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Last Week Tonight Gleefully Ignores a Cease and Desist in Coal Segment

By Leighann Dicks

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As we’ve discussed before, Last Week Tonight puts that HBO money to good use pretty often. After this week’s segment, they might be putting some toward a lawsuit.

Sunday night, John Oliver dedicated 24 minutes of his show to coal, a topic that came up a lot in the 2016 election. This segment is kind of a wild ride, involving a cease and desist letter and a giant squirrel, so let’s tackle the big picture first.

Oliver’s main focus in this segment is coal jobs and looking at how supporting coal companies and CEOs is quite different than supporting coal miners, even though those things are usually treated as the same thing.

The loss of coal jobs is often placed at the feet of former President Obama. Though Oliver reports that this is true, the number of coal jobs has been decreasing for decades now, so it isn’t a new issue.

And while coal jobs lost might represent jobs in renewable energy created (the fact that the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum is powered by solar energy is an amazing irony worthy of a new Alanis Morissette song), Oliver acknowledges that these jobs aren’t located in the same places and usually aren’t available to people who worked in the coal industry.

Clearly, the loss of coal mining jobs is a problem. There are real people losing jobs that might not have a lot of other options, so yeah, it makes sense that they would be responsive to someone saying that they will save their jobs and support their communities. Of course, it’s not that simple.

For one, Oliver points out that President Trump’s proposed budget cuts funding for the Appalachian Regional Commission, which helps revitalize communities affected by coal job losses. The commission funds programs like Kentucky’s Bitsource which hires and trains coal miners in software programming. Losing it means losing programs that actively help former coal miners.

This is all pretty bleak, really, so here’s where things get a little more fun: one of the most vocal people on this issue is Bob Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy. The show reached out to the company for comment, but all they got back was a cease and desist letter with the threat of “immediate litigation” if the show didn’t heed the warning.

This makes me wonder – is anyone at Murray Energy familiar with Last Week Tonight? If they were, I would think that they would know that sending a cease and desist to Oliver and crew would be met with a laugh and something along the lines of “Oh, it’s on.”

Of course, that’s exactly what happens. Oliver explains that this segment really wasn’t supposed to spend so much time on Murray initially, but the cease and desist practically begged them to take aim.

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Oliver talks in particular about Murray Energy’s alleged disregard of miner safety: in one case, they implemented bonus programs based on how much individuals could extract. This was rejected by employees based on safety concerns, but the company did it anyway, saying employees could void their bonus checks if they didn’t like it. The, um…colorful? messages left for Murray on some of the voided checks are pretty hilarious.

In another instance, Murray claimed that an accident was caused by an earthquake, but Oliver points to the Department of Labor’s investigation. They cited “unauthorized mining practices” as the cause.

This brings us to a somewhat wacky anecdote about Murray being told by a squirrel that he should have his own coal company. Sounds reasonable, right? Apparently, Murray Energy denies this ever happened, but this doesn’t stop Oliver from bringing in a person in a squirrel costume, lovingly named Mr. Nutter Butter.

Mr. Nutter Butter has a message for Bob Murray, and you’ll just have to go watch the segment to hear it. Stay tuned to see if Murray Energy sues!

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