We’ve said it before. This country was built on coal. We have the cleanest coal. Coal is an irreplaceable part of the energy mix. And America has 500 years’ worth of coal – more than any other nation. We are, or should be, the Saudi Arabia of coal.

So we are pleased that made-in-America coal was the big winner in the rightly decided West Virginia Supre Court decision announced this morning on a 6-3 decision. Here is a summary written by the Chief Justice:

The decision echoes the late Justice Scalia, who famously wrote in American Trucking:

“Congress, we have held, does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions — it does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouseholes.”

Since the spectacular failure of Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme to even come to the Senate floor in 2010, Democrats and the environmental left have been relying on the EPA to do their bidding in destroying the fossil fuel industry – and putting our energy reliability and security at risk.

The elected representatives of Congress make the laws – not unelected regulatory bureaucrats.

On a more purely practical level: The Obama/Biden war on coal (via the EPA) isn’t reducing world consumption or global CO2 emissions, it is shifting production away from America – with clean coal – to China with dirty coal. We reprint here a chart from earlier this week that shows the quadrupling of coal production in China. Beijing doesn’t have an EPA.