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Make Coal The New Alternative

In the rush to build new solar and wind power generating facilities — and sometimes force Americans to buy their high-priced electricity — government is overlooking by choice a realistic “alternative” energy: coal.

President Barack Obama’s administration has done all in its power to kill the coal industry and with it, affordable electricity provided by coal-fired generating stations. Billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money has been used to subsidize new solar and wind power facilities.

Some state governments, including, amazingly enough, West Virginia’s for a time, played right along with mandates that utilities had to obtain certain percentages of their electricity from “alternative” sources. Utilities seldom objected because state regulators grant them rates based largely on what it costs them to obtain power. Never mind that on down the line, consumers would have to foot the higher monthly bills.

Liberal politicians, having promised for years that doing away with coal-fired power plants would cost nothing because plentiful natural gas could be substituted as a fuel, now are turning against the drilling industry. It turns out that miners who warned the gas industry it was next on the liberals’ hit list were right.

But we have not yet passed the point of no return. A bill approved in different forms by both houses of Congress provides hope for a true all-of-the-above energy policy.

Approved overwhelmingly in the two chambers, the measure’s details now must be worked out by a conference committee including members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Largely because of provisions inserted by West Virginia’s two senators, Republican Shelley Capito and Democrat Joe Manchin, the bill includes a plan to kick-start development of clean-coal technology. It would require meaningful federal spending on carbon capture and other techniques to lessen, if not eliminate, concerns about coal-fired power plants and climate change.

Such work could have been done years ago, but for the Obama administration’s cuts in clean-coal programs.

Congress should make enactment of the new energy bill, under the next president if not this one, a top priority. It could give Americans an alternative to unreliable, expensive solar and wind power: coal.

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