Coal Miners for Clean Energy
The nation's largest miners union signals its willingness to go green in exchange for job guarantees. It's time..
Welcome to EarthWatch, an environmental news and opinion newsletter for people who think you should never turn your back on Mother Earth—written by me, Jerry Bowles, an ancient scribbler who has been around the Sun a few times and doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
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The sharply-dressed happy camper in the photo above is me, circa 1948, making my morning mayoral rounds in an already mostly played out West Virginia coal camp called Thayer, deep in the newly designated New River Gorge National River and Preserve. My dad had returned a couple of years earlier from taking care of some unpleasant business in Europe and had taken a job in one of the few mines that were still open there.
My earliest memories are of the smell of carbide meeting water which creates acetylene gas and calcium hydroxide and fueled miners’ lamps in the days before batteries were common. I also recall vividly the sound of steam engines rounding up coal cars at the tipple and freight yard just below our house before setting off on a 350-mile journey across the mountains to waiting ships in Norfolk. To this day, the sound that thrills me most is the steel-on-steel crunch of a slow-moving freight train at night.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the historic resistance to moving on from coal in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky is not just about jobs. It’s also about family, culture, tradition, pride, dignity, and plain old Appalachian stubbornness.
After the railroads were completed in southern West Virginia in 1883, the boom was on. Mr. Peabody and Mr. Carnegie began hauling away black gold by the millions of tons. The United Mine Workers (UAW) was formed in 1890 and triggered a long and bloody war that included the largest domestic uprising in the U.S. aside from the Civil War. It wasn’t until 1930 that unions were finally allowed. Many West Virginians alive today have ancestors who fought and literally died in the struggle for improved safety and decent wages.
Sure mining is dirty and dangerous but that’s why unionized miners, the few that still have jobs, get paid better wages than most of their working-class peers. Many wear their “blue tattoos,” the coal dust that inevitably gets under the skin and can’t be washed off, with pride. Where’s the dignity and pride of being a greeter or clerk at Walmart? Who wants to uproot their families and move to Columbus or Detroit or Wilmington for a decent living when you’re already living in Almost Heaven?
That’s why the announcement by the United Mine Workers of America on Monday that it will back the White House’s plan to transition fossil fuel industries to renewable energy production if the Biden administration can guarantee the preservation of jobs, is both unexpected and welcome. Said UMWA president and West Virginian Cecil Roberts:
Change is coming, whether we seek it or not. Too many inside and outside the coalfields have looked the other way when it comes to recognizing and addressing specifically what that change must be, but we can look away no longer. We must act, while acting in a way that hasreal, positive impact on the people who are most affected by this change.The UMWA is prepared to work with members of Congress, the Biden administration,community organizations, NGOs and other labor unions to achieve these principles.
In a position paper called “Preserving Coal Country,” the UMWA lays out a wish list that it wants in exchange for its support. These include a massive investment in carbon capture and storage technology at coal-fired power plants, incentives to bring steel production back to America to utilize metallurgical coal, tax credits for manufacturing wind turbine and solar panel parts, as well as preference in hiring, substantial funding to help coal workers, including national training programs for dislocated miners and their spouses, support to replace their wages, healthcare, and pensions, and infrastructure rehabilitation for coalfield communities.
The proposal has the blessing of Senator Joe Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the big man on the Senate campus these days.
Much of the developing world still runs on coal and gas so fossil fuels are not going away entirely for a long time. But, coal employment has dropped by more than half in the past decade and natural gas is less of a polluter and more economically appealing.
More than 60 mining companies have declared bankruptcy, coal-fired power plants are closing ahead of schedule, and the number of hourly coal workers is now at the lowest point since the government began tracking such numbers. There are only 44,100 or so coal mining jobs left in America and most of them are in Wyoming which now produces 41 percent of the nation’s coal, versus 12 percent from West Virginia and just over 5 percent for Kentucky.
The villains in this story are not particular politicians or energy policies, they are automation and market forces. As difficult as it must be to let go of the coal industry’s long and proud history in building modern America, Roberts, and the UMWA’s management are simply bowing to the inevitable. If you find yourself drowning, it’s probably best to let go of Kate Winslet’s raft and find your own.
Dig Deeper
Preserving Coal Country (UMWA)
West Virginia Coal Mine Disaster (Jeanne Ritchie - YouTube)
The Battle of Blair Mountain (Wikipedia)
UMWA Leader Pitches a Way Forward for Coal (MetroNews)