They spoke last, after the nine coal industry and coal - allied politician witnesses, who bemoaned the burden of following critical clean water regulations and wrongly blamed the Obama administration for its coal -
production woes — of course without a
single mention of their real problem, which is the subject of a flurry of current news reports: Coal
in Appalachia is running out, there is little left to mine (see the AP's report that broke the story, Jeff Goodell's Rolling Stone
piece «The Coming Decline and Fall of Big Coal,» and even this energy industry publication story).