Alpha Natural Resources, one of the largest coal companies in America, was a player in major congressional election efforts last year — but you won’t find records of their corporate donations on the Federal Election Commission website or in any public record.
You will, however, find signs of the Virginia-based coal giant’s secret political activities buried in a creditor document filed last Thursday. The recent downturn in coal prices and high debts forced the company to seek bankruptcy protection earlier this month.
The filing lists organizations with which Alpha Natural Resources had any kind of financial transaction, including recipients of grants, creditors and contractors. The filing does not list amounts given or owed by Alpha Natural Resources. A spokesperson for the firm did not respond to a request for comment.
Alpha Natural Resources gave money to an array of nonprofit entities that are not required to report donor information. These groups were pivotal in helping Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives and in electing the new GOP majority in the Senate.
The corporation helped fund the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, a secretive nonprofit group that refused to disclose any donor information during the election last year. The Kentucky Opportunity Coalition was the largest outside campaign entity in the Kentucky senate race, spending over $14 million on television and radio commercials to successfully reelect Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in his campaign against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.
Alpha Natural Resources also helped finance campaign entities associated with the Koch brothers campaign network, including Americans for Prosperity, Themis Trust (a campaign data company), and Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a clearinghouse used to fund a range of organizations supporting Republican election efforts. The Institute for Energy Research, an advocacy group founded by Charles Koch that lobbies in support of fossil fuel subsidies and against renewable energy policies, had a financial relationship with Alpha Natural Resources.
The company, with operations in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Wyoming, had once been viewed as a coal industry powerhouse. In 2011, Alpha Natural Resources borrowed $7.1 billion to purchase Massey Energy after 29 employees were killed in Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine.
The creditor filing reveals a number of other revelations about Alpha Natural Resource’s undisclosed political operation. For instance, the company gave money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a trade association that spent over $35 million during the election last year, largely to benefit GOP candidates. It also donated to Americans Allied for Jobs and Security, a group that spent a small amount supporting Republican candidates during the midterm elections.
The company donated to a number of political groups that favor environmental deregulation on the coal industry, including the Ripon Society, a foundation to support moderate Republicans; the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Virginia; and the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit that works with lobbyists to develop business-friendly template legislation used by state lawmakers. ALEC recently produced template legislation to block states from submitting compliance plans with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, new regulations designed to combat carbon emissions.
The bankruptcy filing lists “Arthur C Brooks C/O AEI 1150 17th St. NW Washington DC,” which appears to be Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has campaigned against the EPA’s new rules governing carbon emissions from coal power plants.
Alpha Natural Resources backed the Heartland Institute, an Illinois-based think tank that aggressively works to counter the belief in climate change. The Heartland Institute, which organizes an annual gathering of climate change deniers, gained notoriety in 2012 for sponsoring billboards comparing those who believe in climate change to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and cult leader Charles Manson.
Bankruptcy filings are providing a rare window into the subterranean world of money in politics. Earlier this year, The Intercept used a bankruptcy filing to reveal secret donations to dark money campaign entities and think tanks made by Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit college with a high rate of student defaults. Many of the beneficiaries of Corinthian Colleges’ secret money helped the school beat back regulations governing the $1.4 billion per year in federally backed student loans the company received.
Just days after his reelection victory, made possible with the support of the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, Sen. McConnell announced that his top priority would be to rein in the EPA’s power to regulate coal companies. Alpha Natural Resources considered the EPA rules a top priority as well.
Great research Lee!
If a company is ready to go bankrupt they should not be allowed to give campaign money or any money away. Basically they are screwing the bondholders over yet giving away money.
Here’s a potential solution for you:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/supercritical-carbon-dioxide-can-make-electric-turbines-greener
There is no such thing as climate “denial”, BTW, and I wish you’d stop using the word. There are, however, “skeptics”. And skepticism in science is perfectly normal and should be encouraged. People are still debating and testing the mechanisms of “evolution” 150 years after Darwin. “Climate science” is by no means “settled”. No real science worth the name ever is.
