Coal, Hard Truths

Correction appended Sept. 28, 2012

Ohio coal miner Robert E. Murray, 72, is still wearing oversize steel-toe boots and a shirt that reads BOB over his heart when he mispronounces President Obama’s name for the third time. Coming from one of the nation’s top-producing coal executives, the heavy accent is no accident. “I say Bear-ick Obama because I never heard the word Barack before,” he explains. “My wife keeps telling me, ‘It’s Barack.’ O.K., Barack. It’s Barack. To me, it’s Bear-ick.”

To the 1,600 coal miners Murray employs in Ohio, to the reporters he meets, to the Republican politicians he supports with millions of dollars in fundraising and to just about anyone else who listens, his complaint is the same: Obama is trying to destroy the U.S. coal industry. “Bear-ick Obama is the greatest enemy that these regions of the country have,” Murray says from his office overlooking the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio. “If we give Obama a second term, I can’t keep it together.”

Such predictions would matter less if his firm, Murray Energy Corp., which shuttles millions of tons of coal a year onto river barges destined for nearby power stations, operated in another state. But in every presidential election since 1964, whoever won Ohio also won the White House, a record that looks likely to be extended this year. So for Murray, who sat out the 2008 race because he felt little love for John McCain’s energy policies, defeating Obama has become something of a crusade. “This is permanent destruction to America,” he says about the Administration’s approach to coal. “Obama ain’t heard the last from guys like me.”

Murray may be Obama’s biggest headache in a state where he leads by about 4 points. At the front gate of one of his three mines in Ohio, a plant foreman has hung a FIRE OBAMA banner the length of a hopper car. When Vice President Joe Biden visited the county in May, Murray’s general manager recruited teams off the graveyard shift to protest in their hard hats. And when Mitt Romney came through in mid-August, Murray closed his mines and told his employees to attend a Romney rally, at which Murray provided hot dogs, soda pop and a magician to entertain their kids. “I tell you, you’ve got a great boss,” Romney told the miners after riding in from the airport with Murray.

The battle over the U.S.’s energy future is one of the clearest choices presented to voters in the 2012 campaign. In his 2011 State of the Union address, Obama dismissed oil companies as purveyors of “yesterday’s energy.” Now many of those same companies have joined with the nation’s coal magnates to pour money and ground troops into the election, determined to make Obama yesterday’s President. Industry ads promoting coal, oil and gas and often attacking Obama’s vaunted clean energy as a boondoggle have filled the airwaves in swing states. And some of the biggest names in the business have been getting off the sidelines to take a public stand against the President.

Joseph Craft III, the CEO of the coal firm Alliance Resource Partners, has so far given $2.6 million to outside groups advertising against Obama. Another coal concern, Alpha Natural Resources, has given $100,000 to a group funding anti-Obama ads. William Koch and his coal, oil and gas firms, like Oxbow Carbon, have given $3 million to the anti-Obama cause, while his brothers David and Charles Koch, who are also in the oil business, have mounted an effort to raise as much as $400 million. Other ads that either boast of fossil fuel’s potential or attack Obama’s policies have been aired by groups as varied as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the American Energy Alliance and the American Petroleum Institute. Murray himself has organized multiple fundraisers. “That community is much more animated,” says Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by David and Charles Koch that will not disclose the source of the nearly $100 million it plans to spend this cycle to influence the election. “They realize that this is a President who isn’t just ambivalent about them but for ideological reasons is seeking their demise.”

The Fading Green Dream

Obama, of course, says he doesn’t want to kill off coal. Instead he favors an “all of the above” energy strategy, with more funding for clean-coal technology, the opening of new domestic oil and gas drilling and further investment in alternative energy sources. “It’s clear folks like these have an agenda, but the facts don’t fit their rhetoric,” Obama campaign spokesman Frank Benenati says of the industry opposition. “The truth is that employment in the coal-mining industry in Ohio has increased 10% since President Obama took office.”

But there is little question that Obama wants to extract more revenue from–and place more regulations on–oil, gas and coal producers than Romney does. In 2011 the Administration instituted new limits on emissions of mercury, arsenic and other toxins from coal-fired plants, a move the Environmental Protection Agency says will prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks and 130,000 cases of childhood asthma every year once it is fully implemented. The coal industry is pushing Congress to repeal the rules, saying the new standards will lead to higher electricity rates. Romney, meanwhile, has vowed to repeal the new mercury rules and roll back other regulations to limit carbon emissions. “Mitt Romney will reverse the President’s war on coal and instead implement commonsense regulations,” says Chris Maloney, Romney’s Ohio spokesman. On Sept. 19, just after Alpha announced 1,200 coal-worker layoffs, including many in the swing state of Virginia, the Romney campaign debuted two new ads with coal miners. “The policy the current Administration’s got is attacking my livelihood,” says one.

