Over at FossilAgenda.com, I'm writing about energy and climate change issues. Generally speaking, my goal is to cut through the industry propaganda (clean coal, climate-change denialism, etc.) and otherwise bring attention to fossil industry malfeasance.
I've been doing this work for three months now. For the most part, I've spent most of my time on deep dives into the coal extraction industry. I've been more than a little overwhelmed by what I've found. Coal mining is dominated by industry chiefs that Hollywood couldn't make up.
(Actually, come to think of it, I guess, perhaps, they have. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) in There Will Be Blood comes to mind):
Anyway, FossilAgenda.com is still in its infancy and hasn't really taken the world by storm yet, so... It makes sense to share compelling content here too. Come over the flip for the inaugural episode of the Coal Follies.
Well, there's nothing like getting 2/3s of the way through a piece, only to find that the same story was front-paged while you were writing... ed.
The West Virginia Gazette has the story, but you have to look really hard to find it. Spread across two pages, the important stuff begins unwinding, at last, in paragraph 19 (of 27):
Patriot Coal seeks to break contract with UMWA
Patriot Coal Corp. on Thursday asked a U.S. bankruptcy judge to throw out the terms of the company's contract with the United Mine Workers union and modify the health-care plan covering thousands of retired miners.
Lawyers for Patriot Coal [...] indicated in a news release that the company wants to cut wages, reduce benefits and adjust work rules for its unionized employees "to a level consistent with the regional labor market."
[snip 17 paragraphs, and click to page 2]
Peabody formed Patriot as a spin-off company where Peabody tucked union mines in West Virginia and the Midwest, along with pension and health-care obligations for union retirees. Patriot later bought another company, Magnum Coal, which had been similarly spun off by Arch Coal when it got rid of most of its Appalachian operations and their related pension and health-care liabilities.
UMW officials say Patriot was essentially a "company created to fail," to give Peabody Energy and Arch Coal a way to shed obligations to fund union pensions and health-care benefits in the nation's Eastern coalfields, while profiting from their giant, nonunion surface mines out West.
Something is simply broken about our system if this is allowed to stand. The two parent companies, Peabody and Arch, have profitably mined coal for decades. They negotiated contracts with their miners, and the miners gave up some pay in exchange for income and health security in their retirement.
For decades, the miners kept their end of the bargain. For decades, they got up before the sun every morning, braved coal dust and methane fumes. For decades they duckwalked for hours at a time through four foot mine shafts, dodging cave-ins, heavy equipment and poisonous gas. Finally, the lucky ones made it to retirement with their bodies reasonably intact. (But maybe not their lungs: Even today, 10,000 new cases of black lung are diagnosed every year).
For decades, Peabody and Arch happily gorged on the profits generated by the miner's dangerous labor.
But then came the Clean Air Amendments of 1990. Acid rain was killing off entire ecosystems across the east. The coal in Peabody and Arch's mines was infused with sulfer, which, when burnt and exposed to water vapor, creates sulfuric acid - acid rain. Luckily for power generators that didn't want to install costly pollution controls, an alternative was available: coal from Wyoming's Powder basin is low in sulfur.
This, apparently, suited Peabody just fine. They owned mines in Wyoming too.
But what of their mines back east? They couldn't sell that coal (at least not at a premium, like they did before the Clean Air Act amendments). And they had all those pension and health care obligations...
Well, apparently some amoral bean-counter came up with the idea of divesting the company of the (for all practical purposes) spent mines (and their obligations).
They kept their valuable assets, while shedding their liabilities.
We've heard people around here say "Corporations are people, my friend."
Actually, they appear to be superhuman.
The law doesn't allow mere mortals to avoid their debts and contractual obligations by artifice. There's actually a name for that: fraud.
Are you sick yet?
Well, forgive me, but this story has a poetic ending:
Patriot's new court filings come just days before it goes into the bankruptcy court on Monday to seek approval for nearly $7 million in bonuses to corporate executives and salaried employees.
"That $7 million would pay for a lot of oxygen bottles for the black lung sufferers," Roberts said.