Rolling Stone magazine contributing editor Jeff Goodell seems to have trouble with logic in addition to his disdain for coal power.
In, “Scott Pruitt Can’t Stop the Death of Big Coal,” Goodell claimed that without the EPA’s Clean Power Plan — an Obama “accomplishment” — coal is still “a dead industry walking.”
“[W]hile Trump's push for fossil fuels risks cooking the planet and stalling economic growth, the rollback of the Clean Power Plan may not be as consequential as it first appears,” Goodell wrote.
Goodell insisted coal was already doomed and Obama’s regulatory efforts did little to hobble that energy industry. Yet he still railed at the Trump administration’s “fossil fuel charade” for “endangering our health, our economy, our climate” and said the rollback was “also going to kill people.”
Heartland Institute Research fellow Sterling Burnett acknowledged some coal-fire plants closed due to competition from natural gas, but noted that “dozens” of plants and mines were also “shuttered prematurely" due to Obama’s EPA.
But other media outlets were more honest about the impact of those rules in 2014 when the Clean Power Plan rules were announced.
“For five years, the coal industry and its fossil-fueled allies in the Republican Party have accused the Obama Administration of waging a war on coal. They claim the administration’s new plan to limit carbon emissions at existing power plants is really about carbon emissions at existing coal plants. They see the carbon rules that the president announced Monday, like his previous rules limiting mercury, smog, and coal ash, as a thinly disguised effort to make coal power uneconomical,” wrote journalist and author Michael Grunwald at Time.
He added, “They’re right, of course.”
After citing glacial melt in Greenland, rising waters in Miami and California wildfires, Goodell insisted: “Our world is changing fast, thanks to our near-suicidal dependence on fossil fuels. A hundred years ago, coal was the engine of progress. But today, it's the enemy of progress – and of civilized life. And nothing Pruitt can do will change that, or halt its inevitable and welcome decline.”
