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Coal Companies Under the Microscope For Taxpayer Ripoff
Human nature is a funny thing: we can ignore long-term, catastrophic problems like climate change, but heaven help the person who tries to rip us off. Sometimes, the two mesh, and we get a situation like the one that came down last week, when a bipartisan pair of Senators decided to take action on one of the biggest conservation issues facing the country: coal exports.
It’s hard not to feel a little giddy about this development (at least for those of us who track this stuff for a living). When your entire business model is pegged to degrading the environment, you had better be sure that you’re keeping your financial ledgers clean, but companies like Peabody, Arch Coal, and others have been scamming the public for so long that it’s second nature. The U.S. has shifted away from burning coal for power, but other countries—particularly in Asia—are still paying top dollar for it, and the industry is trying to take advantage of record prices by mining cheap American coal and selling it at tremendous profits overseas. Their mistake was in trying to avoid paying the federal government the royalties it was due, by setting up corporate middlemen and various other dodges that skirted the boundaries of legality and undermined the public trust. As Wyden said in a press release:
This is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be said: Coal companies need to be paying taxpayers all of the money they are owed. If regulators, or decades-old laws, are not doing enough to protect the public interest, our committee intends to find out, and to fix it.
But regardless of what motivates our elected officials, if the Senate starts taking the profit question seriously, they’ll have to dig into the question of who is really benefiting from all this mining — is it the American people, or is it a few industry executives? The truth ain’t rocket science, and it could go a long way toward protecting iconic species and the health of our planet.
Take Action! Protect threatened wildlife like salmon and orcas by speaking out against coal exports in the Pacific Northwest.
You can learn more about the danger of coal exports at NWF’s website, or check out Power Past Coal for more ways to get involved.