What Will We Do About Coal’s ‘Crisis in the Making’?
Charleston Gazette
16 January 2012
By Ken Ward Jr.
There’s an op-ed in this weekend’s Gazette-Mail that is worth a
look — and worth a detailed read by our region’s political
leaders. It’s by West Virginia native Lou Martin, who teaches
history now in western Pennsylvania at Chatham University. Lou
writes of a “crisis in the making” in Boone County, where coal is
such a big part of the economy, yet good coal seams are playing
out and competition from other regions threatens future production
levels:
In May, CNN Money reported that 3,800 of the county’s 8,600
employed people worked in the mining industry. And a report by
economists at WVU and Marshall titled “The West Virginia Coal
Economy 2008? reported that 60 percent of the county’s roughly $35
million in property tax revenue came from coal. While those
figures certainly speak to the importance of coal to Boone today,
they also represent the potential for devastation when the coal
companies leave. Imagine when half of those jobs and tax revenues
disappear as Downstream Strategies predict they will. Boone County
will be left with slurry ponds, “reclaimed” mountains and dirty
water.
Lou warns:
As a society, we do not plan well for economic transitions; nor do
we tend to plan for the long term. Our elected officials have a
vested interest in helping businesses and industries that are here
now, not imagining future businesses and industries. Coal
companies focus only on this year’s profits. Unions protect
current members’ jobs. Planning the future of Boone County is too
important to leave up to the president of the West Virginia Coal
Association, the CEO of Alpha Natural Resources, the president of
the United Mine Workers, or even government officials like Sen.
Manchin and Gov. Tomblin.
This time, the people need to plan out their own future. What do
we want the future economy to look like? I propose that we try to
create a society that will last for another 100 years, 200 years,
or maybe even 1,000 years. But under the current plan, Boone
County will face utter devastation – economic and environmental —
in just 25 years.
For those who don’t know him, Lou Martin has written extensively
about the working-class people of Appalachia, with a focus on the
steel and pottery country of West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle
(see here, for example). And, he’s observed what has
happened in those parts of the world in recent years, writing in
his West Virginia University doctoral dissertation:
Beginning in the 1960s, local potteries began closing up shop
until only Homer Laughlin remained. When Weirton Steel showcased
its “mill of the future” in 1967, that moment proved to be the
high point for the company and its workers. Thereafter, foreign
competition, mismanagement, and global economic forces beyond any
individual company’s control undercut Weirton Steel’s position in
the market. By the 1980s, working families in Hancock County were
faced with many tough decisions and sad realities as the winds of
“creative destruction,” in the words of economists, picked up
thousands of industrial jobs and carried them to the distant
frontiers of industrial capitalism. The county’s population
declined from about 40,000 in 1980 to about 30,000 in 2000. Many
of those who remain are retirees who have watched helplessly as
pensions and health insurance evaporated amidst bankruptcy
hearings and corporate takeovers.
The deindustrialization of Hancock County underscores the ongoing
nature of the industrial restructuring that brought new industries
and industrial jobs to the county a century before. Workers
struggled for decades to achieve a modest, dependable income and a
decent life. During those decades, they continually adapted to new
technologies, shifting markets, and changes within the working
class. At the height of their influence locally, the
rural-industrial workers of Hancock County also joined with
like-minded Americans around the country to roll back the New Deal
order and transform postwar America. The wrenching economic
changes of the last quarter of the twentieth century, however,
have left many working families to wonder what it was all about.
As I read, I was reminded of passages from the speech AFL-CIO
President Richard Trumka gave on Friday at the United Nations:
Now, some people’s response is to demand that we end all coal
production now—they say “End Coal.” Never mind that such a thing
is simply not going to happen—there is no substitute now for
metallurgical coal and if we stopped burning coal this afternoon
and cut the power in the U.S. grid by 50 percent, as Mayor
Bloomberg advocates, he’d be reading handwritten memos by
candlelight this evening. Given that reality, it’s important to
think about how that slogan is heard in places like my hometown of
Nemacolin, Pennsylvania.
Nemacolin lives on coal — the coal mine my grandfather and my
father went down to every day of their working lives, the power
plant the mine feeds, the rail lines that carry coal to other
plants. When these folks hear “End Coal,” it sounds like a threat
to destroy the value of our homes, to shut our schools and
churches, to drive us away from the place our parents and
grandparents are buried, to take away the work that for more than
a hundred years has made us who we are.
