Can a Southwest Virginia Coal Town Reinvent Itself?

Grundy, Virginia.

Here in Virginia rural area politicians continue to run on an agenda of "god, guns and bashing fags" and a majority of residents support Donald Trump who promised to bail them out of their economic plight but instead has mere made a show of hating the same people they hate: non-whites, gays, non-right wing Christians and, of course, liberals. Meanwhile their economic fortunes continue in a death spiral and the younger generations leave for more urban areas and a better financial future.  A lengthy piece in the New York Times looks at the efforts of one Southwest Virginia town's efforts to reinvent itself.  Lots of state and federal monies have been poured in seemingly with little success. The reason, in my view that the article does not address? The area remains very unwelcoming to outsiders and those in the racial and social demographic groups the residents and Trump hate and far too many of the residents cling to form of right wing Christianity that is nothing short of scary to progressive forward thinking people and businesses. No amount of economic development funding is going to change this obstacle to economic rebirth.  Thus, the economic decline and depopulation continues.  Here are article highlights:

GRUNDY, Va. — Jay Rife surveys the landscape — hundreds of flat, grassy acres reclaimed from a spent mountaintop mine once operated by the Paramont Coal Company. A few handsome homes stand on one end of the project. An 80,000-square-foot shell, to house some future manufacturing operation, is being built on another. For the intrepid, there are trails for all-terrain vehicles. There’s an R.V. park. The whole site has been wired for broadband. Elk have been imported from Kentucky for tourists to look at.

Buchanan County, where Grundy sits, has spent $35 million to $40 million on the development, called Southern Gap, some seven miles from town along U.S. 460. Mr. Rife, the head of the county’s Industrial Development Authority, says the project “is going to be the salvation of Buchanan County.”

Few places have had as many shots at deliverance. None, so far, have succeeded in stemming Grundy’s inexorable decline.

This corner of southwestern Virginia has long sought alternatives to coal as a source of sustenance. The Appalachian School of Law, which opened in the 1990s in the shell of Grundy Junior High School, was heralded as a new economic engine, lubricated — of course — with taxpayer funds. So was the Appalachian College of Pharmacy, founded in 2003 some 20 minutes down the road in Oakwood. County officials considered a dental school, but figured it was too expensive. . . . Then there is downtown Grundy itself, much of which was moved up the hill to avoid periodic floodwaters from the Levisa Fork, a tributary of the Big Sandy River.

Virginia estimates that the relocation and flood-proofing projects, started almost 20 years ago, cost $170 million in federal and state funds, more than $170,000 for every woman, man and child living in town today. The Army Corps of Engineers shaved off the flank of a mountain across the river to create an elevated platform on which the new commercial district would sit. Virginia’s Department of Transportation bulldozed much of the old downtown and routed U.S. 460 through it, built on top of a levee protecting what was left of Grundy’s old center. Finally, in 2011, Walmart opened a superstore to anchor the new site, perched somewhat oddly above a two-story, publicly funded parking lot.

Still, the effort does not quite amount to a reinvention. The economic engine is still the one that carried this corner of Appalachia through the 20th century. “We are a one-industry community, and that’s coal,” Mr. Rife said. A few steps from Walmart, an office of Welmore Energy, a coal-producing subsidiary of the Ukrainian steel conglomerate Metinvest, serves as a reminder of that dominance.

And that, today, is a problem. At the peak of coal’s fortunes in the 1970s, more than 35,000 people lived in Buchanan. Over 5,000 worked in the mines. Mr. Rife remembers downtown sidewalks in Grundy, the county seat, packed with thousands of people on weekend shopping expeditions. Karen Brown, the principal of Grundy High School, recalls Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes parked in the high school lot when she went to school there.

Coal is still the most prominent business, employing one in six workers in the county and accounting for one-third of its total wages. But it can no longer support such living standards. . . . The county population has declined to under 22,000, of whom almost 3,500 people receive disability benefits. Over a quarter live in poverty. And it is getting old. The only age group that has grown in the last two decades is the population over 55.

Grundy is hardly unique. It is one of many victims of globalization, technology and other economic dislocations that have wreaked havoc with small-town America. For years, most economists argued that rather than spend millions in pursuit of a new economic engine for such places, it would make more sense to help residents seek opportunities elsewhere.

But the proliferation of towns like Grundy across what used to be the nation’s industrial heartland — stymied by joblessness, awash in opioids and frustration — has prompted a new sense of alarm. . . . Lawrence H. Summers, once a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, put it this way: “There is probably no issue more important for the political economy of the next 15 years, not just in the United States but around the world, than what happens in the areas that feel rightly that they are falling behind and increasingly left apart.”

Migration, as economists would have predicted, has become an increasingly compelling option: Those lucky enough to find work somewhere else leave. They include Ms. Brown’s two daughters — Peyton, 23, and Bailee, 25 — who last summer followed their husbands from the coal industry to more stable jobs at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Ky.

Overwhelmingly, they support President Trump, who promised to bring coal back. But it doesn’t look as if they have much faith in the promise. As Hoot Dellinger said, leaning over the edge of his booth, “This community will never prosper again.”

Without prosperity, who will stay? “Ninety percent of the girls become nurses and leave,” Mr. Ward said. “We’ve seen a lot of guys chasing gas up in the Marcellus Shale.” But even moving doesn’t always work out. As shale jobs there have waned, Mr. Ward added, “a lot of them are trying to come back, and there’s nothing to come back to.”

