Supporters of the Green New Deal say they can reconcile two conflicting goals: ending the use of coal and other fossil fuels while also supporting coal miners.
“We aren’t going to transition to renewable energy without also transitioning frontline communities and coal communities into economic opportunity as well,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., promised in introducing the Green New Deal resolution. “We are placing the workers in those communities, not the fossil fuel corporations but the interests of the workers, first.”
Progressive Green New Deal advocates say they plan to visit Appalachian coal communities — potentially hostile territory for them — in the coming months in order to sell them on trading coal for federal dollars, clean energy, and infrastructure jobs.
Supporters of the plan say that setting an end date for coal use will force lawmakers to prepare and provide for affected industry workers.
“You overcome the perception about the Green New Deal by engaging in conversation on where they see themselves in the energy transition,” said Greg Carlock, Green New Deal research director at the progressive think tank Data for Progress. “You honor the culture and the role coal communities have played in making the American economy a strong, energy-rich country.”
Carlock envisions a suite of federal programs to help coal communities change their way of life. He sees the Green New Deal providing job training and workforce development programs in addition to interim assistance such as unemployment benefits, mortgage relief, child care aid, and healthcare, as well as shoring up miners’ pension funds. The Green New Deal explicitly offers a federal jobs guarantee for those working on the energy transition.
Green New Dealers will have to overcome Appalachia’s fear that speeding away from coal would cause more harm than good.
“We need time to make this transition,” said John Deskins, director of the Bureau of Business & Economic Research at the University of West Virginia. “If we accelerated the movement away from coal in electricity, that would exacerbate challenges these communities face.”
The leaders of coal groups naturally oppose any government-mandated plan to kill the industry.
“They are getting ready to disrupt the lives of folks who want to live in Appalachia, take coal, and turn it into electricity or steel,” Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, said of the Green New Deal. “This is a feel-good deal. We get a lot of help we are not looking for sometimes.”
The Green New Deal resolution would force utilities to obtain 100 percent of electricity from clean, renewable, or zero-emission sources by 2030. Such a mandate would effectively eliminate coal, except in cases where a plant can use expensive carbon-capture technology to prevent emissions from being released.
Mike Cope, president of the Ohio Coal Association, said his group would not reject outreach from Green New Deal supporters promising to help coal communities, but he prefers the government find ways to subsidize coal with higher payments to keep plants alive.
“We are always willing to engage people who want to learn,” Cope said. “We would never turn our back on something like that. We are not close-minded. But I doubt they would change their opinion. They are wrong. The coal industry is not dead. It can come back, and will, when prices become favorable.”
Coal has been declining even in the absence of the Green New Deal. More coal plants shuttered in President Trump’s first two years than were retired during former President Barack Obama’s first term, despite the Trump’s efforts to repeal and weaken regulations threatening the industry and to open more federal land to mining.
Coal’s portion of the electricity generation mix, which was nearly 50 percent a decade ago, is now below 30 percent. The number of U.S. coal mines decreased by roughly half from 2008 to 2017, according to the Energy Information Administration. The number of American coal miners, meanwhile, has fallen from more than 80,000 in 2008 to about 53,000 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While coal exports have enjoyed a small bump in the Trump era, much of the demand is for metallurgical, or coking, coal, the high-temperature type used in steelmaking, not traditional thermal, or steam, coal used for electricity generation.
Foreseeing this decline, previous administrations have emphasized the need for programs to help coal communities find other industries to pick up, but the results have been mixed.
In 2015, the Obama administration created the POWER initiative, meant to help retrain workers in coal-dependent areas by spending on local workforce development programs. The Appalachian Regional Commission, which administered the program with other federal agencies, has awarded more than $90 million in funding to economic and workforce development projects. Jason Walsh, a senior policy adviser in the White House during the Obama administration, claimed in an op-ed published last year that this spending could create or retain nearly 9,000 jobs in Appalachian coal communities.
Trump has not promoted the initiative, although it still technically exists, and he tried to eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission, but Congress stopped him.
The program has found allies, including Rep. Hal Rogers, a Republican representing the coal state of Kentucky, who has introduced legislation that would build upon the initiative. His RECLAIM Act would spend $1 billion to restore abandoned coal mines, using the money to support local economic development projects near mine sites.
Retraining workers is not easy. In West Virginia, the nation’s No. 2 coal-producing state, some miners resist retraining, especially older workers accustomed to making upwards of $80,000 annually, because there are few available jobs from new industries.
Brandon Dennison, founder of Coalfield Development Corporation in Wayne County, W.Va., said that promises to retrain workers aren’t sufficient. “The reality is it’s a time-intensive, difficult thing to do, and it doesn’t matter if there aren’t healthy businesses there,” he said.
Most of the coal mining in West Virginia takes place in the southwest part of the state, where rural, rugged, and mountainous conditions, without much flat space, make it an undesirable setting to attract new industries, said economist Deskins. Five of West Virginia’s most rural counties — Boone, Logan, McDowell, Mingo, and Wyoming — are almost wholly dependent on coal and suffer when those jobs vanish.
Those five counties shed 6,535 coal jobs from 2012 to 2017, more than half the total amount of job losses in any field during that time frame, according to research provided by West Virginia University.
“It is easy to say we should have already been diversifying the economy,” Deskins said. “That is much easier said than done for these counties.”
Deskins cited some progress in converting reclaimed mining land into sustainable farming jobs, for example, but “it’s not close to the scale of re-employing coal miners, paying them well, and getting them back to prosperity.”
Dennison’s nonprofit focuses on creating entrepreneurial opportunities. It invests in new businesses and recruits workers from local welfare offices and unemployment centers, with a special focus on former coal miners. It provides access to community college for prospective workers to learn new skills.
His group has trained more than 800 workers since 2010, Dennison said, while helping launch 50 new businesses that created 190 jobs, including one for a former coal mining electrician who now runs a company installing rooftop solar panels.
“People in coal country don’t want to go on public assistance,” he said. “That is not going to connect with mining communities. We are proud to have powered this country’s growth and development for generations. We want to contribute to our country in other ways.”
