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Can the GOP Change Obama's Energy Plans?

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This article is more than 9 years old.

Now that the Republicans have soared to victory in the 2014 Midterm Elections, they will try and sink the Obama administration’s environmental agenda once they take their oaths of office early next year. And while a lot of onlookers are predicting an all-out assault, others are saying that Obama need not flinch.

Last Tuesday’s clear message was that people were feeling economically queazy and that it would be President Obama’s Democratic supporters who would pay the price. That thinking produced a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate and an ever-wider margin of conservative support in the U.S. House. But does that financial insecurity translate into rolling back the White House’s environmental programs involving reductions in harmful emissions, including carbon?

If the 2012 presidential election is any indication, then the answer is “no.” President Obama stood for office on a platform of combating climate change while his opponent had mocked the cause during the Republican National Convention. Even Ohio, which had been declared the key battleground state on which the election would depend, chose the financial bailout of General Motors Co. over the fate of the coal sector, both of which are embedded there.

Since 2008, the president has espoused a clean energy agenda. That includes tougher regulations on coal, which releases more pollutants than any competing source of electric generation fuels. His policies, which include tougher rules for mercury, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and greenhouse gases, are blamed by opponents for injuring coal’s status in the utility market place.

While those positions have given President Obama’s foes the ammo they need to declare that there is a “war on coal,” the facts on the ground are different. Coal’s share of the utility market has fallen from roughly half to about 40 percent today. Why? Tougher regs factor into the equation but the more accurate answer is the plethora of cheap natural gas, or unconventional shale gas, which is expected to keeping chipping away at coal's dominance.

Coal miners in West Virginia, for example, numbered 125,000 in the 1950s. Today, they total about 20,000. No company there is immune to economics, including Alpha Natural Resources Inc. and Arch Coal Inc. that have had to lay off workers -- guys making close to six figures who have little formal education. But even those coal enterprises acknowledge that the hardships are because Appalachia’s coal seams are depleting while cheap natural gas is taking a toll.

So, why the perception in the coal fields that there is a full blown attack? The midterm election gave the interest groups their chance to hit the airwaves, combining a mass marketing blitz with the basic human desire to get elected to Congress. While that may hurt the environmental cause in the short run, the fact is that candidates in coal country will never be able to keep the promises that they have made to their constituents -- to revive the floundering coal sector.

“The real story of the election’s campaign finance chapter was not which side had more resources, but that such a large chunk of the cost was paid for a by small group of ultra-wealthy donors using outside groups to bury voters with an avalanche of spending,” says OpenSecrets.

Both sides were well funded, it adds, noting that the Republicans spent $1.75 billion while the Democrats shelled out $1.64 billion. But the Center for Public Integrity says that Charles and David Koch sponsored thousands of television ads that went after the guts of Obama’s legacy: environmental stewardship. Together, they spent $9.5 million, which exceeded ExxonMobil Corp.’s $9 million.

Call it Phase One in the attempt to reverse the Obama administration’s clean air initiatives and most recently its Clean Power Plan that sets out to curb carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Phase Two is a greater challenge, or electing enough sympathizers to overcome a presidential veto or seating a president who would sign legislation to slow down the progress.

Consider that Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is the presumptive majority leader come January 2015 while Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla., will likely head the Environment and Public Works Committee. In their respective roles, they will control what legislation gets a hearing and ultimately a vote, which means anything adverse to their campaign pledges will get flouted.

For his part, McConnell ran hard on a campaign to rein in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, saying that the Obama administration was counter to coal country’s way of life. Meantime, Inhofe has said that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated while calling the UN climate panel an arm of the “left-wing.”

Until the Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate, the president had been in the driver’s seat. Now, Obama must ask himself a simple question, says Scott Segal, a lawyer for Bracewell & Giuliani that represents energy producers: "Do I essentially shut down the EPA or do I work with Republicans in the House and in the Senate to reform that proposal?'" If he choses the latter option, Segal said in a conference call that the president could pick up bipartisan support and negotiate a solution.

The environmental community disagrees, saying that the Republican landslide was nothing more than a six-year itch -- similar to what happened during the Reagan, Clinton and Bush II presidencies. The only interests wedded to the coal industry, it adds, are those states whose economies have long relied on the fuel. Even then, they say that the time has come to move forward and to diversify -- for the good of their own people.

Many states are trending toward cleaner burning fuels, helping the country overall to reduce its carbon footprint. But such progress can be fleeting -- subject to loud mass marketing campaigns and the needs of cash-hungry politicians. Dialing up the volume and turning back the regulatory clock may backfire, however, which gives Obama more voice than his lame duck presidency would indicate.