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The fossil fuel project was the first to come before the government-run bank since it adopted a climate-change policy to settle a lawsuit and to meet Obama administration directives.
"President Obama has made clear his administration's commitment to transition away from high-carbon investments and toward a cleaner-energy future," Export-Import Bank Chairman Fred Hochberg said in a statement. "After careful deliberation, the Export-Import Bank board voted not to proceed with this project because of the projected adverse environmental impact."
The bank's decision is puzzling, Sullivan said, because the power plant will meet international standards and the bank's environmental criteria.
The plant is under construction in Sasan, central India, and is scheduled to be up and running in 2012. Coal mining will take place for the plant whether it's done with Bucyrus machines or equipment from China and Belarus, Sullivan said.
"Unless the Obama administration jumps all over this and corrects a wrong fairly quickly, I am confident this business is going elsewhere," Sullivan told the Journal Sentinel on Saturday.
"The bank's decision has had no impact on global carbon emissions but has cost the U.S. nearly 1,000 jobs," he added.
The Export-Import Bank would not elaborate on the board's 2-1 vote - including Hochberg's - to deny the loan guarantees.
The U.S. State and Treasury departments recommended against making the loan guarantees. Neither agency could be reached for comment Saturday.
D-bag Hochberg didn't care about US jobs as long as he can warm the Chairboy seat at Ex-Im with his considerable haunches spreading to the floor on both sides of the chair he waddles up to daily to make his determinations, always guided by the dunce in the Oval Office. This is done despite the nasty and lucid complaints of politicians in Wisconsin and elsewhere:
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Sen. Herb Kohl, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Mayor Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate for governor, voiced their objections to the Export-Import Bank decision, which may be irreversible since there isn't an appeals process.
Doyle said he met with Hochberg to stress the importance of the mining equipment sale, which was contingent on the loan guarantees, for sustaining jobs here.
"I was absolutely stunned by their decision. It was the most shortsighted, unconscionable decision you could imagine, and I can't see any justification for it," the governor said.
Doyle said he hopes the bank's decision can be reversed before India turns to China or Belarus for mining equipment.
The decision could set a precedent that would keep other nations from buying U.S. mining equipment, especially since China offers discount financing on machines built there, which puts the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage.
"My discussions with the bank chairman were hardly confidence-building," Doyle said. "They really could not justify their decision except somehow, somebody told them that if the word coal is anywhere in a plan, then they can't move forward with it."
Obama is scheduled to be in Racine on Wednesday.
Doyle said he wants to meet with the president and urge him to ask the Export-Import Bank to reconsider its decision.
"I am a green-energy guy," Doyle said. "But I also understand that we need coal as a major source of energy. What that means is, we need to develop and support the technologies and businesses that are involved in the production of energy from clean coal. Bucyrus is one of those businesses."
So Doyle is going to corner the Dunce-in-Chief in Racine----lotsa luck, Guv, as most observers note recently that this pickininny prince just ain't focussed on much and remains unbriefed on issues that come before him---or so Gen. McChrystal, a lifelong Demo-rat who banned FoxNEWS from his Afghan HQ, noted recently. Check out my blog yesterday for more info on the cafe-au-lait d-bag's insouciance on these matters. Or better yet, I'll insert a couple of Mark Steyn's observations:
Only the other day, Florida Sen. George Lemieux attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America's overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their "super-skimmers": Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Sen. Lemieux found the president unengaged, and uninformed. "He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers," reported the senator.
He doesn't seem to know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't care. "It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all," wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. "For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.
The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.
"This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?"
Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, maybe a month before the Iowa caucuses in 2008!
Here's the Bucyrus CEO's statements on the matter.
Sullivan plans to seek community support, including help from Bucyrus suppliers and the United Steelworkers of America, which represents Bucyrus employees, to urge the Export-Import Bank to change its decision. Otherwise, Sullivan said, there is no appeals process for votes by the Export-Import Bank board.
Bucyrus has 250 suppliers in Wisconsin that employ 15,000 people, according to the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.
"These companies are dependent on Bucyrus' ability to capture international sales and export their machines," said Tim Sheehy, MMAC president. "If Bucyrus catches a cold on this, there are hundreds of employers that get sick."
National Mining Association spokeswoman Carol Raulston called the Export-Import Bank's decision shortsighted and said it sets a dangerous precedent for other developing nations wanting to do business with Bucyrus.
"India has millions of people living in poverty, and coal is going to be their most affordable source of electricity," Raulston said.
The Bucyrus equipment that was ordered for India included two draglines, which are machines weighing millions of pounds and tall enough to loom over a 20-story building.
It takes three years to build a dragline at a cost of more than $100 million.
The initial equipment order also included eight electric-powered rope shovels and 180 mining trucks. With additional options, services and other products, the order could exceed $600 million, according to Bucyrus.
"This is a huge deal for us," Sullivan said. Without the order, he added, the company must find other work to avoid layoffs.
"We are going to fight hard to keep this order, but frankly, India can probably find better partners than the U.S. to develop its energy sector," Sullivan said.
If you want to gag, read the communist comments of Sierra Club and Greenpeace subversives in the article. Also read the many letters to the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel which reflect the outrage of citizens being deprived of their wherewithal by roving bands of anarchists similar to the criminals trying to disrupt the G-20 meeting in Toronto.
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