Sir/Ma’am:
This is just more gov. corporate welfare (and gov. gov. welfare); DOE does not need to be involved in energy research. It’s very likely not a potential solution. Basically, you have what would otherwise be unemployed scientists and eng. taking tax payer dollars to play around with gas turbines to see if something works.
Consider this: there was a time a few years back when IGCC plants were going to be the ‘energy plant of the future’. I can tell you, General Electric (another welfare recip) had a hell of time getting those things (integrated gasification and combined cycle) to work, if they even actually do now. At the time GE’s best customer (TEPCO) was interested. But TEPCO was not stupid, Tokyo was not going to buy the first one. Well, so GE’s first customer for a 50 hz plant was GE. And as the saying goes at GE,…”well, we imagined it worked”.
I believe the claims are largely overstated on reliability and efficiency, when these ‘new’ energy sources pop up. If it weren’t for the DOE (and EPA) we wouldn’t even be hearing about it ‘greener’ sources of energy and the use of supercritical CO2. It’s prob. not economical. Incidentally, there is no discussion on how to mfg. and supply supercritical CO2.
Mr Fang………..here’s a challenge for you and Glenn. Go to a coffee shop and sit down and actually THINK. Then…..just look at this comment section. How many of the comment producers to this article actually get the connection between COAL and Carbon nano-tube economic capitalism…? Geez,…. Elon Musk did(is doing) the same in comparison to the Lead-Acid Battery economy.
Really think hard Mr Fang as you and Glenn sip on your Starbucks. Now look at how small your I-phone is now compared to a telephone booth. Think about that BATTERY inside the wiz-bang phone you have…!
Now …really think Mr Fang. Ask Glenn sitting across from you what HE would do if he was a Senator from Kentucky and “controlled” the COAL MINE..? Would he tell Coal miners about their new gold rush..? …or, would he put the miners pension to “sleep” for a while via bankruptcy to clear the “debt” for a new economic business model to take its place..?
Mr Fang………Glenn luvs “Endicott Steel” nano-tubes….!
What the eff are you talking about? So they’ve discovered that coal can be used to create nano-tubes. In what way does that have anything to do with the fact that Big Coal has been directly behind the climate-change-denial movement?
I sort of understand your point that manufacturing batteries is probably just as damaging as mining coal, but that is certainly arguable. (I believe we should be going whole-hog into fuel cells.) But aside from that, what in the world are you actually trying to say? That we need mountaintop removal to create NANO-TUBES?
More explanation, less ad hominem please.
Mr. Fang ….really..? We wonder when the last time you made the effort to educate yourself about carbon nano-tube technology and the value of COAL to the manufacturing process…? Mr. Fang, this bankruptcy is a real “Short” to wipe the accounts before the assets are sold. How do you think the miner pensions will be nursed..? The real reason efforts are being made to shut down “energy” coal mines has nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with the carbon nano-tube budding economy. WAKE UP…Mr Fang. Don’t be the type of journalist that reports on the VA Burn pit fiasco without realizing how small those new plasma waste to energy converters can be made to be small enough to sit beside your outside air conditioning condenser to generate electricity for your house; instead of PAYING your monthly electric bill…!
Mr Fang….we expect First Look to be a better billy club than this.
Here’s the thing. A robust and open-minded climate programme is what honest climate scientists were campaigning for in the eighties.
Now, when the subject comes up, it is never discussed in terms of current data, but in a confusion of business and politics.
At climate reanalyser.com anyone can follow the daily developments locally and around the world. It will be interesting over the next few weeks to watch sea and air temperature anomalies.
My conclusion is that we have one last chance, now that the time is all used up. We can shut civilisation down and see if it will cool, or fasten our seat belts and get ready for things most of us have trouble imagining.
Excellent reporting and great article. I have been a business owner for over 40 years, how do these companies get it so wrong?