I do not know what the solution is since, far too many refuse to accept that their mind set and right wing religious and social views are perhaps among the biggest obstacles to positive change. 

Climate Denial Was a GOP Staple Long Before Trump

At the recent G 20 Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, of the twenty (20) foreign leaders, Donald Trump was the only one to not sign a communique on climate change.  Trump's refusal was no surprise to anyone who has followed his (and Mike Pence's) regime to roll back environmental protection laws not to mention withdrawing from the Paris climate change agreement. Trump's motivations are, in my view, two fold: (i) Trump's desire to appeal to workers in the moribund coal industry - coal use has reached a 40 year low - and the fossil fuel industry in general, and (ii) Trump's desire appeal to the climate change/scientific knowledge deniers among the Christofascist base to which Trump (and Pence) have prostituted himself.  Yet, as a column in the New York Times notes, Trump's approach is in reality merely a continuation of the long GOP denial of scientific knowledge in general and climate change in particular.  Why the GOP intransigence?  See the two reasons set above that have motivated the GOP before the rise of Trump.  Lastly, how is scientific knowledge so cavalierly rejected by the GOP?  Simple: it's all a conspiracy by scientists.  Here are column highlights: 

Many observers seem baffled by Republican fealty to Donald Trump — the party’s willingness to back him on all fronts, even after severe defeats in the midterm elections. What kind of party would show such support for a leader who is not only evidently corrupt and seemingly in the pocket of foreign dictators, but also routinely denies facts and tries to criminalize anyone who points them out?

The answer is, the kind of the party that, long before Trump came on the scene, committed itself to denying the facts on climate change and criminalizing the scientists reporting those facts.

The G.O.P. wasn’t always an anti-environment, anti-science party. George H.W. Bush introduced the cap-and-trade program that largely controlled the problem of acid rain. As late as 2008, John McCain called for a similar program to limit emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.

Trump fits right in with this mind-set. In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.

Take Trump’s dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers,  . . . What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails. The credulousness of all too many journalists about the supposed misconduct revealed by “Climategate,” a pseudo-scandal that relied on selective, out-of-context quotes from emails at a British university, prefigured the disastrous media handling of hacked Democratic emails in 2016.

The truth is that most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-fuel companies. But after the release of the recent National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.” Projection much?

[C]limate scientists have faced harassment and threats, up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work. Most famously, Michael E. Mann, creator of the famous “hockey stick” graph, was for years the target of an anti-climate science jihad by Ken Cuccinelli, at the time Virginia’s attorney general.

And on it goes. Recently a judge in Arizona, responding to a suit from a group linked to the Koch brothers (and obviously not understanding how research works), ordered the release of all emails from climate scientists at the University of Arizona. To forestall the inevitable selective misrepresentation, Mann has released all the emails he exchanged with his Arizona colleagues, with explanatory context.

There are three important morals to this story.

First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.

Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party, which has burrowed ever deeper into climate denial even as the damage from a warming planet becomes more and more obvious.

Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years.

Animus Towards Others - The Real Motivation of Trump's Base

Before the results from the elections on November 7, 2017, came in, Politico ran a piece that looked at Trump voters in southwest Pennsylvania and their continued allegiance to Trump despite the fact that Trump has to date delivered little if anything that is substantively making their lives better.  After some analysis, the piece gets down to what really continues to bind these voters to Trump: he displays animus towards the same people and ethnic groups that they despise.   The problem is, however, as Ed Gillespie discovered, on Tuesday, is that the animus that motivates Trump's base alienates a majority of voters.  A piece in Bear Drift, a conservative/GOP blog in Virginia looks at this other reality and the bind it will put on the GOP going forward.  First, here are excerpts from the Politico piece:

[P]olling continues to show that—in spite of unprecedented unpopularity—nearly all people who voted for Trump would do it again. But as I compared this year’s answers to last year’s responses it seemed clear that the basis of people’s support had morphed. Johnstown voters do not intend to hold the president accountable for the nonnegotiable pledges he made to them. It’s not that the people who made Trump president have generously moved the goalposts for him. It’s that they have eliminated the goalposts altogether.

This reality ought to get the attention of anyone who thinks they will win in 2018 or 2020 by running against Trump’s record. His supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments. For them, it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting. Trump is simply and unceasingly angry on their behalf, battling the people who vex them the worst—“obstructionist” Democrats, uncooperative establishment Republicans, the media, Black Lives Matter protesters and NFL players (boy oh boy do they hate kneeling NFL players) whom they see as ungrateful, disrespectful millionaires.  And they love him for this.

Del Signore said he’s been following politics far more than before because of Trump. Trump, he said, is just “more interesting.” So now he likes watching the news. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I watch Fox,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll be sitting there listening to all this Fox stuff, and I’ll say, ‘Maybe they aren’t right, maybe I’ll flip to CNN’—but every time I’ve found that Fox has been correct, and CNN is definitely fake news.”

There are some positives around here. Corsa Coal’s Acosta mine in neighboring Somerset County opened in June. So did Robindale Energy’s new Maple Springs mine. Rosebud Mining reportedly is working to reopen its facility in Cresson, but a company spokesman wouldn’t comment on the status of the project. The increased activity is largely the result of spiking Chinese demand. But even with potentially several hundred new jobs, the long-term outlook for coal is grim. An industry forecast last month from the BMI Mining Report projected coal production to grow by 6 percent and 2 percent this year and next year, respectively, but also noted: This “does not reflect an expectation for President Donald Trump to revive the sector and our longer-term view out to 2021 remains decidedly downbeat.”

