Team Obama Kills Another 750 Coal Jobs in Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia

In January 2008 Barack Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Businesses would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that cost onto consumers.”

He promised that his plan would cause electricity rates to skyrocket.

He wasn’t kidding.

Now thanks to Barack Obama’s radical energy policies, electricity rates are skyrocketing across the country and coal plants are shutting their doors. New regulations by the Obama Administration is forcing Arch Coal, Inc. to lay off 750 workers in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.
FOX News reported:

One of the world’s largest coal producers said Thursday it would lay off about 750 workers in the Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia coalfields, the latest setback for an industry struggling to sustain market share as utilities switch to cleaner and cheaper alternatives to generate electricity.

The bulk of the cuts by Arch Coal Inc., almost 600, are in Kentucky. The disappearance of high-paying mining work heightened anxiety in hardscrabble Kentucky towns where officials worried declining demand for coal would result in leaner budgets and more people on unemployment rolls.

“This is just a start, I think,” said Dennis Ray Noble, the judge-executive of Perry County, which he estimated has lost about 30 percent of its mining jobs in the last year and the jobless rate is 12.4 percent.

The St. Louis-based company said its subsidiaries would close three higher-cost mining complexes and associated preparation plants: two in Kentucky and one in West Virginia. It will temporarily idle another complex in Kentucky and curtail production at other facilities in the three states. The company accounted for 16 percent of the coal production in the U.S. in 2010.

The layoffs come amid forecasts that the share of U.S. electricity coming from coal will fall below 40 percent for the year — the lowest level since the government began collecting data in 1949. Four years ago, it was 50 percent. By the end of this decade, it is likely to be near 30 percent.

Obama’s new EPA regulations will cost the coal industry $180 billion and force electricity rates to skyrocket.

This was cross posted at FreedomWorks.

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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