Meanwhile, in the election-year equivalent of a Freudian slip, the Obama campaign published a webpage touting its “all of the above” strategy in May that left out coal as an energy source, listing instead “energy efficiency.” (The campaign quickly corrected the mistake.) To this day, Obama is more likely to bring up fossil fuels as a foil than as a resource. His campaign regularly condemns attacks from Big Oil and promises to fight to remove as much as $4 billion in tax breaks for the oil industry. “Now is the time to end the subsidies for an industry that’s rarely been more profitable,” Obama said in his campaign-kickoff speech in Columbus, Ohio. “Let’s double down on a clean-energy future that’s never been more promising.”

That line served Obama well in 2008, when he cast himself as a futurist who could chart the nation’s course to a promised land of tradable carbon credits and battery-powered cars. The greatest legacy of his 2009 stimulus bill may end up being its $80 billion in green-energy investments, including $3.4 billion for clean-coal research. Back then, Democratic fundraising among green-technology companies the party championed was seen as an antidote to the long-standing cash advantage Republicans had enjoyed with the oil industry. But as economic anxiety has deepened and the domestic clean-energy industry has struggled to find markets, concern about the environmental impact of pollution has waned. In March, 55% of Americans polled by Gallup said they worried about global warming, down from 66% in 2008. Political contributions from alternative-energy companies to Democrats have dropped precipitously over the same period.

At the same time, new drilling technologies like fracking have led to a boom in domestic oil and gas production. The number of operating domestic oil rigs is near a 25-year high, largely because of new exploration on private land. Domestic natural gas recovery from fracking has allowed methane–for the moment at least–to outcompete coal as the most cost-effective source of electricity generation. Harold Hamm, a leading developer of shale-oil fields in North Dakota and a Romney adviser who has chipped in nearly $1 million to fund advertising against the President, argues that Obama misread the energy landscape in 2007. “He had a policy based on scarcity,” said Hamm at a May conference of oil developers in Bismarck. “That is certainly not the case. He has had a wave that just crested over him.” A frequent visitor to Capitol Hill to testify in defense of the oil and gas tax breaks Obama has targeted for elimination, Hamm offers a simple message to voters: “Beat Barack Obama.”

For his part, Romney aggressively courted fossil-fuel donors and made coal and oil a central part of his stump speech. When he lists his five-part plan to create jobs, he begins with energy, saying he wants to make better use of coal and open more public land to oil drilling than Obama has. “He’s made it harder to mine coal, harder to use coal, harder to get a reliable supply of natural gas, harder to get drilling for oil,” Romney said at a recent event in Virginia. This is a big shift from Romney’s days as governor of Massachusetts, when he was an outspoken critic of the pollution caused by coal-burning power plants. “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people, and that plant, that plant kills people,” Romney announced in 2003 outside a coal-burning plant in Salem, Mass., that had failed to meet even the lower emissions standards of that time. Romney no longer emphasizes the human role that he still believes is leading to a warming of the world’s climate.

Jack Gerard, former head of the National Mining Association and current head of the American Petroleum Institute, is a longtime friend of the Romney family’s, a policy adviser and one of Romney’s biggest fundraisers and supporters in Washington. (Gerard’s son, also named Jack, works for the Romney campaign.) “When you talk about a vision for energy policy in America, it is a very bright contrast,” the elder Gerard says of the coming choice between Obama and Romney.

The Battle in Ohio

It is difficult for a democrat to win Ohio without taking a large share of mostly white votes from the state’s southeastern hills, where its coal industry is based. “The Democratic areas of this state are Cleveland and here,” Murray says of Belmont County, a traditionally blue stronghold that Obama carried by 2 percentage points in 2008. “And I can tell you right now, he isn’t going to carry this area.”

But if Murray’s part of the state looks much the same as it did when Jimmy Carter won it in 1976, other parts of the state do not. Once solidly Republican central Ohio is now decidedly swing, and even reliably conservative Cincinnati went for Obama in 2008. And if southeastern Ohio is still coal country, northeastern Ohio has now become a significant producer of natural gas–which is cheaper and cleaner to burn than Ohio’s plentiful bituminous coal. The state’s energy politics are changing. Which is why the election in Ohio is in some ways a referendum for voters on the state’s past and future.

Over his 50-year career, Murray has always been attuned to larger political forces. He created his current company in the late 1980s to survive the regulation of coal-fired power plants under amendments to the Clean Air Act that passed in 1990. Now he talks of making sure his company is “Obama-proof,” citing a range of new worker-safety rules, watershed-protection proposals and air-pollution regulations that have been pursued by the Administration. “I couldn’t have known about Bear-ick Obama when I designed this company,” he says.

A longtime foe of the United Mine Workers who rejects the threat of global warming as bad science, Murray says he is motivated by one thing: preserving the livelihoods of his workers from the “Hollywood characters, unionists and wealthy elitists” who oppose dirtier forms of energy. “If I can’t fight Obama off,” he says, pointing in the direction of the Ohio Valley shopping center 20 miles to the north, “these malls will be empty.”

The original version of this article incorrectly reported that Alpha Natural Resources and some of its executives had given $600,000 to a group funding anti-Obama ads. The company itself donated $100,000 to such a group.