He’s been falsely blaming Obama’s environmental policies for job losses for years.
In 2013, then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) took to the Senate floor to excoriate the Obama administration’s environmental policy and its impact of coal jobs in eastern Kentucky.
The claim — which was a major focus for McConnell throughout President Barack Obama’s second term and a frequent club for his attacks on Democrats — was always unfounded. In September, the director of Harvard’s environmental economics program told the New York Times that, the real “primary cause of the tremendous fall in coal employment is low natural gas prices, due to increased supplies of natural gas from hydraulic fracturing.” But McConnell kept repeating it anyway.
President-elect Donald Trump vowed throughout the campaign that he would repeal climate restrictions and to “end the war on coal and the war on miners.” Now that his endorsed presidential candidate is poised to deregulate energy, McConnell has already changed his tune.
In a Friday appearance at the University of Louisville, he tamped down any expectations that coal jobs would come back. “We are going to be presenting to the new president a variety of options that could end this assault,” McConnell told attendees. Then he added “Whether that immediately brings business back is hard to tell because it’s a private sector activity.”
https://thinkprogress.org/mcconnell-admits-jobs-war-on-coal-8938da18e5e3#.w6mf4dnoi
trump: “Let me tell you: the miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week and Ohio and all over, they’re going to start to work again, believe me. You’re going to be proud again to be miners.”
In 2013, then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) took to the Senate floor to excoriate the Obama administration’s environmental policy and its impact of coal jobs in eastern Kentucky.
The claim — which was a major focus for McConnell throughout President Barack Obama’s second term and a frequent club for his attacks on Democrats — was always unfounded. In September, the director of Harvard’s environmental economics program told the New York Times that, the real “primary cause of the tremendous fall in coal employment is low natural gas prices, due to increased supplies of natural gas from hydraulic fracturing.” But McConnell kept repeating it anyway.
President-elect Donald Trump vowed throughout the campaign that he would repeal climate restrictions and to “end the war on coal and the war on miners.” Now that his endorsed presidential candidate is poised to deregulate energy, McConnell has already changed his tune.
In a Friday appearance at the University of Louisville, he tamped down any expectations that coal jobs would come back. “We are going to be presenting to the new president a variety of options that could end this assault,” McConnell told attendees. Then he added “Whether that immediately brings business back is hard to tell because it’s a private sector activity.”
https://thinkprogress.org/mcconnell-admits-jobs-war-on-coal-8938da18e5e3#.w6mf4dnoi
trump: “Let me tell you: the miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week and Ohio and all over, they’re going to start to work again, believe me. You’re going to be proud again to be miners.”