Any links between this group and the campaign to elect Cory Gardner over Mark Udall in Colorado last year?
What is the alt to coal? It isn’t just used for power; it’s used to make steel. If coal goes the way of the dino, then do we slash and burn forests to make steel?
Will there ever be a ‘clean’ source of energy or ‘clean’ manufacturing methods? What does clean mean, anyway? Trees largely canopy country roads; do they love to ‘eat’ the auto engine exhaust? Engine exhaust is deadly to humans; tree exhaust is not, generally.
Look at Nikola Tesla’s writings, you may be surprised what he thought and wrote about over 100 yrs ago.
I agree that ‘environmentalist’ groups tend to do too much obstruction, without keeping a sufficiently broad perspective. It makes sense to shut down coal plants that are emitting dangerous amounts of air pollution that kill people with asthma, but it doesn’t make sense to ignore the goal of making them clean in favor of cracking down on ‘carbon emissions’, while actually exporting the coal at bargain-basement prices to China so we can buy back the stuff they make with it as they get rich on the jobs we don’t have. The ‘clean coal’ research may have been far too little, far too late, but when pilot projects are shut down and nothing else is built, do we blame that on the industry or do we blame that on the ‘environmentalists’?
Meanwhile, there are things that fly totally under the radar – like cement plants. A cement kiln spews out not just significant amounts of carbon dioxide but more heavy metals than a trash incinerator, and is powered by a wide range of burnable trash tossed into it. (I think the wide range of organic matter that can be thrown in is why they’re traditionally owned by the mafia) Most people don’t hear a thing about them until one is already half-built next door to them and they wonder why they can’t sell their land…
We need better environmentalists. People who are willing to make a flexible plan that actually supports a robust economy and abundant power, while specifically targeting the pollution without leaving any loopholes for it to flow out of.
Clean coal research is a gov. scam too; and btw, DOE should be shutdown. The gov does not need to be involved in energy research. There were these facilities called synfuel plants; they were essentially taking coal and coating it with some binder, making briquettes, and calling it… well what ever they want, then receiving a tax credit for it. These plants were moved around quite a bit from coal facility to coal facility; it’s believed to be, only for receiving a tax credit.
How do we know, how can the gov. know, that coal powered production ambient air emissions result in the deaths of anyone today? However, it would be really hard to argue that the folks who lived near that zinc smelting plant in Donora, Pennsylvania did not die from the ambient air… or would it?
I’ll add to your concrete plant :: Bread Bakeries. How much should we pay for a loaf of bread? Bakery ovens emit VOCS. And, here is the acute and chronic health affects according to MN [http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/indoorair/voc/]:
VOCs refer to a group of chemicals. Each chemical has its own toxicity and potential for causing different health effects. Common symptoms of exposure to VOCs include:
Short-Term (Acute) to high levels of VOCs
Eye, nose and throat irritation
Headaches
Nausea / Vomiting
Dizziness
Worsening of asthma symptoms
Long-Term (Chronic) to high levels of VOCs
Increased risk of:
Cancer
Liver damage
Kidney damage
Central Nervous System damage
“volatile organic compounds” is an extremely broad range of compounds – anything with some carbon in it bound to something else, that evaporates. It includes skunk scent and the scent of fresh apples, mineral turpentine, the smell of sweat, nerve gas, nail polish, soap, and yes, the vapors of any cooked food (including bread). I’m sorry, but it is not even faintly productive to see if something makes VOCs and then look up the health effects of VOCs. It *is* possible that industrial bread baking could produce harmful amounts of chemicals such as acrylamide, but you’d have to look at it specifically.
