Press Release: GRASSROOTS TO PROTEST OUTSIDE PEABODY ENERGY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
waygrassroots.com” target=”_blank”>dana@gatewaygrassroots.com
GRASSROOTS TO PROTEST OUTSIDE PEABODY ENERGY
Gateway Grassroots and Missouri Conservatives To Highlight Claire McCaskill’s War On Missouri Coal
OCTOBER 1, ST. LOUIS — The Gateway Grassroots, founded by St. Louis metro area tea partiers, will protest Senator Claire McCaskill’s war on Missouri Coal today at 4 p.m. central outside the Peabody Energy building in downtown St. Louis.
The protest is in response to Senator McCaskill’s rubber-stamp of President Obama’s energy policies, focusing on McCaskill’s vote for the MACT rule, which will shutter a number of coal plants in Missouri and threaten thousands of related jobs.
“Senator McCaskill has sided with the special interests that fund her over Missouri jobs and affordable energy prices,” says Stacy Washington, a member of Gateway Grassroots. “Missouri stands to lose big as a result of her support of the President’s disastrous energy policies, the same policies which gave us the billions wasted on Solyndra. It’s bad to let the free market dictate energy needs but OK to subsidize pet energy projects of this administration?”
“I’m not sure how the Senator can claim the description of ‘moderate’ when she’s heartily supported the President’s agenda at every turn,” says Dana Loesch of Gateway Grassroots. “She’s voted with him 98% of the time. That doesn’t sound ‘moderate.’ That sounds extreme.”
“I don’t want to see what my energy bill looks like when these plants shut down due to her MACT vote and EPA anti-market support,” says Gateway Grassroots’ Van Harvey. “Did Senator McCaskill, at any time, think of how her push to pass this rule would affect low income Missourians? They’re going to get hit the hardest by these higher energy prices.”
The MACT rule, for which McCaskill voted, is the EPA’s most expensive air rule and it specifically targets coal plants. According to Scott Segal of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council:
“It will result in retirement of a significant number of power plants and either fail to replace that capacity or replace it with less labor-intensive forms of generation. It will increase the cost of power, undermining the international competitiveness of almost two dozen manufacturing industries, and it will reduce employment upstream in the mining sectors. All told, it is anticipated that the rule will result in the loss of some 1.44 million jobs by 2020. While some jobs are created by complying with the new rule, the number and quality of those jobs is far less than those destroyed. We estimate that for every one temporary job created, four higher-paying permanent jobs are lost.”
The rule gives an unrealistic timetable for coal plants to comply with the new law and plants won’t know up front their deadline for compliance. It’s a back-door quasi-Cap and Trade; a way for the EPA to shut down coal plants under the guise of compliance with the law. And it will destroy a large chunk of Missouri jobs in the process. Missouri ranks 12th in the nation for coal producing energy as 83% of our energy is coal-generated.
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