This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.

Furious Coal Baron Lashes Out: "Obama Is The Greatest Enemy I've Ever Had. It's Beyond Personal"

Tyler Durden's picture




 

Robert Murray is no fan of Barack Obama. 

Murray, you’re reminded, is the CEO of Murray Energy. Earlier this year, the company laid off 21% of its employees, with the majority of the cuts coming in West Virginia, which was staring down a $195 million budget gap thanks to the slide in coal prices.

Around two months after the job cuts, Murray spoke to Republicans at the Lincoln Day Dinner and let it all out. The 75-year old told lawmakers he was “righteously mad” at the President, who he says is on a "bizarre personal and political" quest to destroy not only the coal industry, but the entire country. “Radical environmentalists, liberal elitists, [and] Hollywood characters" aren’t helping, he added, for good measure. 

As SNL wrote at the time, "Murray said President Barack Obama's administration has issued regulations that illegally bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U.S. EPA in charge of the nation's electric grid." Here are some other notable quotes:

"Thus, these people are prohibited from working and fall to the negative side of the economic ledger for the rest of their lives. This is not the America that I have always cherished. Well, I am obviously not giving up. Nor should you. We have the law, science, economics, cold hard energy facts and the Constitution on our side. Our cause is right. It is right for the coal industry and our communities and America. We must continue to do whatever we can to overcome the insanity of our current government."

Well, lest anyone should think that Murray has deviated from his position in the five months since those comments were made, Bloomberg is out with a new piece which highlights just how steadfast the coal baron truly is: 

At a time when the U.S. coal industry is beset on all sides -- by environmentalists, by regulators, by the economics of shale gas -- Murray has positioned himself as King Coal’s warrior-in-chief. And his main antagonist is the country’s commander-in-chief.

 

He calls Barack Obama “the greatest enemy I’ve ever had in my life.” His fight with the president, he says, has gotten “beyond personal.”

 

Since Inauguration Day in 2009, Murray Energy Corp. has filed no fewer than a dozen separate lawsuits against the federal government, more than any other U.S. coal company. Murray, the man, is trying to beat back Obama administration regulations, which he says are strangling his industry. Someone, he says, has to try.

 

Coal is his life. At 16, he went to work at the coal face to support a family fallen on hard times. His father had been paralyzed from the neck down in a mining accident seven years earlier and his mother was stricken with cancer. “I know what it is to be poor,” he said.

 

Today he’s responsible for a company with 7,500 employees digging coal out of 13 mines in five states. Not surprisingly, he’s no big fan of the recent Paris climate agreement, dismissing it as “a meaningless fraud that will have no effect on carbon dioxide emissions.”

 

“There’s no question that Barack Obama and his Democrat supporters constantly, daily, pick winners and losers depending on who supports them and their politics,” he said, his voice rising. 

 

Murray has asked judges to void the president’s marquee plans for curbing mercury, carbon dioxide and ozone emissions and vows to challenge pending rules designed to protect streams from adverse mining impacts.

He was also at the forefront of a suit launched last year to overturn the EPA’s Clean Power Plan before it even hit the books -- a gambit rejected by the court as premature, twice. He sued the EPA again when the Clean Power Plan was officially published on Oct. 23. That was one of three challenges he filed over an eight-day span, including bids to quash the EPA’s carbon capture and ozone reduction rules.

 

The bulk of the cases are still pending, but so far losses outnumber victories.

 

“They haven’t won anything,” said the NRDC’s Doniger. 

 

Either way, Murray intends to keep up his courtroom counter-attack. Told that Peabody Energy Corp. the biggest U.S. producer, sues at nowhere near the same rate, he replied, “nobody does. The rest of the industry put together doesn’t.” “They don’t have the money,” he said. “And I don’t either.”

Maybe not, but as we noted back in July, Murray does apparently "have the money" to take advantage of the industry downturn by snapping up weaker players.  While laying of 1,400 employees, the company has simultaneously spent at least $4.6 billion (enough to pay the annual salaries of 54,120 West Virginia coal miners, according to data from the National Mining Association) in the past two years acquiring competitors. 

One wonders how many of the company's now jobless workers could have been retained with the money Murray is spending to send high priced lawyers to tilt at windmills in the courtroom. 

In October, Murray was fined $5,000 by the FEC for violating election spending rules when he spent $22,000 buying signs that read "Fire Obama." 

 

- advertisements -

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
Mon, 12/28/2015 - 21:14 | 6972513 Faeriedust
Faeriedust's picture

While I have conventional views on the pollutants attached to coal, you make important arguments.  NO form of power is "clean", and NO form of power is cheap if all of the "external" costs are fully paid.  The question is, will we grow up and start pricing in those externalities, or continue to pretend that they don't represent real costs until their consequences destroy us?