I think that chemicals that are not produced naturally, not produced by longstanding human activities previously believed to be safe, and highly stable (such as the C-F bonds in the Dupont C8 mentioned in other articles recently) should face a greater degree of skepticism than those which are short-lived and which bakers have been breathing in for generations. In part this is based on my opinion that ancient herbal medicine used highly active ingredients surprisingly often – nowhere near 100%, but often enough to show that they were capable of making impressive deductions. So I think that if people have gone millennia without thinking something is harmful, you need pretty solid proof to infringe on them continuing – but we should have a different standard for the next fluorinated chemical to hit the waterways.
The EPA seems to take the VOC emissions from bakeries serious enough to have States permit them, and serious enough to fund research papers, to estimate emissions, etc.
But you’re right perahps folks don’t think bread baking is harmful to them. Why would EPA regulate it under CAA, if there is no harmful health issue or no negative ambient air quality impacts?
Sigh. I didn’t see anything in PubMed before, but indeed the EPA, or at least the Ohio EPA, regulates bakeries. ( http://www.epa.state.oh.us/Portals/41/sb/publications/bakery.pdf ) The culpable compound is ethanol. Supposedly ethanol is responsible for smog (though I don’t see much in PubMed about that either).
I have to say, I find this regulation peculiar because bakeries of any size are merely an alternative to baking at home, which traditionally has been treated as a right. The amount of bread baked is self-limiting. Ethanol is not going to kill the neighbors. The effect on smog is limited only to the degree that bakeries install ‘control devices’ to reduce a pollution fee. I see that “Catalytic Recuperative Oxidizers” and “Regenerative Thermal Oxidizers” are available, but I have to wonder whether the total environmental savings there compensates for the degree of expense in paperwork and installation.
I wonder the same thing. I also think the statement or tidbit on ” bakers breathing for generations” applies to CO2. I believe it is of some interest to note that EPA had to make the determination that CO2 is harmful to human health before it could begin writing in regulations. And arguably farmers breathe methane and CO2 for generations. I suppose the scale and impact are the issues?
To get back to the point of politics, money, and env. reg.: there would seem to be something going on, that somehow money (or a rich man’s trick, if you will) influences what or how things get regulated. Considering too, that a few years back EPA de-listed MEK as a HAP (but now CO2 is harmful, c’mon sounds like bullshit). For god sake man, if we went to the hardware store and opened a can of MEK there’s noway anyone would agree, after acute and especially chronic exposure, that it should be de-listed (still listed as a VOC though, a criteria pollutant).
I believe money influences politics of both parties [env. regulation]; and, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if coal companies bought by Soros thrive under a democratic administration. If coal companies are owned by Rep contributors, they would thrive under republican administrations.
It’s a giant and perhaps more elaborate game of monopoly.
As for clean coal, obviously it is no good to do fake research. But I can’t believe that a country that deludes itself into thinking it can sustain human life on Mars is unwilling to make a serious NASA-grade effort, with NASA-grade people, to figure out how to burn coal and then get the undesired compounds back out of the smoke economically.
there’s no such thing as clean coal. burning of fossil fuels must end soon, the survival of humanity depends on it. Finding better ways to burn fossil fuels solves nothing
Readers might want to ponder my point about coal-dust loss from open rail cars. That means particulate matter, tons of it, sprinkling from the train along every mile from mine to power plant or port terminal. That was my point: every town, every farm, every school along the right of way gets a dose.
It’s not a matter of looking for an alternative to coal. It’s a matter of right-sizing the use. Coal needs to have the full cost to humans incorporated in it’s price — the full cost of mining it safely, the full cost of using it safely, the full cost of cleaning up the carbon it releases. If this full cost means coal is no longer economical to use to produce energy to power A/C units in northern US latitudes where a fan and an open window would do the same job — that’s the point. If it is no longer economical to use it for throw-away commodities, that’s the point. We are paying the full cost anyway, let’s put it out in the open.
That’s not as illuminating as this article which reports George Soros recently purchased an “initial 1 million shares of Peabody Energy and 553,200 shares of Arch Coal” [http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/17/the-new-king-coal-george-soros/].