But even this optimistic stance highlights some of the deep-seated troubles here. “Right now, if I could find 150 people, I’d put them to work,” Polacek said. He needs machinists. He needs welders. “But it’s hard to find people,” he said—people with the requisite skills, people who can pass a drug test.

“We just don’t have the workforce,” said Liston, the city manager. “If they are employable, and have a skill set, basically they already moved out of the area.”

Some of the later-in-life blue-collar workers who are still here can be loath to learn new trades. “We’ve heard when working with some of the miners that they are reluctant because they’re very accustomed to the mining industry,” said Linda Thomson, the president of JARI, a nonprofit economic development agency in Johnstown that provides precisely the kind of retraining, supported by a combination of private, state and federal funding, that could prepare somebody for a job in Polacek’s plant. “They really do want to go back into the mines. So we’ve seen resistance to some retraining.”

Johnstown and surrounding Cambria County, whiter, poorer and less educated than America overall, was famished for the message Trump delivered in person at War Memorial Arena last October. “Your government betrayed you, and I’m going to make it right,” he told them. . . . . It was what they so badly wanted to hear. On November 8, 2016, in Cambria County, Trump trounced Hillary Clinton by nearly 38 points.

By last week, though, John George told me that despite what they might have said, people here didn’t really believe Trump would make good on all his promises. “Deep down inside,” he said, “I don’t think anybody thought the steel mills were going to come back.”

Last week, he reported hearing for the past year at work, at Gautier Steel, exactly what I had been hearing in my conversations around town—a remarkable, undeniable, ongoing vehemence of support. . . . . So many people in so many other areas of the country watch with dismay and existential alarm Trump’s Twitter hijinks, his petty feuds, his penchant for butting into areas where the president has no explicit, policy-relevant role. All of that only animates his supporters here. For them, Trump is their megaphone. He is the scriptwriter. He is a singularly effective, intuitive creator of a limitless loop of grievance and discontent that keeps them in absolute lockstep.

More than anything, what seemed to upset the people I spoke with was the National Football League players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality.

“You’re not a fan of equality?” I asked.   “For people who deserve it and earn it,” he said. . . . . “Like NFL players?” I said. . . . . “Well,” Del Signore responded, “I hate to say what the majority of them are …” He stopped himself short of what I thought he was about to say. 

The NFL?  “Niggers for life,” Schilling said. “For life,” McCabe added.

Given this mind set, it is little wonder that new, forward thinking businesses have little desire to locate in Southwestern Pennsylvania.  That mindset is not limited to that region of Pennsylvania.  It is alive and well in Southwest Virginia.  The problem is that what animates the rural racist voters increasingly repels the majority of voters in the rest of Virginia.  Here are highlights from the Bearing Drift piece:

First, the Democrats did not win the election; the Republicans lost it.  As the Republican standard-bearer at the head of the ticket, Ed Gillespie committed three fatal errors.

·        He invited Trump to campaign for him, the President with the lowest approval rating in modern history after only ten months in office.  Trump’s low approval rating is not so much a result of his obnoxious personality, bullying, and lying, but because he has failed to deliver on any campaign promises, from building a southern border wall to repealing and replacing ObamaCare to returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S. from overseas. Ed bought into that failure when he invited Trump to appear with him at campaign rallies. By my observation, Gillespie started to decline in the polls after Trump came to Virginia to campaign for him.

·        Gillespie tried the old fear tactic of blaming illegal immigrant gang violence like MS-13 on “sanctuary city” Democratic politics.  The problem is that there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia.  A sanctuary city is one that has passed local laws that counter-act Federal laws on illegal immigrants, such as refusing ICE requests to detain illegals arrested for crimes.  A sanctuary city is not defined simply by the presence of immigrants, legal or illegal.

·        Gillespie bought into the failed Republican promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare.  Millions of Americans have entitlement benefits under the Affordable Health Care Act and, for all its faults, the Republicans have failed to propose an alternative entitlement. And once the government institutes an entitlement program, you cannot take it away without losing elections. Social Security is a case in point. It was launched in 1934 as a safety net for elderly poor.  Today it is a Federal pension program for the middle class.

“God, guns, and guts” plays well in the rural southside and southwest, but economic growth, traffic relief, and good public education is what excites voters in the voter-rich areas.  Cutting taxes for transportation improvements and diverting public school money to Christian academy school vouchers doesn’t get you votes there.

Third, the Republicans continue to send contradictory messages. Individual liberty and personal freedom are not enhanced by government restrictions on issues ranging from hunting on Sundays to having an abortion, the latter having been the law of the land for almost 50 years and continuing to be supported as such by the most conservative Supreme Court since the Great Depression.

Virginia is not so much turning blue as it is becoming anti-red. And that, along with Donald Trump in the White House, is why we had a record voter turn-out Tuesday despite awful weather conditions.

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Will the GOP learn that it needs to abandon the Trump base in many states if it hopes to win elections going forward?  I doubt it.  The Christofascists and white supremacists are now too entrenched in the party grassroots to be defied. 

