Have you heard the one about the governor who took on big coal and wound up driving a cab?
Nearly 60 years ago, Bill Marland tried to rescue West Virginia from the fossil fuel industry. It wrecked his life.
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In 1965, a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times got into a taxi and immediately thought her driver looked familiar. As they were driving, it hit her. “You look a lot like a guy named Bill Marland who used to be the governor of West Virginia.” The driver looked up in the mirror and said ‘I was Governor Marland.” Margery McElheny had just stumbled across the biggest story of her career.
In those days, most Americans still got their news from newspapers and three main TV networks. There was no Fox News yet so if you wanted an “alternative” reality, you had to make it up yourself. Everyone loves a good fall from grace story(as long as the victim is someone else) and this one was a doozie.
William C. Marland, which was how voters knew him, was a Democrat from a mining family in Wyoming County who served one term as governor of West Virginia from 1953 to 1957, ran for the Senate twice and was defeated both times, then fell off the face of the earth until Margery McElheny accidentally found him. At the time, he was a recovering alcoholic and living in the basement of the YMCA in Chicago.
Marland committed several unforgivable sins as governor—he wanted the coal mining companies to pay taxes on the product they hauled out of the state and use the money for schools. He was for enforcing the new school desegregation laws. He wanted better unemployment and workers' compensation laws, and an industrial development program that focused on industries other than coal. In other words, he was what today’s Republican Party calls a socialist.
You might think that 58 years later, with hundreds of mines and the lively communities they once sparked now shuttered and all but abandoned, the state would have gotten over its addiction to coal and the environmental destruction it inevitably brings and be ready to move on. After all, fewer than 14,000 people in my native state now work in mines.
You might think that but you would be wrong. Last Saturday, the Republican-dominated West Virginia Legislature once again passed another sweetheart bill designed to help the dying coal industry and rejected an amendment designed to help communities devastated by the industry’s decline.
Left out of the legislation was an amendment to establish a “Coal Community Comeback Plan” for West Virginia that would have directed the state Public Service Commission to facilitate creating a plan mandated to revitalize communities affected by coal-fired plant closures. The rejected plan aimed to create opportunities to increase jobs in coal and other industries, defining affected communities as counties in which a coal mine or coal-fired plant has closed since 2000 and caused a loss of at least 200 jobs. As usual, that was a bridge too far toward godless communism.
Proponents of the plan argued that not having a plan for revitalizing communities whose economies have been ravaged by coal plant and mine closures would leave their populations and tax bases on a decline, and their chances of benefiting from an expected federal investment in rural communities as part of the Biden administration’s jobs and infrastructure plan greatly diminished.
President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion plan to transform America’s infrastructure does indeed include $16 billion to plug old oil and gas wells and clean up abandoned mines across the country. There are hundreds of abandoned coal mines in southern West Virginia still spewing black dust from naked piles of coal waste — called “bony piles”— that pollute the air and spews arsenic and zinc and god knows what else into creeks and rivers. (Here’s a safety tip: if the water is orange, don’t drink it.)
Biden has positioned this cleanup effort as a “jobs” programs because mention of the word environment causes foaming at the mouth in some GOP circles. The plan would exponentially boost an Abandoned Mine Land program run by the Department of Interior that uses fees paid by coal mining companies to reclaim coal mines abandoned before 1977. About $8 billion has been disbursed to states for mine-reclamation projects in the past four decades, and Biden’s plan would ramp up the spending substantially.
The biggest challenge in rescuing dying fossil fuel communities though is more fear of change than funding. A new report from Brookings explains it like this:
The clean economy transition isn’t as simple as doing what’s right for the planet. Residents and businesses in fossil fuel employment hubs often view this transition with skepticism or fear, leading them to turn to politics as the most direct path to protect their economic fortunes despite the environmental harms. The February blackouts in Texas have further perpetuated concerns over renewable energy, despite ongoing extreme weather challenges for all types of energy infrastructure. To break this political blockade, then, federal and state leaders need to convince these communities that the clean economy doesn’t threaten their future—and that a “just transition” will deliver sustainable jobs.
Sen. Joe Manchin, who’s been gitting a little bit too far above his raisin,’ as we say in Summers County, now chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and has been pushing to expand the mine-lands program for a long time. He announced in March that more than $152.22 million will be available in fiscal 2021 through the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act’s (SMCRA) Abandoned Mine Land (AML) grant program, of which West Virginia will receive $18.9 million. The Department is also disbursing $115 million through the Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization (AMLER) grant program, of which West Virginia will receive $25 million.
Now that he has the Democratic side of the Senate by the short hairs (Yes, we say that in Summers County too) he’s in a position to deliver some even more serious funding next year. Naturally, the top Republican on the energy committee is frothing up already. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso ridiculed Biden’s overall plan as “an out-of-control socialist spending spree.” Wyoming now produces more of the nation’s coal than West Virginia.
Presumably, the Republicans in the state house in Charleston will denounce the socialist cleanup money, take it and claim the whole thing was their idea in the next election cycle. The only thing we have to worry about is whether Joe Manchin winds up operating a fork lift in Dallas some day.
Dig Deeper
How renewable energy jobs can uplift fossil fuel communities and remake climate politics (Brookings)
Manchin Praises Interior’s Investment in Coal Communities to Help Create Jobs and Revitalize Land (AP)
Orange water, dirty air (Bay Journal)
Legislature rejects coal community comeback plan in passing bill to keep coal plants operating as long as possible (Herald-Dispatch)
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Joe Manchin has me pining for Bob Byrd.