Robert Murray is no fan of Barack Obama.
Murray, you’re reminded, is the CEO of Murray Energy. Earlier this year, the company laid off 21% of its employees, with the majority of the cuts coming in West Virginia, which was staring down a $195 million budget gap thanks to the slide in coal prices.
Around two months after the job cuts, Murray spoke to Republicans at the Lincoln Day Dinner and let it all out. The 75-year old told lawmakers he was “righteously mad” at the President, who he says is on a "bizarre personal and political" quest to destroy not only the coal industry, but the entire country. “Radical environmentalists, liberal elitists, [and] Hollywood characters" aren’t helping, he added, for good measure.
As SNL wrote at the time, "Murray said President Barack Obama's administration has issued regulations that illegally bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U.S. EPA in charge of the nation's electric grid." Here are some other notable quotes:
"Thus, these people are prohibited from working and fall to the negative side of the economic ledger for the rest of their lives. This is not the America that I have always cherished. Well, I am obviously not giving up. Nor should you. We have the law, science, economics, cold hard energy facts and the Constitution on our side. Our cause is right. It is right for the coal industry and our communities and America. We must continue to do whatever we can to overcome the insanity of our current government."
Well, lest anyone should think that Murray has deviated from his position in the five months since those comments were made, Bloomberg is out with a new piece which highlights just how steadfast the coal baron truly is:
At a time when the U.S. coal industry is beset on all sides -- by environmentalists, by regulators, by the economics of shale gas -- Murray has positioned himself as King Coal’s warrior-in-chief. And his main antagonist is the country’s commander-in-chief.
He calls Barack Obama “the greatest enemy I’ve ever had in my life.” His fight with the president, he says, has gotten “beyond personal.”
Since Inauguration Day in 2009, Murray Energy Corp. has filed no fewer than a dozen separate lawsuits against the federal government, more than any other U.S. coal company. Murray, the man, is trying to beat back Obama administration regulations, which he says are strangling his industry. Someone, he says, has to try.
Coal is his life. At 16, he went to work at the coal face to support a family fallen on hard times. His father had been paralyzed from the neck down in a mining accident seven years earlier and his mother was stricken with cancer. “I know what it is to be poor,” he said.
Today he’s responsible for a company with 7,500 employees digging coal out of 13 mines in five states. Not surprisingly, he’s no big fan of the recent Paris climate agreement, dismissing it as “a meaningless fraud that will have no effect on carbon dioxide emissions.”
“There’s no question that Barack Obama and his Democrat supporters constantly, daily, pick winners and losers depending on who supports them and their politics,” he said, his voice rising.
Murray has asked judges to void the president’s marquee plans for curbing mercury, carbon dioxide and ozone emissions and vows to challenge pending rules designed to protect streams from adverse mining impacts.
He was also at the forefront of a suit launched last year to overturn the EPA’s Clean Power Plan before it even hit the books -- a gambit rejected by the court as premature, twice. He sued the EPA again when the Clean Power Plan was officially published on Oct. 23. That was one of three challenges he filed over an eight-day span, including bids to quash the EPA’s carbon capture and ozone reduction rules.
The bulk of the cases are still pending, but so far losses outnumber victories.
“They haven’t won anything,” said the NRDC’s Doniger.
Either way, Murray intends to keep up his courtroom counter-attack. Told that Peabody Energy Corp. the biggest U.S. producer, sues at nowhere near the same rate, he replied, “nobody does. The rest of the industry put together doesn’t.” “They don’t have the money,” he said. “And I don’t either.”
Maybe not, but as we noted back in July, Murray does apparently "have the money" to take advantage of the industry downturn by snapping up weaker players. While laying of 1,400 employees, the company has simultaneously spent at least $4.6 billion (enough to pay the annual salaries of 54,120 West Virginia coal miners, according to data from the National Mining Association) in the past two years acquiring competitors.
One wonders how many of the company's now jobless workers could have been retained with the money Murray is spending to send high priced lawyers to tilt at windmills in the courtroom.
In October, Murray was fined $5,000 by the FEC for violating election spending rules when he spent $22,000 buying signs that read "Fire Obama."