July 30, 2014 

My name is Bradley Charles Lewis - President of Westmoreland 

Energy Services and President of Friends of Coal West. I am a 

registered professional mining engineer. My comments today are 

presented on behalf of Friends of Coal West and my employer 

Westmoreland Coal Company; a top 10 coal company and the 

oldest coal company in America. We have been mining coal since 

1854, which is before the Civil War. 

I am proud to be a coal miner, I am proud of the contributions the 

coal mining industry has made to America's greatness and I am 

proud to be an American. 

I am here today to respectfully request EPA to withdraw the Clean 

Power Plan. My top 10 reasons are: 

10.) A 375 page document is not the answer. We need a laserfocused plan that can be logically explained in less than 50 

pages. 

9.) Decimating the American economy while only reducing less 

than 1`)/0 of the global carbon pollutants over 20 years makes no 

sense. 

8.) The Plan is nothing more than a symbolic gesture of reducing 

carbon by the US, and to expect the rest of the world to follow suit 

is delusional. I assure you this from first-hand experience 

working in the international market for the past 24 years. 

7.) The Plan gambles our future on renewables that have 

repeatedly failed throughout the world because they are 

uneconomical and unreliable. If renewables were the right 

solution for the future, we would not need for political advocates, 

subsidies and regulatory mandates. 
6.) Americans use more energy per capita and have enjoyed the 

lowest cost energy of anybody in the world. Only coal and gas 

power plants have the proven track record of providing large 

scale, reliable electricity for decades. 

5.) Energy is the industry that powers all other industries. The 

Plan callously disregards the impact of increased energy costs 

that have a domino impact on every step in the supply chain 

resulting increased costs of our goods and services, reduced 

competiveness and job losses. Americans need to get back to 

work and stay working. 

4.) The lion's share of the cost to generate electricity is the fuel 

cost. Historically, coal price annual increases have been modest. 

Conversely, gas prices have fluctuated wildly over the past 40 

years. 

3.) The US utility industry has made significant progress over the 

past 40 years in substantially reducing total emissions while at the 

same time significantly increasing coal use. 

2.) A centralized governmental energy plan has never worked. 

The Plan handcuffs the free market's ability to use American 

ingenuity to solve problems. 

1.) "All the Above" is not what Americans need or want. I do not 

want two cups and a string, a rotary dial phone, a land line phone 

with 20 speed dial buttons and a smart phone (i.e., all the above). 

I want the cheapest, most reliable smart phone with outstanding 

features. I also want the smart phone equivalent in electricity and 

that is increasingly cleaner coal fired electricity. 
Coal is energy dense and our most abundant global energy 

resource. Coal fired electricity has energized hospitals, water 

filtration plants, food processing plants, factories, urbanization, 

education and the information age. 

I advocate for continuing the US trend of the past 40 years of 

continuously reducing emissions from coal fired plants by allowing 

the markets to aggressively develop and implement the requisite 

technologies. 

Please step back from all the statistics and technical jargon and 

ask yourself: Is my life better today than it was when I entered this 

world? If the answer is yes; thank a coal miner. 

Thank You and God Bless America !