Charleston Gazette Tuesday 14 February 2012:
Hoppy Kercheval continues pro-coal ‘puffery’
February 13, 2012 by Ken Ward Jr.
It’s really no wonder that so many West Virginia political leaders won’t confront the coming crisis in our state’s coalfields. That’s especially so if you just look at the media coverage these issues generally get from most of the state’s newspapers, television stations and radio outlets. There have been some noticeable improvements of late, but my buddy Hoppy Kercheval’s latest West Virginia MetroNews commentary shows how far our media have to go in doing their job of forcing powerful interests to confront what is — and perhaps isn’t — in the public interest.
Hoppy’s headline is “Environmental puffery,” and it focuses on the Sierra Club reaction to last week’s announcement of power plant closings by FirstEnergy. Hoppy writes:
The closings are a tough blow for those communities; jobs are lost and tax revenue from the utilities will dry up.
“This is going to take a pretty big chunk out of the operating budget of the town,” said Rivesville Mayor Jim Hershman, who worked at the power plant for 25 years.
The Sierra Club is positively euphoric. The environmental organization’s “Beyond Coal” campaign is geared toward shutting down all coal-fired power plants.
“The retirements represent a major improvement in the lives of local residents, who have been exposed to pollution from these plants for decades,” read a statement from the Sierra Club.
I suspect the Sierra Club might have trouble getting laid off workers or the leaders of a community that will have trouble paying the bills for street lights to join them in the victory dance.
Now, there’s no question that some people within the Sierra Club are pretty darned tone-deaf when it comes to how their campaigns are viewed in communities that still rely so heavily on the coal industry … for example, one of the group’s bloggers and magazine writers posted on Twitter after the First Energy announcement:
Boom boom boom, another one bites the dust…
But Hoppy’s commentary didn’t mention that the Sierra Club also hosted a meeting in Albright, one of the communities where FirstEnergy is closing a plant, to try to get the conversation going about how the closure might impact local residents and what alternatives might be once that closure happened. The effort was modeled after a successful collaboration in Washington state, where a coal plant closure was phased in and the company put together a $50 million fund to help ease the impacts and move toward cleaner energy. In West Virginia, Sierra Club officials tried to get FirstEnergy involved in such an effort in Preston County — but the company couldn’t be bothered to show up for a town meeting.
Hoppy also took the Morgantown City Council to task for approving a resolution in support of EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution to deal with the climate crisis:
So Jackson, who has done more than any one individual in recent history to undermine fossil fuel production in this country, now has the town fathers in the middle of coal and gas country on her side. And the City of Morgantown is doing its best United Nations imitation.
And he wraps it all up by arguing that coal isn’t going away anytime soon, citing recent statements from new AEP CEO Nick Akins:
The inevitable energy transition that’s taking place in this country is going to be a long, drawn out affair. American Electric Power President and CEO Nick Atkins said earlier this week “We’ll still need coal” for the foreseeable future. “If someone is trying to eliminate that, it’s just not going to happen.”
Maybe the adversaries of fossil fuels actually know that, which is why they are reduced to relishing their small victories and embellishing their meaningless symbolism.
As did other media who quotes Akins without reservation, Hoppy ignores that, while coal overall is expected to remain a major part of the energy picture, production from Appalachian — especially Central Appalachia — is expected to decline significantly over the next 25 years. No honest forecast ignores this trend — but Hoppy, much of the media, and West Virginia political leaders insist on pretending this crisis isn’t waiting out there for us.
I tuned into my local MetroNews station this morning, to see if perhaps Hoppy was going to be talking about what state officials should be doing to plan for the coming coal collapse … but all I heard was a Friends of Coal ad.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:47 am