So why, in an economy without an effective safety net, would the
good men and women of my hometown and a thousand places like it
surrender their whole lives and sit by while others try to force
them to bear the cost of change.
The truth is that in many places – and not just places where coal
is mined – there is fear that the “green economy” will turn into
another version of the radical inequality that now haunts our
society — another economy that works for the 1% and not for the
99%.
You can read the speech for yourself here and you can also see the
initial reactions from a couple of the most outspoken
anti-mountaintop removal activists in the comments section.
It’s certainly true that Rich Trumka didn’t mention mountaintop
removal — and there’s no doubt we haven’t heard much from the
Rich’s old friends at the United Mine Workers about the growing
body of science that links living near mountaintop removal to
serious health problems, to increases risks of cancer and birth
defects among coalfield children. I’ve asked the question on Coal
Tattoo before, “Exactly what sort of environmental protection does
the UMWA support?” At the same time, I’m not sure that the way to
build strong coalitions is to do what citizen groups did a few
years back when the UMWA’s media spokesman, Phil Smith, took part
in a roundtable aimed at trying to find common ground on heated
and complicated coal industry issues.
And gosh, to hear the president of the AFL-CIO to speak so
eloquently about what is without a doubt a much larger global
crisis — climate change — was a truly remarkable moment. Just go
back and read part of it:
Today, as we meet together, scientists tell us we are headed ever
more swiftly toward irreversible climate change — with
catastrophic consequences for human civilization. We must have a
stable climate to feed the planet, to ensure there is drinking
water for our cities but not floodwaters at our doors. A stable
climate is the foundation of our global civilization, of our
global economy — the prerequisite for a profitable investment
environment.
And to those who say climate risk is a far off problem, I can tell
you that I have hunted the same woods in Western Pennsylvania my
entire life and climate change is happening now — I see it in the
summer droughts that kill the trees, the warm winter nights when
flowers bloom in January, the snows that fall less frequently and
melt more quickly.
And what about economic transformation, about green jobs and a
stronger economy? Rich Trumka said:
Even so, some will ask, why should investors or working people
focus on climate risk when we have so many economic problems
across the world? The labor movement has a clear answer:
Addressing climate risk is not a distraction from solving our
economic problems. My friends, addressing climate risk means
retooling our world—it means that every factory and power plant,
every home and office, every rail line and highway, every vehicle,
locomotive and plane, every school and hospital, must be
modernized, upgraded, renovated or replaced with something
cleaner, more efficient, less wasteful.
Taking on the threat of climate change means putting investment
capital to work creating jobs. It means building a road to a
healthier world and a healthier world economy–one less dependent
on volatile energy prices, one where many more of us have the
things that modern energy makes possible.
Reading the Trumka speech and the reactions to it also reminded me
of the wise words of the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd:
Change is no stranger to the coal industry. Think of the huge
changes which came with the onset of the Machine Age in the late
1800’s. Mechanization has increased coal production and revenues,
but also has eliminated jobs, hurting the economies of coal
communities. In 1979, there were 62,500 coal miners in the
Mountain State. Today there are about 22,000. In recent years,
West Virginia has seen record high coal production and record low
coal employment.
And change is undeniably upon the coal industry again. The
increased use of mountaintop removal mining means that fewer
miners are needed to meet company production goals.
Meanwhile the Central Appalachian coal seams that remain to be
mined are becoming thinner and more costly to mine. Mountaintop
removal mining, a declining national demand for energy, rising
mining costs and erratic spot market prices all add up to fewer
jobs in the coal fields.
These are real problems. They affect real people. And West
Virginia’s elected officials are rightly concerned about jobs and
the economic impact on local communities. I share those concerns.
Remember that Sen. Byrd also told us that “the time has come to
have an open and honest dialogue about coal’s future in West
Virginia.” Of course, that is exactly the oppose of what we heard
last week from Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, in a State of the State
address that mentioned coal only to cheer-lead, as opposed to
actually leading. And it’s exactly the opposite of what other
political leaders are doing when they dodge questions about the
mountaintop removal health studies.
Even for those political leaders who support mountaintop removal —
or who are afraid not to support it — go back and read Lou
Martin’s op-ed piece:
… Even if we cannot agree on mountaintop removal, change is still
coming. A 2010 report by Downstream Strategies predicts that coal
mining in Central Appalachia will decline by more than half over
the next 25 years (from 234 million tons in 2008, down to 99
million tons in 2035) for reasons ranging from competition from
natural gas to depletion of the most productive reserves.
There’s a crisis in the making … what are we going to do about it?