I believe I’ve heard or read somewhere that everything is a rich man’s trick. It’s prb true; people using rules and politics to ensure you ‘lose’ and they ‘win’.
Coram Nobis mentions fugitive rail car emissions: a regulating authority [whoever that is] just needs to enforce the application of crusting agents. Problem largely solved.
Oh and lest I forget: Patriot Coal is set to unload its WV assets to a so-called ‘environmentally focused nonprofit’.. once under their control operations will continue of course, because, after all, they are concerned with the env. and not making a profit. [http://www.wsj.com/articles/patriot-coal-reaches-deal-to-sell-remaining-mines-1439829680]
Hypothetical: If Soros keeps his investment and the Obama’s EPA remains in power would coal be more environmentally friendly then?
Hypothetical: No.
I don’t know where people get this deluded idea that George Soros is some kind of standard-bearer for the left. I guess when you’re grasping at straws, you can’t be too choosy.
Sir/Ma’am,
I don’t believe soros a standard bearer; but, the article is about money and politics influencing environmental stuff…
Reportedly, or perhaps it is a fact, Soros contributes to Obama, Obama sets EPA agenda (sorta). So, you believe No; and by inference, you’d believe Obama is above influential money.
I think it’s been said on this website to: “forget checking for Obama’s birth certificate, someone needs to check his DNA” …because he has largely not delivered what he said he stood for or wanted to do as Senator and Candidate.
Some of the talk seems to be about a move to covered hopper cars for coal. They already do that for loose cargoes like grain. The worry seems to have been that grain, sugar or such would be more vulnerable to weather, where coal wouldn’t be. Trouble is, the problem is also what blows out, not just in.
I’m not sure which agency would regulate coal dust pollution. NTSB, of course, could mandate a change from DOT-111 tank cars when it came to crude oil, since the danger was obvious. But this? STB heard the BNSF case, but an environmental or air-quality agency might look in.
So Soros makes an investment of less than 0.01% of his wealth. Is that really a big deal?
Well,…if he’s willing to just throw away 0.01% of his wealth in a losing investment…could’ve done something else w that money.
Some things are fairly straight fwd in biz aren’t they? Don’t spend more money than u take in and regarding investment (and risk) buy low and sell high.
I am suspicious that there are other kinds of “dark money” that people aren’t even aware of. Last night, Donald Trump made this noble speech about how he refuses campaign contributions so nobody could buy him … while taking time out to call the head of Comcast a “great guy”. I wish someone could figure out whether Trump is getting good deals, rather than campaign contributions, from the Koch brothers and all the other usual suspects.
For that matter, is this why CEOs make the big bucks? So they can make side deals and pay bribes out of public view? There is so much cartel money in the U.S…. it would be no surprise if money laundering has become the quintessence of business.
Bankruptcy filed last Thursday, huh? Take a look at their announced results for 1Q 2015.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alpha-natural-resources-announces-results-for-first-quarter-2015-300074833.html
Any insider trades for ANR between then and last Thursday, Lee?
TI may also want to look into the coal dust loss issue at some point. These are open coal cars (as in your photo), and it seems that BNSF testified about that before the Surface Transportation Board. Sierra Club has a lawsuit ongoing.
This, from a coal-industry source:
http://www.coalage.com/departments/transportation-tips/2736-coal-dust-control-in-the-pacific-northwest.html#.VdzwISVVhBc
That means a lot of coal dust blown off between the mine and the port or power plant. Also, the annual railroad corporate reports — Canadian National, BNSF, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX — no doubt will show how much of their cargoes are coal in any given year. FYI.
Lee, where can one view the entire list? Who else might we find on there?
Since when is it news that companies support those who support their industry!! Check out the PACS of the wind and solar interest groups and companies! Get the true scientific facts on climate change,you just might be surprised!!
Mr Lee, would we be surprised if we checked YOU out?
Be that as it may, at least it wouldn’t be a crime against humanity.