PRESTONSBURG, Ky. (AP) - President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to reduce the gases blamed for global warming from the nation's power plants gives many coal-dependent states more lenient restrictions and won't necessarily be the primary reason coal-fired power plants will be retired.
If Kentucky, for example, meets the new limits that the Obama administration proposed Monday, it would be allowed to release more heat-trapping carbon dioxide per unit of power in 2030 than plants in 34 states do now.
That's because the Environmental Protection Agency would only require Kentucky, which relies on coal for about 90 percent of its electricity needs, to improve its carbon dioxide emissions rate by 18 percent over the next 15 years. By 2030, Kentucky would be second only to North Dakota for having the most carbon-intensive power plants in the country.
Environmentalists had hoped the proposal would shutter hundreds of coal-fired power plants. Republican critics painted it as a war on coal, with a major economic impact on local economies.
Neither side got exactly what they wanted.
Instead, the EPA's complex formula to calculate each state's reductions gives some coal-heavy states a more relaxed standard, based on what it deemed was realistic to achieve. The EPA says that even with the rules, coal will still provide about 30 percent of the nation's power in 2030. It supplies just under 40 percent now.
"We looked at where states are today, and we followed where they're going," said Gina McCarthy, the EPA administrator. "Each state is different, so each goal and each path can be different."
The defensive posture of coal states comes as the resource struggles to compete with plentiful natural gas, the primary driver for coal's diminishing share of the U.S. electricity market - and environmental regulations are not helping. Besides the carbon rule proposed Monday, the EPA also proposed that new plants capture a portion of their carbon pollution. The Obama administration has also cracked down for the first time on mercury and other toxic pollutants from the nation's coal-fired power plants. And more regulations are in the pipeline to control coal ash waste ponds and other releases from coal-fired power plants into the environment.
Together, it's hard to predict what all these rules and the natural gas boom will do to coal-fired power.
"Why keep chopping the legs out of your own economy to try to fight a world problem? You are going to destroy your country trying to set an example," Gary Whitt, a 29-year-old railroad worker said as he ate lunch at Giovanni's in downtown Prestonsburg, Kentucky. He said at least 50 of his co-workers have been laid off, and he's worried he could be next.
Here in Floyd County 20 years ago, more than 150 coal mines were active. Now there are fewer than five, according to R.D. "Doc" Marshall, the county judge-executive. Total coal production in the state has fallen nearly 40 percent since 2000.