FRANKFORT — It was a bad week for coal and nearly 600 coal miners in eastern Kentucky.

Arch Coal announced it is laying off miners and idling mines because of “the unprecedented downturn in coal-based electricity.” Demand for coal to fuel coal-fired utility plants have been dropping steadily and coal inventories are high after a mild winter and falling natural gas prices.

The bad news didn’t take Kentucky lawmakers by surprise, especially those who represent districts in the coal fields.

Rep. Fitz Steele, D-Hazard, and Sen. Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, said they expect more bad news as other coal operations scale back and reduce work forces this year. Only two weeks ago, John S. Lyons, the director for Air Quality for the state Department for Environmental Protection, told the Interim Joint Committee on Natural Resources that new air quality regulations “kind of rule out coal-fired plants.” Lyons said the only way utilities can meet newly proposed standards is to convert to natural gas, which is cleaner and cheaper.

The layoffs create serious hardship for miners, their families and other businesses that depend on the coal industry and its high wages in an area of high levels of poverty and unemployment. Kentucky Coal Association President Bill Bissett and House Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, said the impact of the layoffs reach far beyond those employed in the coal industry. Gov. Steve Beshear announced the Cabinet for Education and Workforce Development will assist laid off miners in searching for new jobs.

Political leaders, most of them Republican but also Democrats like Beshear, blamed the policies of President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency. Sen. Mitch McConnell, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers and state House Minority Leader Jeff Hoover, R-Jamestown, blamed “Obama’s war on coal.”

Blaming Obama isn’t politically risky in a state where he is held in such low regard anyway and can’t win in November. Republicans know that and hope Obama’s name on this fall’s ballot will undermine support for their Democratic opponents. Stumbo, too, said Kentucky is under attack in a “war on coal.”

But coal won’t soon go away. It will continue to be part of our energy portfolio but it is increasingly under assault as environmentalists, health advocates and market conditions pressure utilities to find cleaner ways to generate power. That means tough decisions for Kentucky, which gets about 90 percent of its electricity from coal-fired plants and depends heavily on the industry for jobs in the eastern and western parts of the state. Policymakers will justifiably continue to look for ways to boost coal production and employment while calling for research into “clean coal technology.”

But at the same time, they must also look to the future and prepare for what looks like an inevitable decline in this country’s dependence on coal, which exacts greater costs than just its production and purchase prices. Even if a majority of people and politicians in Kentucky refuse to acknowledge the science that says coal’s extraction and burning damage the environment and our health.

As Kentucky’s best-known author Wendell Berry observes, the health of the land in the end is inseparable from the health of the people living on it: “To cherish what remains of the earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.”

Kentucky has lived through this sort of thing before. Our politicians fought the war on tobacco long after the war was lost. Because we didn’t prepare for the inevitable, our farmers, our health and our state revenues paid a high price. We shouldn’t repeat that mistake with coal.

RONNIE ELLIS writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com. Follow CNHI News Service stories on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cnhifrankfort.