Monongahela, Pennsylvania (CNN)It sits on the banks of the Monongahela River like a monstrous monument to extinction.
With
no fire in its belly and no smoke in its stacks, the rusting power
plant provides only one sign of its former inhabitants, scribbled on a
white board in a padlocked guard booth. “RIP Mitchell,” the handwriting reads. “You gave us a good few years.”
The Mitchell Power Station, just south
of Pittsburgh, actually turned Pennsylvania coal into power for a good
65 years before the discovery of cheaper, cleaner forms of energy. As
fracked natural gas and renewables like wind and solar undercut the
price of coal, both Mitchell and the nearby Hatfield’s Ferry power
plants were deactivated on the same day in 2013. Many
in this corner of coal country blamed Obama-era regulations on their
demise, so when a candidate named Donald Trump promised to end a
so-called “war on coal,” they were ready to believe.
“We
are putting our great coal miners back to work,” he repeated to rally
crowds waving “Trump Digs Coal” signs. “I’m coal’s last shot.”
But thanks largely to free-market forces, more coal-fired power plants have been deactivated
in Trump’s first two years in office then in Obama’s entire first term.
When asked about the President’s claim to be the savior of coal,
veteran miner and industry consultant Art Sullivan bristles.
“He’s
trying to get their votes,” he says, standing by the fenced-off
entrance to a mine not far from Mitchell where he once served as Face
Boss, a coal industry term for managers. “He’s lying to them.”
For 52 years, Sullivan worked in mines
around the world and, like many in western Pennsylvania, he remembers
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Ohio town hall where she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
In
her book “What Happened,” Clinton devoted an entire chapter to the
gaffe, which eclipsed her early campaign promise to provide a $30
billion aid package to struggling coal communities. Sullivan
had his own thoughts. “What you need to say to coal miners is ‘We’re
going to figure out a way to give you better, safer, healthier jobs.’
These guys and the few gals are simply too good. They are too capable to
simply say that we don’t need you,” he said.
“They wanted hope,” Blair Zimmerman says
of his fellow miners in Greene County, Pennsylvania, who put their
faith in Trump. “If someone that has a sickness or a cancer and the
doctor says ‘I can cure that,’ they believe … I can’t blame them or
question them for trusting (Trump).”
Now
a county commissioner, Zimmerman is part of a local group hoping to
lure natural gas investors from Texas to drill in Pennsylvania and he
scoffs at the Trump administration’s efforts to deregulate coal-fired
power plants. “It will help this much,” he says, holding his fingers an
inch apart. “But it won’t bring back coal as king.”
______
Leave it so CNN to turn something like this into a hit piece on Trump.
Hey we’re producing more clean energy and pouring less carbon into the atmosphere and we’re increasing the rate at which we switch over doing it.
Suck on that Donald.