How "Conservative Charities" Fueled Rejection of the Paris Climate Accord

Despite seeing evidence of climate change before our very eyes - the melting of the polar ice caps plus three simultaneous hurricanes fueled by much warmer ocean water than in the past are but two plainly visible examples -  one has to wonder how Donald Trump and far too many Republicans have been so willing to deny what is otherwise obvious.  As a lengthy investigative report in the Washington Post reveals, much of it is due to the work of "conservative charities" that masquerade as "educational charities" furthering  public education when in reality they are little more than propaganda fronts for large corporations or religious extremists.  Having followed various "conservative" and "Christian" charities for over two decades, they are one of the biggest scams on the public and further ignorance and the rejection of knowledge not to mention unrestricted vulture capitalism that cares nothing about future generations. How they are allowed to continue to scam the IRS rules is at first baffling until one realizes that they often pay larges sums to "conservative" politicians.  Here are highlights from the Post's story:

For nearly two decades, Ebell has led the Cooler Heads Coalition, an umbrella group of tax-exempt public charities and other nonprofit organizations in the vanguard of efforts to cast doubt on the gravity of climate change and thwart government efforts to address it.

Coalition members have called climate science a hoax and denounced environmentalists as “global-warming alarmists.” They have written letters, blasted out emails, pressured lawmakers, sponsored seminars, appeared on television and made a documentary movie.

It was all part of a wave that crested with Trump’s rejection on June 1 of the Paris agreement, a landmark accord by nearly 200 countries in 2015 to limit greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

The story behind the coalition illuminates the influential, little-known role that tax-exempt public charities play in modern campaigns to sway lawmakers and shape policy in the nation’s capital, while claiming to be nonpartisan educational organizations.

It also offers insight into the forces behind a Trump decision that infuriated scientists and environmentalists, mystified U.S. allies and went against the advice of some major corporations.

[T]he Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which helped start the Cooler Heads Coalition in 1997. The coalition, with a rolling membership of more than three dozen groups over the years, describes itself on its website as “informal and ad-hoc,” and focused on education.

Interviews, tax filings, internal documents and news accounts show that its members are well funded and dedicated to advancing a conservative, free-market agenda.

The Post found that the coalition is part of a far larger network of tax-exempt nonprofit groups, linked by ideology and funding, that supported Trump while disparaging Democrat Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential campaign.

The Cooler Heads have received more than $11 million in donations over the years from coal and oil companies. They’ve taken in tens of millions more from nonprofit foundations, such as those controlled by the wealthy Koch brothers, and the Scaife and Mercer families, according to interviews and Internal Revenue Service filings.

[M]embers of the Cooler Heads Coalition are allied with trade groups, public relations companies and lobbyists working to influence public debate about global warming.

“Public charities serve as so-called independent think tanks, providing analysis to create the appearance they are independent, third-party voices,”

Long dismissed as cranks by mainstream scientists and politicians in both parties, Ebell and his Cooler Heads colleagues were embraced last year by the Trump campaign. Ebell served as the transition director at the Environmental Protection Agency. This spring, he leveraged those connections to arrange a White House briefing in opposition to the Paris agreement, according to an email from Ebell to participants that was obtained by The Post.

Such advocacy is in effect supported by American taxpayers, because contributors to groups organized under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code can deduct donations from their taxes, which means less revenue for the federal government. Under IRS rules, such organizations may not devote a substantial part of their work to lobbying. But the laws are vague and hard to enforce. And the IRS provides little oversight, because it is financially strapped and has too few auditors. Agency officials are also wary of enforcing prohibitions on political activity, after the conservative backlash triggered by the agency’s focus on tea party groups several years ago, according to knowledgeable officials.

After long questioning global warming, Ebell now acknowledges that “climate change is occurring and human beings have a role in it.” But he said global warming still is not a crisis. He frames climate change as an ideological issue, saying that giving the government more authority to address it would stimulate a “regulatory onslaught,” damage the U.S. economy and subvert human freedom.

Climate scientists said there is no doubt about the reality of climate change and its consequences, including melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and the intensification of storms. Benjamin Santer, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award for groundbreaking climate research, told The Post that Ebell and his Cooler Heads colleagues are attempting to turn back the clock on knowledge and science.

The Cooler Heads Coalition was formed in the spring of 1997 by a group called Consumer Alert that drew funding from Chevron, Philip Morris and other large corporations. An allied public charity, the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, soon took over management of the coalition, a cross section of nonprofit groups already fighting policies promoted by progressives and a growing number of liberal public charities and nonprofit organizations.

Joining later were groups such as the Heartland Institute, a libertarian group in the Chicago area, and an influential nonprofit organization, Americans for Prosperity, begun by the Koch brothers to “mobilize citizens” to press for economic growth through “government restraint,” tax filings show.

In early 1998, Ebell and others associated with Cooler Heads met with energy industry executives and lobbyists in closed-door meetings at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association. Their goal was to convince the American people that climate science was purely speculative and that the scientists were “out of touch with reality,” according to a copy of an internal memo written by an API official who organized the meetings.

One former Cooler Heads member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of a punitive backlash, said the coalition’s mission under Ebell was to be a “Johnny-on-the-spot for climate denialism” and to simulate a “cacophony of voices” against climate-change science.

An article that spring [2005] by Mother Jones reporter Chris Mooney, now at The Post, revealed that ExxonMobil had cultivated an intricate web of nonprofits, news media outlets, columnists and activists who “have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change.”

A 2009 IRS filing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute — inadvertently made public without redactions — disclosed funding from two coal mining companies. 

In 2013, Brulle completed a study showing that between 2003 and 2010, energy companies, corporations and conservative foundations contributed hundreds of millions to 91 nonprofit “think tanks,” educational groups and associations involved in the fight against global-warming regulations — more than three quarters of them tax-exempt charities whose donors were largely anonymous.

