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On “Meet The Press” this past Sunday California Gov. Jerry Brown described Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s letter to all 50 state governors urging them to reject the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to reduce emissions from existing power plants by 30 percent by 2030 this way:

“To have the leader of the Senate … putting at risk the health and well-being of America is a disgrace.” He went on to say that fighting efforts to curb emissions “borders on the immoral.”

The issue is big coal and the safety of its workers and the environment polluted by coal burning power plants that buy 90% of American coal.

Coal dust is worst than nicotine in the lungs. Black Lung disease is the inevitable consequence of breathing concentrated amounts of coal dust that mining produces. There is no cure. Once you get it you’re dead. The only question is how many years you suffer from it before you die.

If McConnell actually cared about the workers whose jobs he says he is concerned about, why has he not supported stricter enforcement of safety regulations to protect them or exposed the legal tactics of the coal industry that hires lawyers to keep Black Lung cases tied up in court for years on end. Why did he support coal industry union busting during the Reagan years?

If you want to get a true picture of the coal industry, read John Grisham’s novel, Gray Mountain. It’s all about the menace the coal industry is to workers, families, and America. It’s a novel, but I would describe it as historical fiction. The characters are not real, but the stories are.

I know. I lived in coal country for four years.

A real life example why a book like Gray Mountain was necessary is Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. Last year its former CEO, Don Blankenship, was indicted on four criminal counts for alleged safety violations that led to an explosion in 2010 that killed 29 miners. It took more than four years for chargers to be brought. It’s anybody’s guess how long it will be before Blankenship goes on trial, if he ever does.

Grisham’s focus is strip mining that destroys mountains and pollutes valley drinking water because of slurry pools (water and coal dust) as big as lakes that are left behind. Once big coal buys mountain land to strip mine home values in the area drop like a rock. Dynamite explodes day and night, and overloaded trucks carry the coal out, speeding as they do creating a real danger to anyone travelling the same road. Again, I know. I’ve been on those roads.

Here’s a strip mining story for you. I knew the owner of a coal related company contracted to “restore” hillsides left after a mountain had been stripped. Because the seed he sprayed from his helicopter kept washing away when it rained, he decided to spray Elmer’s Glue on it to hold it in place. I’m not making this up.

I won’t begin to tell you all the reasons why that didn’t work, but the long and short of it is that strip mining not only destroys mountains, what is done to the land left behind cannot possibly be described as “restoration.”

This is how big coal operates. Workers, home owners, and the environment be damned. Money matters, nothing else.

McConnell’s effort to protect this seedy industry is just another example of the open war conservatives are waging against ordinary Americans.

The simple truth is that political conservatives have never seen an industry’s behavior they would regulate and a worker’s rights they would protect.

Yet millions of blue collar workers who are the casualties of this very real war vote for McConnell and his ilk. It makes no sense, but I try not to lose heart, encouraged as I am that someone of the statue of a sitting governor like Jerry Brown would call McConnell out.

What he is doing is a disgrace. What is more, it doesn’t border on being immoral.

It is.