Coal apropos top McKinley’s agenda

Walking into Rep. David McKinley’s (R-W.Va.) office, the aboriginal affair a company notices is the life-size affiche aloft his couch of atramentous miner James Brandon and his adolescent daughter, Kailee.

“I’m searching out for this guy appropriate here,” McKinley said, pointing to the poster.

“When I came to Washington, I begin out that the mining industry did not accept actual abundant account and these individuals were advised as numbers and I’m aggravating to personalize it for anyone who comes into the office.”

“This atramentous miner, he’s real. He’s a animal being. He’s a father, a brother, an uncle, a neighbor, the guy who sits in foreground of you in church. He’s not just a statistic.”

McKinley’s commune is in atramentous country and the appreciative seventh-generation West Virginian is angry to assure it.

“People don’t accept if they’ve never been in a atramentous mine,” McKinley said. “This guy has to clamber on his easily and knees all day continued for weeks and months on end until he gets that coal, just so you and I can go home and accept electricity and about-face on our air conditioning … I wish them to be captivated with a college admire actuality in Congress.”

One way that McKinley has approved to accession the contour of atramentous is through H.R. 2273, the Atramentous Residuals Reclaim and Management Act. That bill anesthetized the House in October 2011, but never got a vote in the Senate.

As a way to force the issue, McKinley approved to acquaint the artery and busline conferees to accede it. But that, too, failed. McKinley charcoal undeterred.

“I didn’t appear actuality to just advance it and lose it,” he said.

The admeasurement would accept instructed coal-burning ability plants to reclaim the atramentous ash — or fly ash — that is produced from afire the atramentous in added products.

“Fly ash is an certain byproduct of afire coal. If you bake coal, you get ash, just like if you bandy a log on the fireplace. The catechism for the account companies is, ‘What do they do with the ash?’ ” McKinley said.

“American adeptness at its best begin that you can mix it into compounds and accomplish drywall, bowl tile, bowling balls, bowl adverse tops, cosmetics and toothpaste. But the better use of it has been in concrete.”

McKinley said the atramentous ash recycling industry already employs added than 300,000 workers, and that’s with just 40 percent of atramentous ash getting reused.

“This was a jobs bill,” McKinley said. “What we were accomplishing was acceptance it to be acclimated in accurate so we could cascade added roads. If we pave added roads, we appoint added people. If we body added bridges, we’re traveling to appoint added humans — it’s a jobs bill. But they got bent up in their credo and war [on coal], so we absent that. But we’ll appear aback addition way.”

McKinley said one acumen his bill bootless was because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved to alarm assembly into cerebration that atramentous ash is hazardous, admitting the after-effects from EPA studies done during the Clinton administering that say it isn’t.

“I don’t wish to do abroad with the EPA. There are a lot of scientists there [who] are apparently able-bodied intended, but appropriate now I anticipate it’s become something of a rogue accumulation bent up by issues of credo rather than science,” McKinley said.

“The science is actual bright on things like fly ash and the mercury and arsenic levels in that, it’s actual commensurable to what you’d acquisition in your backyard. We don’t accede our backyards toxic, but in Washington, humans use that chat baneful afield because they’re not scientifically accomplished and it’s a alarm tactic.

“The best way I can adverse it is, ‘Do you accede the angel abstract you buy in the cool bazaar baneful because angel abstract has arsenic in it?’ It’s just a trace element, but it’s there. And there’s just a trace aspect of mercury in coal, but that’s baneful and angel abstract is not. It’s inconsistent because we don’t accept a war on apples, we accept a war on coal.”

Serving on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, McKinley said addition affair he affairs to plan on is calm air quality.

“The EPA says on their own website that the calm air superior can be as abundant as 96 times worse than the air outside,” McKinley said. “So if humans advance our corporations for discharges from smokestacks and water, anticipate about it, why aren’t we afraid about our calm quality? Because we absorb 90 percent of our time indoors.”

McKinley said furniture, acrylic and carpeting all afford toxins that can accident health.