Enviro to Coloradans worried about coal-mine shutdown: ‘Tough sh**’

A WildEarth Guardians official had this message after the Interior Department refused to appeal a court ruling that could cost the jobs of 220 Colorado coal miners: Tough luck. Except he didn’t say “luck.” “My initial response is ‘tough sh**,’ ” Jeremy Nichols, WildEarth Guardians climate and energy program director, told the liberal Colorado Independent in a July 13 post. “They [the Interior Department] didn’t appeal, and there is nothing they can do about it now,” Mr. Nichols said. Supporters of the mine decried his comments Thursday as “callous” and an example of the group’s “out-of-control war on coal,” as Advancing Colorado’s Jonathan Lockwood put it. “I wonder if Jeremy Nichols has the courage to say that directly — face-to-face — to the 220 coal miners who will lose their jobs if Nichols and WildEarth Guardians are successful in shutting down the Colowyo Mine,” said Amy Oliver Cooke, energy policy director at the free-market Independence Institute in Denver. “Better yet, I wonder if he would be that callous to the children of those same men and women,” she said. “In that one statement, Nichols personifies modern environmentalism. It’s an elitist movement with no regard for hardworking families in Colorado or any other state.”...more

Ms. Cooke is right about environmentalism being an elitist movement and the harm it can cause.  But before we go too far down the road of victimhood we should ask:  How did they get in a position to publicly treat us with such disdain?

They developed the tools and methods to elect politicians who have done their bidding by a) the passage of environmental laws b) the appointment of officials to administer those laws and c) the appointment of judges to interpret those laws.

Until the we turn this around in the voting booth we can expect more laws, more environmentalist administrators and more bad court decisions.

And continued disdain from the environmental movement.