From September to Jan. 19, 2017, Ebell worked on an “action plan” for the president [Trump]. It incorporated the promises Trump had made during the campaign, including the rejection of the Paris accord. Ebell also proposed gutting the agency by cutting thousands of EPA employees.

In effect, taxpayers have indirectly funded these organizations which are fronts for some of the worse polluters that care nothing about clean air and clean water or the nightmares suffered by cities and citizens as the impacts of global warming increase.  

Should We Just Let Appalachia Depopulate?

If there is any part of Virginia that is an economic basket case it is large swaths of Southwest Virginia that comprise a part of Appalachia.  Much of the economic malaise derives from the decline of the coal industry.  But much also comes, in my view, form the region's social backwardness and religious extremism that keeps new industry from entering the region.  The combined result is that young people are fleeing the region, leaving the region inhabited by an increasingly elderly and less educated population.   If Congressional Republicans have their way and gut Medicaid, the regions economy will be even more distressed as rural hospitals are forced to close and some of the few large non-coal related employers cease to exist.  Two editorial in the Roanoke Times - here and here - suggest that perhaps parts of Appalachia should be allowed to simple become depopulated.  The pieces recognize the reality that before the rise of the coal industry, the region was very sparsely populated. A few counties and small cities are trying to embrace education and woo new 21st century businesses. Many, however, are not and the downward spiral, if anything, is accelerating.  Here are  excerpts:

Here’s an uncomfortable question: Instead of trying to build a new economy in Appalachia, should we simply depopulate the place?

Mind you, that’s not a position we’re advocating. It does, however, make for a sobering thought experiment — one that has some important policy implications.

Here’s who got us thinking about this: A friendly fellow named Lyman Stone who issues some dire warnings. By day, he’s a cotton economist in Washington, concerned with the ups and downs of the global cotton trade. On the side, he runs a website called In A State of Migration, which tracks migration trends around the world. A native of Kentucky, he writes a lot about Appalachia. One of his posts — laden with charts and graphs and maps — shows population trends in Appalachia.

The basic point: Westward settlement mostly bypassed Appalachia, likely for the obvious topographic reasons. From 1800 to 1870, what he calls “the classic core of Appalachia — West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia — was mostly empty.

Then something happened. Coal happened. Railroads happened. People — many of them immigrants — poured into Appalachia. Roanoke was not the only boom town to spring up then. So did lots of other communities deeper in coal country.

Between 1870 and 1890, the population of many counties in Southwest Virginia (we’ll just focus on our part of Appalachia) nearly doubled. Over the 20 years after that — between 1890 and 1910 — many nearly doubled again. Wise County’s population more than tripled. From 4,785 in 1870 and 9,345 in 1890, Wise County’s population surged to 34,162 in 1910. The coal boom wasn’t over yet. By 1950 — the year most coal counties in Virginia peaked — Wise County topped out at 56,336. West of the Blue Ridge, only Roanoke was bigger.

Put another way, Appalachia was where the jobs were. Now it’s not.

First, coal-mining became more mechanized. People started moving out decades ago, long before the demand for coal dropped. The collapse of the coal economy has only accelerated that population exodus.

All but one of Virginia’s coal counties is smaller than it was in 1950, sometimes dramatically so.  . . . . And their populations will surely continue to decrease for two reasons, one economic, one demographic.

The economic reason: Last year marked the first time that coal was not the nation’s biggest energy source; natural gas surpassed it. Coal will not come back in any appreciable way. The demand of metallurgical coal — used in steel-making — may rebound some, depending on the economy. However, when utilities make decisions on new power plants, they’re looking decades ahead. They are putting their money into natural gas — hence, Dominion Energy’s interest in the Atlantic Coast Pipeline — and, to a lesser extent, renewables such as wind and solar. You can’t simply flick a switch and turn coal back on.

The demographic reason why coal counties will continue to lose population: It’s young adults who are leaving. Rural areas in general are getting older, but Appalachian counties even more so. . . . . There is not going to be a baby boom in the coalfields — so all these counties will simply get older and older, which means another way they lose population: Deaths outnumber births. All that’s old news, of course, just a backdrop for getting to this question: How much lower will Appalachia’s population drop? And should we really try to stop that?

So what is Appalachia’s economic future? There are certainly efforts to change the equation. Wise County is now rich with broadband Internet — thanks in part to investments by the state’s tobacco commission — and is now making a play for data centers. It’s already landed one. The University of Virginia’s College at Wise and the community college there are training students for drones and cybersecurity. There are similar efforts in eastern Kentucky to create what some are calling “Silicon Hollow.”

On the other hand, Appalachia is a lot bigger than just one forward-thinking county. And President Trump’s proposed budget zeroes out funding for the Appalachian Regional Commission, the federal agency that makes a lot of that training possible. It also zeroes out funding for the program that converts abandoned mine sites into marketable industrial sites.

Trump has lifted environmental regulations on coal. This helps the coal economy in the short term, but does nothing to change its long-term trajectory in the marketplace. Meanwhile, he is trying to take away the few tools that Appalachia does have to remake its economy. Even with those tools, though, the challenge to create an economy to match its existing population is daunting.

