In Ohio Campaign Swing, Romney Focuses On Coal Policy

• 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.

Coal was front and center on the campaign trail yesterday, as Mitt Romney visited eastern Ohio to blast President Obama for stifling the coal industry through increased environmental regulation.
Cheap, readily available natural gas has played a major role in the coal industry’s recent contractions, too, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from focusing on regulations like the mercury limits the EPA imposed in December. Those new rules will likely lead to the closure of several coal-fired power plants.
NPR has more on yesterday’s coal-centric campaigning:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was in far eastern Ohio on Tuesday — seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
But Beallsville is in the middle of coal country, and this site was carefully chosen. There’s a battle over messaging on coal in Ohio, a state with huge coal reserves and an important but troubled coal industry.
For months, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity has been buying ads in Ohio, talking up coal jobs and blasting the Obama administration’s “heavy-handed regulations” on coal.
In turn, the Obama campaign launched a radio ad a week ago, praising the president’s record on coal. It claims that coal jobs are up 10 percent, and that a $5 billion investment in clean coal technology is one of the largest ever.

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