As though coal-fired steam
Robert Murray is pumped — as though coal-fired steam might be coursing through his veins. Striding purposefully, he ascends a lectern in a conference room at Pittsburgh's Wyndham Grand Downtown hotel toting a cardboard box with hundreds of copies of his keynote speech to give out later lest anyone miss a word.
It turns out to be a corporate version of a hellfire-and-damnation sermon for the 250 U.S. coal executives assembled at the Platts Coal Marketing Days conference. Satan and his minions aren't in the room but Murray knows their names.
"Environmental alarmists" and "liberal elitists," he says, his voice rising as he whips off his glasses. And worse than them all, "the insane, regal administration of King Obama" and Obama's Environmental Protection Agency.
Murray, 74, pauses for effect and then lowers his voice. "We have the absolute destruction of the United States coal industry. It isn't coming back. It's permanent. Virtually all of it is permanent. And if you think it's coming back, you don't understand the business. Or you're smoking dope."
This is vintage Murray, America's pro-coal provocateur-in- chief, a coal miner's son and a former miner himself, a man whose anti-regulation record is so unwavering that he once dismissed acid rain as a hoax, never mind climate change.