Stone puts it in clinical terms: “The market equilibrium for Appalachian population may be even lower than the levels we see today. I know this will cause deep sadness for locals who long for recovery; and as someone who genuinely loves Appalachia, it does for me too. But we can’t let hopes blind us to realities. On some level, population must be associated with economic activity to support it. Coal mining is still declining, and when it’s completely gone, it’s not clear how much economic activity will remain, and therefore how much population can be sustained.”

So what is the solution - beside Appalachia dropping its religious extremism and bigotry towards those who are :other"?  The second o-ed suggests something abhorrent to many whites in Appalachia: immigrants.  Here are excerpts from that piece:

In most localities in Southwest Virginia, more people are dying than being born. In 2015, there were about 1,800 babies born in Virginia’s coalfields. But about 2,400 people died.

Furthermore, the number of deaths is only going to accelerate in coming years, because there are bigger age cohorts moving into their senior years. Meanwhile, the number of births is probably going to fall, because there are fewer young adults left to have babies.

That means right now the coalfields’ population declines by about 600 people a year just through the natural process of deaths and births — even if nobody moves out. And that annual deficit is likely to increase to 1,300 to 1,800 per year — again, even if nobody moves out. That’s a lot of people to make up.

So what would it take to keep the population of the coal counties even? To stop the population losses entirely? Hold onto your seat.

There is another solution, one that could repopulate the coalfields. It’s a policy that’s been proven to work elsewhere, but isn’t likely to be very popular in Southwest Virginia. Still, we’ll mention it anyway: Immigration.

One of the great ironies of our current political situation is that anti-immigration sentiment runs highest in rural areas, yet it’s rural areas that logically should be the loudest champions for increased immigration.

The United States is not Canada — a little matter in 1776 made sure of that — but there are some things we might learn from our northern neighbor. Rural Canada faces the same demographic pressures that rural America does, yet some Canadian communities have responded very differently.

Consider the case of Cape Breton, the northernmost part of Nova Scotia. It looks and feels a lot like Southwest Virginia — mountainous, with an economy that was once based on coal. Now the coal mines are shut down, and the population is declining. Sound familiar? The problem does but the solution doesn’t: Community leaders there are actively encouraging immigrants to settle in Cape Breton — and the leadership complains when their provincial and federal governments don’t do enough to direct immigrants there.

Not just Cape Breton either. The Calgary Herald recently looked at two small towns in what it called Manitoba’s “Bible Belt”: “In 2011, Winkler’s population stood at 10,700; Morden’s was 7,800. Both cities and the surrounding region have grown by more than 3,000 people since, thanks to immigration programs that have drawn people from all over the world.” The Herald said the two towns were now economically “booming,” as employers are enticed there by the larger talent pool of workers.

Canadians see more clearly than Americans that immigrants drive the economy, not slow it down. So what would it take to reverse the demographic collapse in the coalfields? A baby boom would help. So would increased immigration. Without one or both of those, the coalfields will continue to die, quite literally.

How Trump Will Betray the Coal Industry and Miners

Perhaps no one well for Der Trumpenführer's lies more completely than those dependent on the coal industry, especially in areas like Kentucky, West Virginia and parts of Southwest Virginia.  Between appeals to racism, white nationalism and toxic right wing religion, voters in these areas voted for Trump and Republicans that now push budget cuts that will hit these regions harder than many others.  Meanwhile, promises to bring the coal industry back to its glory days - which in truth, were not all that good for average coal industry workers - will likely turn out to be nothing more than promises of a carnival barker.  Between Trump's broken promises (assuming he meant anything he said) and a reactionary culture that makes these regions unattractive for modern progressive businesses, the economic future remains bleak with further pain to come from the policies of politicians that these regions put into office.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the coming betrayal of those who voted out of hatred and an unwillingness to move toward the future and who continue to look backwards.  Here are highlights:

[T]he prognosis for Big Coal remains dim. . . . . President Trump has vowed to roll back environmental regulations that the industry says are part of a “war on coal.”

The stocks of coal companies have enjoyed a “Trump bump,” thanks to the president’s pledges to “bring the coal industry back” and “put our great miners and steelworkers back to work.” Half a dozen big companies have seized the moment to issue stock or sell bonds to raise money from investors willing to wager on the effects of a friendlier Trump administration. Peabody Energy, the nation’s biggest coal behemoth, hopes to win court approval to come out of bankruptcy in April.

But the obstacles on the other side of the ledger remain daunting: Coal-fired power plants continue to shut their doors. Bountiful supplies of U.S. shale gas are keeping natural gas prices low and competitive, and renewable sources of power generation are growing rapidly. Though most experts expect U.S. coal sales and output to top last year’s levels, they also expect the decline to resume in 2018.

“The coal industry is saying it’s back. It’s not back,” said Tom Sanzillo, director of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis. “This is a fool’s errand.” . . . . . Some coal companies will survive, and some could thrive. Metallurgical coal will be needed to make steel in India and China and in the United States, especially if there is a boost in infrastructure spending. And thermal coal will still be used to generate electricity for years, even if at lower rates.

But to show profits, coal operators will have to trim output from the oldest, least-efficient mines in Appalachia (where Trump garnered crucial votes in the election) and shift their focus to the Illinois Basin and the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.

“A lot of people conflate two primary things: the coal industry and coal jobs,” said Chiza B. Vitta, a coal analyst at Standard & Poor’s. “Even if the coal industry were to do better, that doesn’t translate into coal jobs. Over time the process has become more and more efficient, and they’re able to mine with fewer and fewer people working.”  Some analysts don’t even expect the industry to do better.

