Note to Mitt: Coal's coming back as gas prices rise

Coal's return is a big deal for our brothers and sisters in the Teamsters Rail Conference. They've been worried about the drop in coal shipments on eastern and western roads. Thousands of good-paying railroad jobs depend on coal.

The reason coal fell in the first place? It's the fracking, stupid.

Last week, CSX blamed low gas prices for the decline in coal, even as two Wall Street analysts recommended two coal companies as good buys because natural gas prices are now rising.

Mitt Romney, of course, blames President Obama. He's wrong.

Brother Dennis Pierce, national president for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, explains: George W. Bush unleashed a natural gas boom by relieving natural-gas corporations of their obligation to clean up Superfund sites. He also relieved them of the responsibility to tell people what's in the chemical mix they inject into the ground as part of their fracking operations.

Pierce tells us what happened next:

When the increase in fracking flooded the market with natural gas, gas prices fell, and the profit-driven power companies converted operations to the cheaper product where they could. Shortly thereafter the gas industry, having set the hook, started cut down on drilling to drive the prices back up.

Pierce has firsthand knowledge. He has a home that sits on the Barnett Shale in Northern Texas.

For two years, a natural gas "fracking" operation sat less than 1,500 yards from my neighborhood, on land supposedly set aside for a city park.

To put it into railroad speak, the rumbling that our neighborhood endured sounded like an EMD SD-40 sitting in your front yard at throttle 6 night and day for months on end. That drilling site was one of thousands in the Barnett Shale, those in addition to the fracking sites in the Marcellus Shale in Western Pennsylvania and the Meade Peak and Green River Basin Shales in Wyoming.

Now that gas prices are going up, the drilling platform in his neighborhood is gone.

But here's the important point: Mitt Romney is not the savior of coal.  Watch this youtube video of Gov. Mitt Romney standing outside of coal-fired power plant, pointing his finger toward the plant, and saying "That plant kills people!"



Concludes Pierce:

Mitt Romney is a boss ... first, last and always. That's why every few days we see or read or hear about some company owner threatening his workforce with layoffs if President Obama is elected.