In November 2008, when Barack Obama was elected as President of the United States, the focus of environmental policies turned to climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs), the heat-trapping pollutants that are produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Given coal’s prominence as the source of nearly 80 percent of the GHGs in the electricity industry at the time, the focus on achieving GHG reductions necessarily had implications for the coal industry. Moreover, it was clear from some of the early initiatives at Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the administration had some hostility toward mountaintop removal in particular as a means of extracting coal. Other actions by the EPA had impacts on West Virginia – adoption of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard (MATS) in late 2011, for example, resulted in the closure of several coal plants, as utilities determined that the cost of compliance was too great to justify additional investment in emission reduction measures.