Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series based on Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s appearance before The Register-Herald’s editorial board.



Enacting a new federal law is no solution to safety concerns in the coal industry since there is ample legislation in force to get the task done — if the Mine Safety and Health Administration would only do it, Sen. Jay Rockefeller says.

On a related topic, Rockefeller says he can do nothing in the short term to get gas prices down, but wants to see a new “Manhattan Project” on converting coal to liquids, providing America with alternate fuels.

In response to last year’s tragedy that left a dozen underground coal miners dead at the Sago Mine, Congress passed the MINER Act, calling for increased safety measures, but since then, the United Mine Workers of America has complained that MSHA has been lax in enforcing it.

Of chief concern with the UMWA has been the spotty record of conducting mandatory inspections.

“I don’t need a federal law to tell me to do my best every day,” Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told The Register-Herald editorial board this week. “I just don’t.”

With inspections held in limbo at some installations, are some coal companies exploiting the situation?

Bristling at the question, Rockefeller said, “That’s a provocative question.”

“I don’t think that coal in this state has always taken every single advantage they could have, every possible thing they could do on their own,” he said.

Rockefeller recalled his initial foray into West Virginia in 1964 while working as a VISTA volunteer and remembering a coal mine strike nearly every day.

“Every day was a headline, somebody getting a temporary restraining order,” he said.

In that era, however, he said, the operator met with the union leaders at the mine face and ironed out differences, and then for a long time, possibly two decades at least, there were virtually no work stoppages.

“It just disappeared,” he said. “You don’t have to be constantly at war with somebody. But you do if you’re not around the table. Then your press release has to be 12 percent stronger than their press release on their statements. It was an extraordinary thing to see them solve problems at the face of the mine. They didn’t leave until they had them solved.”

Rockefeller said he has had “a very low regard” for MSHA under the Bush administration, and criticized director Richard Strickler as “an anathema to me.”

“I’m not sure that what you do is try to pass another bill, add some more things on,” the senator said. “First of all, it’s going to get vetoed.”

Secondly, mine issues appeal to a much narrower audience since coal is produced in only 16 states, unlike the State Children’s Health Insurance Program which is in force across the entire country, he noted.

“MSHA is meant to do rules and regulations and meant to have inspections all over the place,” he said.

Rockefeller suggested its failure to carry out its mission could lie in the daily $2 billion outlay to keep the war going in Iraq, combined with $3 trillion in tax cuts — “virtually all of which I voted against, except the earned income tax credits and things of this sort.” Those have just “wrecked this country,” he said.

Moving on to gas prices, Rockefeller said he cannot simply walk into the board room of ExxonMobil and demand that prices at the pump take a nosedive, especially after a letter criticizing the energy giant’s position on global warming.

“They’re funding all this phony stuff that said there’s no problem,” he said.

By the holiday season, the U.S. Department of Energy says gas prices could reach $3.40 a gallon, or higher.

In the long haul, however, the senator says America needs to embark on a second “Manhattan Project,” not to find a new and powerful way of waging war, but to invite scientific know-how to a place in New Mexico, marshaling perhaps 150 to 1,000 of the finest brains working and harnessing them for a coal-to-liquids project that can solve the issue of sequestration of unwanted gases.

With crude prices spiraling and hiking prices at the pump, he pointed out, more and more voices are joining the energy independence choir, but no real progress has come to make the coal conversion practical and acceptable to environmental concerns.

“We haven’t started the science,” Rockefeller said. “We haven’t started the research. I believe in science. I believe in technology.

“There is nobody who can convince me that we can’t burn coal cleanly. Nobody can convince me we can’t do the same thing on liquids.”

— E-mail:

mannix@register-herald.com