The American coal industry is accusing the Obama administration of using the Environmental Protection Agency to end the use of coal despite the president's claim of having an "all of the above" energy policy.
Earlier this year, the EPA issued its Mercury Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which the agency said will eliminate 90 percent of mercury and acid gas released into the air by coal-fired power plants.
"I would say this administration is certainly unfriendly towards coal," Wyo. Governor Matt Mead said. "And in my view it is a war on coal."
He and others in the coal industry are concerned, however, that the EPA's MATS rules, which go into effect in January 2016, will devastate coal production in America and force many older power plants to close because the cost of retrofitting them will be too high.
Combined with other EPA policies and regulations, Betsy Monseu, CEO of the American Coal Council said, "Starting in about 2012 and continuing to 2020, we'll have about 60 gigawatts of coal-fired generation coming off-line...and the majority of that will come off in regard to the implementation of MATS in 2015 and 2016."
One of Monseu’s issues is the way she said the administration is targeting coal, which currently fuels around 40 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. "Increasingly we face a situation where policy is dictated not by Congressional mandate but rather by executive order and regulatory mandate from the EPA," she said.