WASHINGTON – Meet Robert Stivers, attorney, president of the Kentucky State Senate and nascent climatologist.
Stivers, a Republican from Manchester, was on hand at the White House recently when President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump announced his latest foray into raping Mother Nature – promoting coal over other sources of energy generation, characterizing the black rock as both beautiful and clean when it is decidedly neither.
Coal burning to generate electricity is indisputably a raging health hazard that is changing the climate for the worse. For some reason, Trump, our simple-minded president-cum-dictator, loves the stuff and took steps during his first go-round in the White House to promote the dig baby dig philosophy he embraces over alternatives that are safer for the environment.
Now he’s at it again.
Stivers was on hand in the East Room when Trump signed the executive order that will, among other things, lift barriers to coal mining on federal lands and requires federal agencies to rescind policies that seek to transition the nation away from coal production or establish a preference against coal as a generation source.
And in a very Trumpian move, our boy directed the National Energy Dominance Council to designate coal as a “mineral” in order to facilitate domestic production. The problem here, of course, is that coal is not a mineral under any existing definition since it is organic in nature. But if our guy wants to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, who’s to argue?
Coal production has been a mainstay for generations in Kentucky although it’s fair to say the coal industry has benefitted more from its relationship with the Commonwealth than the Commonwealth has ever benefitted from coal, given the desecration of the land from both underground and strip mining while contributing to the pockets of extreme poverty that persist in Eastern Kentucky to this very day.
The industry hasn’t always been popular with the good folks in the mountains. Ned Pillersdorf, the outstanding attorney — and fellow Mets fan — who lives in Van Lear reminded me today in a Facebook post about the legendary Widow Combs, who, in 1965 and in her sixties, sat down in front of the Caperton Coal Co. bulldozers that had arrived to rip up the Knott County farm she called home to retrieve the coal beneath the surface and refused to move. Her resistance led others to protect their property in similar fashion.
Still, there’s no denying the old adage that coal is king in Kentucky, at least it used to be. The Commonwealth was the nation’s top coal producer from 1971 to 1988 with peak production actually arriving in 1990 when 170 million tons were mined.
But Kentucky has nearly fallen off the coal mining map. In 2023, Kentucky produced 28.3 million tons, less than 17 percent of what it produced in 1990. It now ranks sixth in national production, only pulling out about five million more tons per year than neighboring Indiana, which has never really identified as a coal state (Cats maintain a big edge in basketball, though).
For much of the 1970s Muhlenberg County, in the heart of the Western Kentucky coal fields, was the nation’s largest producer. It was the home of Big Hog, a giant shovel reputed to be the biggest in the world. Now it trails other producing counties in the same region.
The reasons for the decline are plentiful. Despite Trump’s nonsensical opposition to clean energy, power companies have moved away from coal in favor of natural gas, wind and solar for health, environmental and cost reasons. To create the same amount of electricity, natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal. It also produces a lot less pollution considered harmful to public health.
And while coal has traditionally been a cheaper fuel source, advancements in natural gas extraction, like hydraulic fracturing, have reduced that advantage. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted, for the first time in history, it’s cheaper to burn natural gas than coal. Technological advances in wind and solar have also reduced their costs.
Statistics show that coal is now only the fourth highest source of energy generation, accounting for about 16 percent of the power produced, well behind the 43 percent attributed to natural gas, and placing it behind both nuclear and renewables.
Despite claims otherwise – beautiful and clean? Don’t be stupid – burning coal is extraordinarily messy, as dirty as a Chicago politician, and unhealthy. According to the Climate Council, air pollution from coal-fired power stations contribute to four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic respiratory diseases. It provides more pollution than any other power generating method. The Council maintains 1.2 million deaths worldwide were directly related to the burning of fossil fuels.
Regardless, coal mining may have just passed the Bluegrass State by. Wyoming, the reigning king of coal, holds about one-third of all U.S. recoverable coal reserves. In 2023 the state produced about 230.4 tons – about eight times as much as Kentucky and significantly more than the Commonwealth ever produced in a single year. Wyoming has led the nation in coal production since 1988 and accounts for two-fifths of all coal mined in the United States.
If anyone is going to benefit from this debacle it’s the Cowboy State.
And then there is global climate change. But hold on a moment.
Stivers was on hand for the big deal announcement even though Clay County, his home base amid the Eastern Kentucky coal fields, no longer produces an appreciable amount of coal. Meeting with reporters after the announcement, he fully supported Trump’s rah-rah initiative, maintaining the effort will place “Kentucky in good position” by stimulating commerce and easing the permit process.
During the press session, Stivers breezily dismissed burning coal’s contribution to global climate change, declaring that “the assumption that fossil fuels are a contributor to climate change is subject to debate.”
Now, Robert Stivers is said to be a smart man but nowhere in his curriculum vitae does it reveal where he received his degree in climatology. If he had one, he would understand that there is no debate. There exists a nearly unanimous consensus among climatologists — some place it as high as 97 percent, you judge – that the earth has been warming since the Industrial Revolution but the effect has accelerated in recent times resulting from the increased presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And where is this CO2 coming from? Human activity, primarily through fossil fuel combustion, aka, to a large extent, burning coal.
That information comes primarily from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Change Research Program, folks who know what they’re talking about.
According to National Geographic, “The past 10 years have been the 10 hottest years on record, and a reconstruction of Earth’s average temperature over the past 485 million years showed that when the planet warms, catastrophic weather and mass extinctions follow. At no point in the period of Earth’s history… have temperatures warmed as quickly as they’re warming now.”
Trees are increasingly dying from drought, precipitation patterns are changing, resulting in increased incidents of wildfires and raising concern about the prospects for agriculture, and hurricanes are more severe.
And, frankly, that’s not the half of it. Just some headlines.
Despite all this, the President-cum-Dictator, whose indifference, no, animosity toward the environment is appalling – he has eviscerated the Environmental Protection Agency, directed federal agencies that regulate energy and the environment to sunset a wide array of protections and cut funding for a climate programs – is now promoting global climate change and its dire consequences by embracing coal.
And Stivers, among others – that nitwit Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, attended the same announcement – think that’s just peachy-keen.
Trump’s war on the environment has essentially gone unnoticed during his first three months in office because of all the other ludicrous, dangerous actions he has taken. It requires everyone’s attention.
And don’t think for a minute he’s at all concerned about the coal miners, a number of whom attended the coal announcement. He is cutting back on the Mine Safety and Health Administration, delaying, probably ditching, the implementation of new safety standards to protect miners from lethal dust exposure and he’s gutting the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which oversees the Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program, the office that screens and monitors the respiratory health of miners, including black lung.
I am so embarrassed to be a Kentuckian because, with the exception of wonderful Governor Beshear, there are very few legislators in the state or in DC that care about Kentuckians. They care about themselves and sucking up to …..you know who I mean.