How Coal Will Factor Into The 2012 Campaign

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

May 30, 2012 | 3:30 PM

Kimberly Paynter / WHYY

Inside a Greene County coal mine

Earlier today, we linked to a story detailing the coal industry’s precarious position.
Here’s one more coal story for the road: Slate takes a look at the political implications of the shift away from coal, and what it means for the presidential campaign:

Are the coal states red or blue? Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is working hard to convince voters in key swing states that also produce coal—Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—that the Obama administration is anti-coal.*

That shouldn’t be a difficult task. In late March, the EPA proposed a rule that could prevent the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States. (Public comment on that rule ends on June 12.) That move was cheered by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups that are pushing their “beyond coal” campaign.

But here’s the reality: Whatever happens in the presidential election won’t matter much to the booming global coal market. Furthermore, it will have almost no effect on soaring global carbon dioxide emissions, which have increased by about 28 percent over the past decade.