Arch Coal CEO Ready To Push For Coal Rule Suspension, Rollback - WSJ

[hatrack]

Arch Coal Inc. Chief Executive Steven Leer, whose coal-mining company has faced a swath of new rules, said that Congress should put on hold planned regulations and consider overturning existing rules following years of stepped-up government involvement in the U.S. economy.

“If I were Congress and the president, very seriously what I would do is I’d say “we’ve got a lot legislation and rules and promulgations over the last four years that go back to the Bush administration,’” he said in an interview late Monday on the sidelines of the Wall Street Journal CEO Council. “I’m going to take the next year and we’re just going to review them all and any of them that don’t support jobs and don’t make sense and don’t give us the bang for the dollar that we thought, we’re going to move to rescind them or change them or modify them.

EDIT

Leer said that he thought that Arch would wind up in court with the EPA over the agency’s efforts to hold up a permit granted to Arch to develop one of the largest mountaintop-removal coal mines in West Virginia. The EPA has already proposed vetoing the project, the first time in the EPA’s 40-year history that the agency has proposed vetoing a water permit after it was issued. The EPA’s efforts to negotiate with Arch on modifications to the project have not been successful. “I told the administrator I hope we can work this out but if we can’t we’ll let the courts decide it for us,” Leer said.

“We continue to search for ways that can satisfy some of their concerns,” Leer said. “We’ve done a lot of work to get to this point and that’s part of the problem–there’s not much more that we can trim or trade or figure out how to do it differently,” he said. “There’s not a lot of chips that we particularly have anymore because we’ve already used them.”

EDIT

http://blogs.wsj.com/ceo-council/2010/11/16/arch-coal-ceo-calls-for-rolling-back-regulation/

[yellowcanine]

1. “We continue to search for ways that can satisfy some of their concerns,” Leer said.

Yes, I am sure they have been staying up until the wee hours of the morning trying to satisfy the concerns of people who care about the environment. :sarcasm:

[Nihil]

2. I think he has the "we" mixed up ...

> and we’re just going to review them all and any of them that don’t support
> jobs and don’t make sense and don’t give us the bang for the dollar that
> we thought, we’re going to move to rescind them or change them or modify them.

Greedy, corrupt, polluting scum.