Book contents
- The Coal Trap
- The Coal Trap
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Introduction: “The Lost Decade”
- 1 The Rise of Environmental Regulations under Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency
- 2 The Shale Gas Revolution
- 3 The Rise of Renewable Energy
- 4 The “Ds” of Today’s Electric Utility Industry: Decarbonization and Decentralization
- 5 From “Friends of Coal” to the “War on Coal”: How West Virginia Went from Blue to Red
- 6 “Leadership” from Washington, DC: The Congressional Delegation That Could Have but Didn’t
- 7 Manchin in the Middle
- 8 The Failure of the Public Service Commission to Serve the Public
- 9 The Role of the Legislature in West Virginia’s Failed Energy Policies
- 10 Bailing Out the Coal Industry on the Backs of West Virginia’s Electric Ratepayers
- 11 Coal Operators Get Rich and West Virginia Gets to Clean Up the Mess
- 12 What the Future Could Hold if Leaders Choose to Lead
- Acknowledgments
- Index
1 - The Rise of Environmental Regulations under Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2022
- The Coal Trap
- The Coal Trap
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Introduction: “The Lost Decade”
- 1 The Rise of Environmental Regulations under Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency
- 2 The Shale Gas Revolution
- 3 The Rise of Renewable Energy
- 4 The “Ds” of Today’s Electric Utility Industry: Decarbonization and Decentralization
- 5 From “Friends of Coal” to the “War on Coal”: How West Virginia Went from Blue to Red
- 6 “Leadership” from Washington, DC: The Congressional Delegation That Could Have but Didn’t
- 7 Manchin in the Middle
- 8 The Failure of the Public Service Commission to Serve the Public
- 9 The Role of the Legislature in West Virginia’s Failed Energy Policies
- 10 Bailing Out the Coal Industry on the Backs of West Virginia’s Electric Ratepayers
- 11 Coal Operators Get Rich and West Virginia Gets to Clean Up the Mess
- 12 What the Future Could Hold if Leaders Choose to Lead
- Acknowledgments
- Index
Summary
In November 2008, when Barack Obama was elected as President of the United States, the focus of environmental policies turned to climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs), the heat-trapping pollutants that are produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Given coal’s prominence as the source of nearly 80 percent of the GHGs in the electricity industry at the time, the focus on achieving GHG reductions necessarily had implications for the coal industry. Moreover, it was clear from some of the early initiatives at Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the administration had some hostility toward mountaintop removal in particular as a means of extracting coal. Other actions by the EPA had impacts on West Virginia – adoption of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard (MATS) in late 2011, for example, resulted in the closure of several coal plants, as utilities determined that the cost of compliance was too great to justify additional investment in emission reduction measures.
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- The Coal TrapHow West Virginia Was Left Behind in the Clean Energy Revolution, pp. 14 - 42Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022