“The regulatory environment for coal should improve under Trump’s presidency,” the bank [CitiBank] said. But, it added, “comparative economics for coal, renewables and gas place clean coal firmly at the bottom of the stack in the U.S.”

[I]t will be hard for Trump to deliver. “To bring jobs back in Kentucky is a tough proposition unless there’s a subsidy, because it doesn’t make economic sense,” Vitta said.  That’s been true for years, notwithstanding some of the political rhetoric.

In Arizona, the Navajo Generating Station could also provide an early test for the president. Its owners have decided to close the massive coal plant. . . . . . the Navajo station produces electricity at rates about 50 percent higher than market rates.

“There’s no good economic reason to keep NGS on life support, and indeed the time for closure has come,” Sanzillo’s group said in a blog post. “The plant is emblematic of a core challenge facing the traditionally hidebound U.S. electricity-generation industry, as the market for coal-fired electricity is shrinking.”  And, he added, “that’s regardless of recent political events.”

 The take away?  Coal jobs will not return in these regions and the Trump/GOP budget will be savage to the residents of these areas who were basically played for fools and stupidly aided their own long term economic destruction.  Meanwhile, do not expect any progressive changes that will bring new, forward thinking businesses ot that will stop the flight of the most able younger generations to places that are the opposite of their home regions. The embrace of ignorance - think conservative Christianity - and bigotry carry a high price.

Coal Country's Embrace of Fantasy

Coal producing areas of the country, including the increasing backward Southwest Virginia, embraced Der Trumpenführer and his lies about the "war on coal" for many reasons, not the least of which was the desire of voters to return to "the god old days" in the coal industry.  Never mind that (i) there was no "war on coal" and (ii) domestic and global demand for coal is headed in a downward spiral never to return to past levels.  Rather than admit economic reality and to face the task of accepting change - and modern thinking - it was far easier to embrace Trump/GOP lies.  Wanting something to be true, however, doesn't make it true as a piece in Think Progress underscores.  These fantasy embracing voters are going to be most disappointed and Democrats need to find a way to turn their disappointment against the Republicans who played them for fools.  Here are article highlights:

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has a message for the new president: You are not going to bring coal back.

Donald Trump won the presidency with claims that he is a brilliant businessman who will create jobs. He railed against a political “war on coal” supposedly waged by President Obama, one Trump claimed was “killing American jobs.” On his first day in office, Trump deleted all the climate change references on the White House website, replacing it with an “energy plan” that asserts he is “committed to… reviving America’s coal industry.”

In a new analysis, leading independent energy experts at BNEF dismantle these claims. “Whatever President Trump may say, U.S. coal’s main problem has been cheap natural gas and renewable power, not a politically driven war on coal,’” explain BNEF chair Michael Liebreich and chief editor Angus McCrone. Therefore “it will continue being pushed out of the generating mix.”

They note global electricity demand has grown much less than expected (thanks in part to energy efficiency).  . . . .  In a world of flat demand, the electricity market is a ruthless game of musical chairs — where the slowest and most unwieldy power sources keep losing their seat.

Coal power is just too costly and inflexible, explains BNEF: “Super-low-cost renewable power — what we are now calling ‘base-cost renewables’ — is going to force a revolution in the way power grids are designed, and the way they are regulated.”

When you add the revolution in cheap fracked gas — which Trump has pledged to double down on — it’s no surprise the country shut down over 40 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations since 2000. “These will not reopen whatever anything President Trump does,” explains BNEF, “nor do we see much appetite among investors for ploughing money into U.S. coal extraction — stranded asset risk will trump rhetoric.”

[C]oal’s woes are not merely being driven by a collapse in the economic case here. It’s also being driven by a collapse in the export market, as countries from Europe to Asia also move away from coal because of its economic and human cost. Coal pollution is killing people and destroying the climate.

“Peak coal is coming sooner than expected,” Goldman Sachs told clients in a September research note. BNEF agrees.

So Trump won’t be bringing back the domestic coal industry. And even if he could, he can’t bring back the jobs because it’s the coal industry itself that wiped out most of those jobs through productivity gains from “strip mines and machinery,” as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explained in 2014.

The fact is clean energy jobs are the only major new source of sustainable high-wage employment in the coming decades. Tragically, Trump’s misguided policies — his war on clean energy — mean the U.S. may not benefit from this exploding $50-trillion industry.

Did West Virginia Spurn Hillary Because of Obama?

In Virginia, West Virginia is often viewed with skepticism.  After all, West Virginia broke away from Virginia during the civil war and the cultures of the Tidewater and Richmond Virginians and the mountain dwelling West Virginians could not be much greater - in 1860 or now.  West Virginia remains a vastly white state while Virginia has seen much demographic and educational change and much urban growth unlike its next door neighbor.  In the wake of Tuesday's Democrat primary that was won by Bernie Sanders, there are some who view Hillary's loss as a rebuke for serving and siding with Barack Obama, America's first black president.  Indeed, given the racism that is alive and well in West Virginia, which is only magnified by Obama's efforts to push the nation towards clean energy at the expense of coal, such thoughts are probably accurate.  A column in the New York Times looks at the situation.  Here are excerpts:

West Virginia turned on Hillary Clinton. In 2008, when running for the Democratic nomination against then-Senator Barack Obama, Clinton won every county in the state, carrying it by a whopping 41 points.

The Hill reported this week that, according to a political-science professor at a West Virginia college, West Virginia voters were so “fiercely anti-Obama that they voted in large numbers in 2012 for his primary opponent, who was a jailed felon in Texas.”