We have been on a two-century-long binge sucking everything of value out of the Earth and spitting out crap in return, and calling it "progress".  We're getting to the point where it simply can't continue.  One way or another, we will have to pay.

Mon, 12/28/2015 - 18:44 | 6972054 gregga777
gregga777's picture

It's extremely important that Murray sues the Federal Government to illustrate to the American People how corrupt the American courts are and how dictatorial and corrupt the Federal Government is under Sunni Muslim and Indonesian citizen President Barrack Hussein Obama.

Mon, 12/28/2015 - 18:51 | 6972079 Pumpkin
Pumpkin's picture

If he paid the 5k fine, it is because his lawyers sucks.  Lawyers is what got us to where we are at, including the pretender in the WH.

Mon, 12/28/2015 - 19:42 | 6972247 SethDealer
SethDealer's picture

In Texas or windmills capacity factor is around 12%. So our 13,000 of installed mws wind is actually 1,560 mws of electricity produced. its so easy to fool the average american with inflated math to try to make renewables look competitive.

Tue, 12/29/2015 - 02:02 | 6973181 hendrik1730
hendrik1730's picture

"Renewables" are NOT competitive when compared to existing technology. Everyone knows that apart from the green fanatics and politicians. Solar might be one day when the idiotic policies of today have destroyed the existing power generating base .... at a price 5 times higher than today. Slight problem : when solar becomes a viable alternative, one can kiss the centrally power generation plants goodbye because of no longer necessary apart from industry - every private person will be offgrid then and no longer controllable by big energy.

Mon, 12/28/2015 - 19:42 | 6972252 More_sellers_th...
More_sellers_than_buyers's picture

What the hell happened to ZH? Used to be insightful comments.  Now it's been infected with folks defending the status quo.  Defending the indefensible.  Jesus its almost as if they just finished Sociology 101 at your local liberal arts school and cannot wait to find out where they sign up for their brown shirts.  

Mon, 12/28/2015 - 20:05 | 6972322 nicxios
nicxios's picture

Murray has asked judges to void the president’s marquee plans for curbing mercury, carbon dioxide and ozone emissions and vows to challenge pending rules designed to protect streams from adverse mining impacts

 

Hey this guy has every godam right to pollute streams with the byproducts of his operations. Fuck Obama for preventing him! That's un-American! It's bad for our communities and America!

Yah ok asshole. Pull this leg it plays Jingle Bells.

Mon, 12/28/2015 - 21:23 | 6972540 oooBooo
oooBooo's picture

How many could have been retained if he had not purchased weaker competitors? Zero to negative.  The number of jobs isn't based on how much a company has in savings but how much work there is to do. Sure some jobs were probably lost because there was no need for duplicate functions when other companies were acquired but if they were that weak, that's probably the least bad outcome. If the competitors weren't purchased they probably would have folded retaining nobody.

Regulation breeds consolidation, but it became obvious early on this guy worked his way up from the bottom. A typical CEO would cheer the regulation as it made his company bigger and the last one left standing. This guy sounds pissed off and that sort of pissed off doesn't happen from people who didn't do the grunt work some time in their life.

 

Mon, 12/28/2015 - 22:30 | 6972745 Ms No
Ms No's picture

Barring some miracle free energy being pulled out of a closet, the shuttering of coal fire power is temporary.  The technology is already available and in use that can make coal power quite clean especially compared to the flaring and clean water act non-compliant shale. 

The retrofit to gas is off the hook now but also temporary as the gas decline rates and production costs will become a problem eventually.  Coal will become a huge industry again down the road under new ownership... the banks or whoever they delegate it to.  They are unlikely to be nicer bunch then our old coal barons. 

I would trust this guy before I would trust any of them. They're taking us full circle jerk and you can bet that your energy will be tightly controlled and expensive in the future.  These people do not care about the environment, this is about the control of people.  Enjoy the "cheap" days of loose money abundance while you can as this was about Russia and not about your wallet or the viability of the loans given to the shale industry.

Tue, 12/29/2015 - 01:21 | 6973143 onmail1
onmail1's picture
<-- Obama Is The Greatest Enemy I've Ever Had. It's Beyond Personal

well well well

Becuz of this Man(woman inside) ppl will be very afraid of electing any other colored person as president. This person has ashamed ALL the colored ppl of the world (especiallyBlack/African) , whose greed for power , wealth, money , influence has exceeded all moral limits. 

Tue, 12/29/2015 - 13:41 | 6974481 Thinkor
Thinkor's picture

Here's the power reality: In 40 or 50 years, assuming we avoid WW III (or will it be IV?), we'll be getting most of our energy from thorium reactors or fusion reactors.

Meanwhile, let's keep using fossil fuels to maintain social stability until new technologies make fossil fuels obsolete.

Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!