More bad news for the coal industry

If all goes well, I will have more on the state of coal on this blog this weekend. That assumes my power and my DSL service remain on during the big snowstorm we're supposed to have. The snow started falling here in Huntington WV around 9:30 a.m.

First, a federal court has refused to grant a stay of the EPA's Clean Power Plan. Notice that Murray Energy, which moves coal on the upper Ohio, is one of the plaintiffs. (If that link doesn't work, try this one.).

This is off the river, but still significant. I looked at numbers for CSX last week, and they were down, but it is industry-wide. Railroad loadings of coal in the first two weeks of this year are down.


Back to the snow, the National Weather Service said we could have whiteout conditions today. For boats that have radar, I assume that's like running in the dark of night with the exception that your spotlights don't help out a whole lot during a whiteout.

Back when I was younger, I liked snow. When I was in college, I preferred winter snow to winter rain because my feet didn't get nearly as wet in snow as they did in rain. Then I graduated and started to drive in the stuff. That first winter in a car that was terrible in snow was ... not fun. It was also one of those years when the Ohio River froze over, the first time I had seen that.