.
So what does it tell us that McCain not only is worried about the state but also so worried he has to lie about his record and Obama's?
