Clinton Ruffles Feathers with Coal Comments

By Abby Harvey

Presidential candidate and former Secretary of State and Hillary Clinton provoked a bit of backlash after stating during a town hall Sunday in Ohio that her proposed energy plan would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

The Democratic front-runner went on to state that “we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.”

“By flippantly writing-off the well-being of countless coal miners, their families and all of those involved in the coal-based electricity industry, Secretary Clinton is showing Ohio’s voters her true colors ahead of tomorrow’s primary,” a spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity said in a statement released Monday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was also fast to respond, calling Clinton out on the Senate floor Monday. “Miners in Kentucky and across the country know that coal keeps the lights on and puts food on the table. What they want is to provide for their families, but here’s how more Democrats seem to view these hardworking Americans and their families: just statistics, just the cost of doing business, just obstacles to their ideology,” McConnell said.

The statement doesn’t seem to have had a major effect to the candidate’s chances in Ohio, at least in the primary, which she won Tuesday evening.

Under Clinton’s energy plan, more than half a billion solar panels would be installed across the country by 2021 and by 2027 the nation would generate enough clean renewable energy to power every home.

The energy policy states that Clinton will “protect the health and retirement security of coalfield workers and their families and provide economic opportunities for those that kept the lights on and factories running for more than a century.” The document does not offer any details as to how exactly Clinton intends to protect these workers.

The linchpin of Clinton’s plan seems to be creating clean energy jobs in coal country. “I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key to coal country,” she said during the town hall.

Clinton’s competitor, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), also notes the need to support coal workers in his campaign’s energy plan. “Our transition away from fossil fuels must be fair to those currently working in the energy sector, which means those workers and their families must be able to depend on safe, living-wage jobs,” the plan says.

The senator’s plan notes a recent piece of legislation Sanders proposed, the Clean Energy Workers Just Transition Act, “which provides the most comprehensive package of benefits for workers, including extended unemployment benefits, education opportunities, health care and job training for those transitioning to a career in the clean energy industry.”

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Clinton Ruffles Feathers with Coal Comments