For years, Republicans have attacked President Barack Obama for waging a war on coal. In fact, for much of the Environmental Protection Agency’s existence, they’ve offered doomsday predictions that any regulations on coal would make the lights go out. It was little surprise, then, that on Monday, minutes before Obama entered the East Room of the White House to lay out his historic plan to rein in carbon emissions from power plants, Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor to castigate the proposal.

“I am not going to sit by while the White House takes aim at the lifeblood of our state’s economy,” the Kentucky senator said. The new regulations, he argued, would mean “fewer jobs, shuttered power plants, and higher electricity costs for families and businesses.”

McConnell vowed to fight the Clean Power Plan, which requires a 32-percent cut in power plant pollution over 2005 levels by 2030, with all the tools at his disposal—from legislative maneuvers to lawsuits. And he's supported by the fossil fuel industry, which has predictably piled on to the criticism.

The Environmental Protection Agency " is pursuing an illegal plan that will drive up electricity costs and put people out of work," Mike Duncan, the president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, said in a statement on Sunday, after details of Obama's plan were teased. The country's largest privately held coal company, Murray Energy, promised to file multiple lawsuits against the new rule.

Reaction from the oil and gas industry has been more mixed. The American Petroleum Institute said in a statement that it “opposes the rule because it oversteps the authority given to the EPA under the Clean Air Act.” Even as it registered its complaint, the oil lobby tellingly didn't pledge to fight the proposal. And the plan gives natural gas a boost, even if it isn’t as much as the industry would like. "We are confident about the role that natural gas can and will play in America's clean power future," America’s Natural Gas Alliance commented.