Page 27 - The Economist20171214

The Economist December 16th 2017 United States 27
2 rier to diversifying the region’s economy. site—a category that includes coal and nuc- Mr Perry’s before it imploded. Bob Murray,
The likelier a young man is to believe he lear plants, and excludes renewables, one such boss, implored the White House
will one day have a six-figure coal job like which rely on weather, and natural gas to use emergency powers to save several
his father, the less likely he is to train for plants, which get their energy through coal plantsfrom bankruptcy. MrTrump de-
anythingelse. pipelines. He cast this as a way to counter- clined, but several weeks later Mr Perry re-
In Appalachia, coal is not just a com- act subsidies provided to renewables, and leased his proposal. The former acting
modity; it is a cultural totem. The chamber to keep America’s electricity grid reliable chairman of the FERC does not believe the
of commerce building in Williamson, and resilient. In a letter to the FERC he not- proposal was intended to benefit any spe-
tucked away in West Virginia’s south-west ed that during the Polar Vortex (a period of cificcompanyordonors. MsBrownell says
corner, is built from 65 tons of coal mined sustained cold) in 2014, coal plants on the that “as part ofa long-term economic strat-
from the nearby Winifrede Seam. T-shirts brink of closure were kept online to meet egy [Mr Perry’s proposal] makes literally
and mesh caps for sale in West Virginia’s the demand for heat. The commission no sense, no matterwhat party you are.”
main airport advertise that the wearer is a asked formore time to thinkitover. MrPer- It is hard to think of many more mis-
“Coal Miner’s Wife”. Licence plates in Ken- ry grudgingly agreed, setting a new dead- guided public policies than subsidising
tucky proclaim the drivers “Friends of line ofJanuary10th. coal production. Askingthe FERC to favour
Coal”, and in 2014 the state’s senior sena- one fuel over another also tinkers with a
tor, Mitch McConnell, used as a campaign Subsidyand perfidy market mechanism that has served the
slogan “Coal. Guns. Freedom.” In hisproposal, MrPerryneglected to men- country fairly well. In fact, these policies
Many see coal as evidence of divine fa- tion that at several plants massive coal make sense only as a kind of political the-
vour: He put it under American soil for piles froze solid, and in much of the coun- atre, according to which both the adminis-
Americans to exploit as they see fit, not to try wind power and energy-efficiency tration and its many supporters agree to
keep in the ground to please pencil-necked measures helped meet peak demand. And pretend that it is possible to return to some
environmentalists. Many families have at a report from his own department found mythical glorious past, when brawny
least one member who has worked in the that the main reason coal-fired plants were American men, rather than machines or
mines or related industries. Coal provided being retired was not subsidies for wind foreigners, smelted steel, mined coal and
jobs for people with a strong work ethic and solar, but “the advantaged economics built things on assembly lines. That world
but little formal education. One West Vir- of natural-gas-fired generation”. If the is gone—and even in coal country, some
ginia banker, a pillar of his community, FERC adopted Mr Perry’s rule, it would have come to grips with its absence.
grows misty-eyed recalling his father, who amount to one of the biggest government The fourmen in Welch demolishing the
left school when he was 13 and became a interventions in energy markets for de- old factory (to turn it into an arts centre, no
repairman in local mines, earning a six-fig- cades, and risks frightening investors by less) are preciselythe sortwho would once
ure salary that supported a family of six. putting a thumb on the scale for coal and have worked in the mines: healthy, dili-
These jobs were not only well paid, they introducingpolicy uncertainty. gent, reliable. All four come from multi-
were also important—coal powered Amer- Some see a darker motive in Mr Perry’s generational mining families. But the in-
ica’s expansion and industrialisation—and proposal—and indeed in Mr Trump’s fond- dustry holds little appeal for them. Gary,
dangerous. The men who went “down the ness for coal. Nora Brownell, a Republican the smallest, fears being sent into small,
mines” had a similar band-of-brothers ca- ex-FERC commissioner appointed by narrow spaces. PJ worries about safety.
maraderie to men at war. George W. Bush, calls it “cash for cronies”; “It’s not like it was,” says Ramon, the big-
Taken literally, which is usually a bad she believes it was intended to help coal gest and oldest of the quartet. “Those jobs
idea, the administration’s policies are in- firms and bosses that donated heavily to aren’t coming back, and even if they did,
tended to revive this lost world. First, it Mr Trump’s presidential campaign, and to you don’t know how longthey’ll stay.” 7
wants to repeal the Clean Power Plan, an
Obama-era initiative intended to limit car-
bon emissions from power plants, which
the president has called “stupid” and “job-
killing”. “Did you see what I did to that?”
he asked a crowd in September. “Boom,
gone.” This pleased the audience but was
false, for the plan has not yet taken effect.
The Supreme Court blocked implementa-
tion while it considered lawsuits filed by
multiple statesarguingthatthe EPA had ex-
ceeded its authority in enacting the plan.
Mr Trump’s repeal proposal may also face
legal challenges. In any event, the EPA can-
not simply decline to regulate emissions.
The “endangerment finding” of 2009 ob-
liges it to find “the best system of emission
reduction” for carbon. The previous ad-
ministration thoughtthe Clean PowerPlan
fitted the bill. Even if the current adminis-
tration successfully repeals the plan, it will
stillneedtocomeupwiththebestpossible
way to regulate carbon emissions.
Second, in late September Rick Perry,
the energy secretary, proposed that the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
(FERC) should, in effect, subsidise power
plants that have a 90-day fuel supply on It’s the hope that thrills