This cycle, a major part of Clinton’s strategy has been to so closely align herself with President Obama that there is very little light between them. This helped her secure and retain some minority voters, but most likely distanced her from many white ones.

On Tuesday, Clinton lost every county in the state and trailed Bernie Sanders by nearly 16 points. So what’s going on in West Virginia?

First, it is one of the whitest states in the country, and the absolute whitest in the South. It is also the least educated state and one of the poorest. As of 2014, almost 94 percent of its citizens are white, only 18.7 percent have attained a bachelor’s degree and 17.2 percent fall below the poverty threshold.

West Virginia is also heavily reliant on the coal industry, which is at odds with liberal clean-energy initiatives. In an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle in 2008, Obama said of his proposed energy plans:

If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches.

Bankruptcies aside, the Obama years saw a steep decline in coal production in the state. According to a report published by West Virginia University, “After climbing to nearly 158 million short tons in 2008, the state’s coal mine output has tumbled in each successive year to an annual total of approximately 115 million short tons in 2014 ─ or a cumulative decline of 27 percent.” This was the right long-term clean-energy approach, but it hit a sour chord in West Virginia.

[S]mart long-term policy, but doesn’t sit well in West Virginia. Clinton recently apologized for the “misstatement,” saying, “I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context for what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time.” But the apology was too little, too late for voters in West Virginia.

West Virginia illustrates the danger that accompanies the Clinton strategy of closely aligning with President Obama and his policies: Many white voters, particularly white men, detest him. 

These white non-college graduates are a strong base of support for Donald Trump, who exclaimed in Nevada, “I love the poorly educated.” Apparently, the feeling is mutual. If Trump has a path to the presidency, it will most likely be because of Clinton’s — and Democrats’ — weakness among people who look an awful lot like the voters in West Virginia.

Like much of Southwest Virginia, West Virginia is its own biggest enemy.  Few new, progressive business want to locate to a region so consumed with racism and so proud of embracing ignorance a bigotry.  Until these factors change, do expect economic improvement.  

Coal is a Dead End for Southwest Virginia

Southwest Virginia continues to be the basket case of Virginia.  Unemployment is high, too much reliance exists on the coal industry - which does anything but give back to the community - and the region remains educationally and socially/culturally backwards.  Not surprisingly, other than a few of the cities, the region remains a Republican bastion even as GOP policies help hold the area back economically and socially.  Parts of the region are truly beautiful - e.g., the Blue Ridge Parkway and some of the national forests - but many people choose not to travel to a region that in someways still fits the mold of something out of the movie Deliverance.  An editorial in the Roanoke Times by a Catholic nun makes the case for change in what is a vicious downward spiral.  Here are excerpts:

The Oct. 29 commentary (“New carbon rules are all pain, no gain”) from Kevin Crutchfield, Steve Smith, Jim McGlothlin and John Tickle continues to miss the mark about “the disconnect.” The disconnect isn’t with D.C. It is within us.

We continue to underappreciate our full Appalachian culture, the incredible biodiversity of our coalfield region. We are more than the coal in the coalfields. We have survived a climatic extinction twice; yet, we continue to be led in a cycle of singular, over-reliance on coal as the solution to our economic and cultural survival.

This is a dead end and much of the reason we are facing the current and future losses named in the energy magnates’ letter and blamed on the EPA. We need a new landscape and business leaders with broader vision. Decisions today cannot be taken solely from geological perspectives or the possible economic benefits for investors and for the states in which the companies are based.

We need an honest acknowledgment, by business and local political leaders and ourselves, of what we far Southwest Virginians know, deep down, to be true. It will only be in restoring the land that we will restore the people and the economy of our area, and our state. A restoring the land, restoring the people initiative happens when we advance practical solutions that integrate simultaneously both ecologically sustainable and economically viable practices. These practices require giving priority to ecological economics as the means to creating a culture of sustainability.

We cannot continue with a “do the damage now and reclaim it later mentality.” Principles of reduce, reuse, recycle, reclaim and restore are necessary at every stage of the economic development plans. Practicing an ecological economics includes a commitment to going green, doing green.

Our IDA plans and commitments require more than promoting discrete projects like Appalachian Culture, music and crafts, tourism, ATV trails and outdoor activities. These are important, but in addition to their promotion there needs to be a link to how that content contributes to the total restoration of our region. In practice, whatever initiatives we take, they need — from start to finish, in every aspect of the business plans — to follow principles that are friendly to the natural environment and sustainable for the Earth.

Stop blaming D.C., EPA and the proposed clean energy power plan. Stop using “traditional air emissions” to buttress the argument that says the coal industry is lessening carbon pollution.

In fact, the coal industry has done little if anything to reduce its carbon pollution despite its contribution to global warming. When the production of our goods and services depends on the extraction of material from our ecosystems, then that dependence causes resource depletion on the one hand, and excess pollution on the other.

The disconnect we are experiencing in far Southwest Virginia is that we continue to ignore the biophysical basis that underpins the economy. We need to conserve resources, conserve energy, reduce waste, reduce pollution and the release of harmful substances into the environment and protect the Earth’s ecological balance with other living things. Anything or anyone who undermines this reality undermines us.

Southwest Virginia has lived in the past for far too long.  Of course, the Christofascists and the GOP like it that way.  However, it is a dead end for the local residents.  When will more of them open their eyes to this reality?