'I don’t believe in putting our coal under the ground forever,' Romney said Friday. Romney intensifies EPA attacks

Mitt Romney is stepping up a favorite Republican attack line in battleground states: President Barack Obama’s overzealous Environmental Protection Agency is killing jobs.

The GOP presidential nominee is telling voters in Colorado, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia that Obama’s EPA is to blame for wiping out the coal industry. Romney and his surrogates are warning Iowans of EPA plans to regulate for farm dust and railing against the agency for flying airplanes over livestock operations to spy for dirty water.


( Also on POLITICO: Mitt visits coal country)

In many instances, Romney’s EPA attacks stretch the boundaries of what the agency actually does or can do. The EPA has repeatedly denied any plans for new farm dust rules, and the planes have been used as a cost-cutting enforcement measure dating back to the George W. Bush administration. Energy experts say the coal industry’s problems are a byproduct of all-time lows in natural gas prices rather than new air pollution requirements that have been subject to legal battles for more than a decade.

But the Romney campaign is betting that public perception won’t factor into complicated realities of energy and environmental policy. Romney stood out as a moderate during primary season when his GOP rivals threatened to kill the Nixon-era agency , but his attacks have picked up in the homestretch to November.

“I don’t believe in putting our coal under the ground forever,” Romney said Friday at a rally in southwestern Virginia, the swing state’s main coal-producing region. Standing in front of a “Coal Country Stands With Mitt” banner, Romney also referenced Obama’s EPA chief, who he said has advanced regulations that make building a new coal-fired power plant “virtually impossible.”

During Wednesday’s debate in Denver, Romney launched a similar attack, telling Obama that “people in the coal industry feel like it’s getting crushed by your policies.”

Romney has also blamed EPA air pollution and climate change rules for creating a tough economic and regulatory climate that drove Alpha Natural Resources’ closure of eight mines in Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia as well as its plans to eliminate up to 1,200 jobs by early 2013. And his campaign started airing ads last month in Ohio and Virginia charging the EPA with pushing regulations that will ruin the coal industry.

( Also on POLITICO: Inside the campaign: Reinventing Romney)

“We have 250 years of coal. Why wouldn’t we use it?” Romney says in his “War on Coal” commercial, which shows him giving a stump speech in rural Ohio flanked by coal miners.

Another Romney ad released last month recycles Obama’s January 2008 admission to the San Francisco Chronicle that electricity rates would “skyrocket” if Congress passed his cap-and-trade bill. “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them,” Obama said during his first presidential campaign.

“Obama wages war on coal while we lose jobs to China, who’s using more coal every day. Now your job is in danger,” the narrator in the Romney ad says.

Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher accused the Romney team of leaning on ideas from oil and coal executives to fuel its EPA attacks. Romney, he added, has “repeatedly employed blatantly false claims about job creation and job elimination in attacking the EPA — using it as a boogeyman to propagate myths and falsehoods in the name of a false choice between robust energy production and responsible environmental protections.”

Former Rep. Tom Perriello, a Virginia Democrat, slammed Romney on Friday for his tough pro-coal talk now even though he opposed extending the life of a coal-fired power plant as Massachusetts governor: Romney said in 2003 that the aging electric utility in Salem, Mass., “kills people.”

“Virginians don’t trust people who say one thing on one side of the mountain and another thing when they’re on the other side of the mountain,” Perriello said during a conference call organized by the Democratic National Committee. “They expect you to be on the level.”

The Romney campaign’s swing-state attacks on coal, the EPA and Obama administration regulations are coming from surrogates as well.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli last month told a local chamber of commerce in southwestern Virginia that Romney would eliminate Obama-era pollution rules by executive order. “We haven’t talked about this one or that one, but he’s made it pretty clear if he’s elected the things legally within his reach he will dial back,” Cuccinelli said, according to the Kingsport Times-News.

