The Courier-Journal reports:
Rep. Andy Barr, R-6th District, joined Friday with many other coal-state lawmakers in attacking the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules to limit emissions from new power plants.
“These greenhouse gas rules are designed to complete the job that years of regulatory attacks and delayed permits started: the elimination of coal from the energy marketplace,” Barr said in a statement. “The outcome of these ruinous regulations will be hundreds of thousands of Americans added to the unemployment lines and, in President Obama’s own words, electricity costs that will ‘necessarily skyrocket.’”
“Of course,” Barr continued, “Kentuckians already know too well the impacts of the EPA’s assaults on the coalfields – over 6,200 mining jobs lost in the last couple of years, with 525 more announced in just the last week. Employment in the Kentucky coal industry is now at its lowest level since statistics were first kept in 1927.”