>>Want to give a specific example where Obama used his office to harm a business that disagreed with him?
>>
>>How about the entire coal industry? Anyway, what I meant to say was that his policies for the last 8 years have hurt many businesses - especially small business. You don't think that this is using his office to harm business?
>
>Ha, ha, ha! Coal is on the way out for all kinds of reasons, including that it's bad for the environment and for the miners. Most importantly, though, at the moment, coal production is way down because other sources of energy have become cheaper.

Yes, the economics are strongly against creating new coal power plants.
The politics of the "war on coal" are shutting down *existing* coal plants for political reasons:

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them.."
- Barack Obama 2008

"It will bankrupt them..."
Hard to deny that he meant harm to them.

Sierra Club Lawyers are doing more than talking: http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/inside-war-on-coal-000002

All of the coal plants met pollution standards when they were built.
The rules are being changed post facto to classify CO2 as a pollutant.
No matter how cleanly you burn coal, it does emit CO2.

Coal plants would be shutting down for economic reasons too, but more slowly, because big fixed investments like coal power plants are sunk costs.
In other words, really only the marginal cost of running them matters. The construction money is already spent.
Big coal fired ships continued operating at a loss (accounting loss) for years after oil fired ships made them obsolete.
Simply put, the loss from running them was less than the loss of junking them outright.

If the political pressure were not there, some coal power plants would continue to have some use, even if other forms of energy are cheaper.

Mind you, as a human who breathes, I am not a fan of coal.

As a human who uses lights, computers, air conditioning and TV, I have some sympathy for having backup power on the grid.
You have the same sympathy too - all hospitals have backup generators, even if diesel generators are dirtier per kilowatt-hour than utility power partially from coal.