In March, Romney said Obama regulators “would have shut down the Wright Brothers for their dust pollution.” Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) repeated that warning in a mid-September appearance for the campaign during a Des Moines, Iowa, forum on agriculture issues.

“Do you know how long we have been fighting them on the dust regulation? Don’t be fooled. If Barack Obama is reelected we are going to be dealing with the dust regulation again,” Johanns said.

Johanns, a former Nebraska governor and Bush-era Agriculture secretary, cited the EPA’s plan to treat milk spills “the same as oil spills” — a policy that the agency ultimately rejected. Johanns also attacked Obama over EPA’s livestock enforcement efforts. “Well, come to find out the EPA was taking airplanes up and flying at 1,500 feet to spy on producers,” he said.

Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said the campaign stands by the charge that the president is out to kill the coal industry. With a cap-and-trade bill dead, Obama has said he’d use the EPA to deal with climate change and air pollution issues.

“The Clean Air Act requires some regulation, but it does not require the unreasonable and economically disastrous approach taken by the Obama administration,” Williams said. “This is simply an excuse used to justify President Obama’s job-killing, big government agenda.”

In a point-by-point rebuttal to POLITICO, the Obama campaign challenged Romney’s assertions that EPA rules have been killing industry jobs. Coal mining jobs, the campaign said, reached a 15-year high in 2011, and a new rule to limit mercury emissions from power plants would create nearly 50,000 construction jobs as electric utilities install new pollution control equipment. EPA’s climate change rules also come after the agency determined greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and the environment, a decision Romney has said he’d try to overturn.

Former Iowa Agriculture secretary Patty Judge, who represented Obama during the Des Moines forum, rebutted Johanns’ claims about new policies making life harder for farmers. “There are no pending regulations by EPA to regulate farm dust. Period. The end,” she said. She also challenged Johanns’ statements about the EPA planes, which has become a viral Internet story that distorts the Bush-era program into claims that federal regulators are using unmanned military-like drones.

“There are no drones,” Judge said.

The EPA is in a tough spot amid a presidential campaign — its policies can easily be challenged over their costs, while the benefits aren’t always so obvious, said Christine Todd Whitman, Bush’s first EPA administrator. “Unfortunately, it’s the way our whole political system is going,” she said. “You go for the easy sound bites that are going to whip up their base. Both sides do it.”

Industry polls show the Romney EPA attacks may work with some Democrats in coal-producing swing states. According to a survey released last month by YouGov and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry-funded group, 44 percent of adults surveyed in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia disapproved of how EPA was doing its job, compared with 21 percent who approved. The survey’s results were almost the same when the pollsters included a larger sample of Democrats.

“They don’t hate the EPA, especially in Virginia. A lot of their neighbors work there,” said Tom Riehle, a senior vice president at the polling firm YouGov. “But they do have a long-standing difference with the Democratic elites placing a higher priority on the environment over the economy and working class.”

Environmentalists acknowledge the Romney attacks against EPA can work well in targeted areas of the country. But they point to polling data that shows widespread support for EPA clamping down on polluters and for the agency resisting Republicans and industry attacks.

Public Policy Polling and the Natural Resources Defense Council released a poll last month showing that voters in eight swing states support presidential candidates by double digits who favor reductions in power plant pollution, incentives for renewable energy and the public disclosure of chemicals used in natural gas drilling operations.

Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann said the Romney campaign has a “fundamental misreading on the politics” of the EPA and environmental issues.

“Either they’re playing to their base, or they’re starting to believe their own rhetoric,” he said.

Greens have also defended the EPA by having a little fun at Romney’s — and his old dog Seamus’s — expense. Save our Environment Action Fund spent $350,000 this summer running a Web ad in nine battleground states and nationally on Facebook, Google and other social media sites urging the EPA and the Transportation Department to complete tough new fuel economy standards.

In the ad, a dog stares at his crate and the family car’s roof, fretting over an upcoming road trip where there will be fewer pit stops for gas.

Erica Martinson contributed to this report.