Elizabeth Warren in heading to West Virginia to campaign for Natalie Tennant is getting flack from both Tennant’s GOP opponent Shelly Capito and Tennant herself. The big noise is, of course, about coal. Warren is a deadly enemy of that poisonous fossil fuel while both Capito and Tennant have come out as backers of the worst source of energy on the planet. Nneither pol deserves to win because neither has the guts to tell their constituents the truth.
But why don’t West Virginia residents see this as an open and shut argument? The answer is simple, jobs. Coal has been supporting, or indenturing WV workers for a couple of centuries. It’s also been killing its kids, poisoning its water and turning its residents into virtual slaves of the company store, but who’s keeping track? Especially not the local residents who tend to back anyone who is on the side of coal.
After all the objections to coal have been listed and sorted and for the most part discarded, the one essential argument always comes down to jobs. If you destroy the coal industry, the oligarchs declare, you will all be out of work. What they fail to mention is that the only people currently working are those who haven’t succumbed to black lung or been poisoned by their drinking water.
What no one mentions and I can’t for the life of me figure out why, is that there is a whole new industry just waiting to replace coal. I don’t hear anyone asking the wives and mothers of West Virginia if they would rather have their sons and husbands out in the sun and fresh air erecting wind towers and installing solar panels or down in a black mine shaft breathing in coal dust and waiting for the roof to bury them alive. It seems like this is the argument that no one is making and for the life of me I don’t see why not.
If the coal mines closed today there would be years of government work still to do, to secure the unsafe mess that is sure to be left behind by a genre of owner/operators who have proven over years of abuse that they care nothing for the workers, their families or the country in general. The top American coal producers, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, Alpha Natural Resources, Cloud Peak Energy and Duke care only for their profits and the hell with anything or anybody else. They put men to work in conditions that are so dangerous that only a small percentage of workers ever survive to maturity, they keep those workers families in virtual slavery by means of the company store, the only place they are allowed to shop and where each week’s wages disappear back to the company before any amount is saved. And just so the rest of the community, that part that doesn’t work in the mines, doesn’t forget that they’re there, they manage to spill poisonous slurry from their operations into all the rivers and to dump millions of tons of debris from their clear cut mountain topping operations into the smaller streams, blocking them forever and eliminating sources of fresh water and fish for local communities and forage for local wildlife.
Of course the coalmines are just about the only source of jobs in West Virginia and Kentucky. Who wants to build a manufacturing plant in a location where fresh air and potable water are almost non-existent? But eliminate coal and let these beautiful mountains return to what they once were and you will have a land where many would love to live and work. Where jobs that didn’t kill off your sons and husbands would flourish and where a safe and beautiful environment was entirely possible.
The people of West Virginia must be convinced that they must kill coal before coal kills them.