Alan Lowenthal: “I would like to talk in response to some of the points raised by my esteemed colleagues from the other side about the…”

“I would like to talk in response to some of the points raised by my esteemed colleagues from the other side about the doom and gloom of job loss numbers that they presented. I believe 70,000 jobs will be lost with the proposed rule or we just heard also possibly 80,000 direct mining jobs might be lost. These are, indeed, frightening numbers. Unfortunately, they are not credible and not based upon any kind of evidence. Those estimates which we are hearing come from a study that was paid for by the National Mining Association, and those numbers are the same, that 70- or 80,000, as the total number of coal mining jobs currently in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration. {time} 1515 In fact, the National Mining Association study that we have heard about projects up to 52,000 coal mining job losses in Appalachia as a result of the administration's proposed rule. There are less than 50,000 coal miners in that entire region today, so apparently this rule creates jobs before it costs jobs. We shouldn't be surprised that the industry would come up with such inflated numbers. After all, they don't need to be accurate. They just need to scare people, much in the same way as the American public was told that the Affordable Care Act is going to destroy an untold number of jobs, except that we have now added 14 million private sector jobs since that act was signed into law. Today we should be extremely skeptical of industry scare tactics.…”