Coal’s Decline

Zach Colman’s longish piece is good for getting at the real reasons behind coal’s decline in West Virginia. The people of that state want to blame Obama. And there’s no question that Obama has issued new regulations to move us away from the dirtiest of all energies. But overall, his administration has played only a minor role in a collapse long in coming:

Production in West Virginia hit 156.5 million tons in 1924, when the industry employed 116,000 people, according to the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. Output stayed relatively steady for decades, but new technology cut the workforce to 68,000 by 1956, when output totaled 150.4 million tons.

The region’s low-sulfur coal became a hot commodity when Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970. Power companies could not afford the pollution scrubbers needed to continue burning dirtier coal under the law’s new standards, so cleaner coal from Central Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee was suddenly in demand. Once the easiest coal was extracted, production dipped in the 1980s before peaking again in 1997 at nearly 300 million tons. West Virginia’s production of 182 million tons that year, just 17 years ago, was a record.

Wage costs rose sharply after that as the coal was harder to reach. And by then, power plants had installed technology that allowed them to burn dirtier Midwestern coal.

Decline accelerated when the shale boom began in the late 2000s. Plentiful supplies of natural gas pushed prices to record lows, making it competitive with coal. Power companies built cheaper generators to run on gas. Buyers for Central Appalachia’s coal went away. Regulations have encouraged the shift from coal to gas. The writing was on the wall for electric utilities when Congress nearly passed a sweeping cap-and-trade bill in 2009. It passed in the House but fizzled in the Senate.

Coal employed 22,096 people in West Virginia in 2012, according to state records. That’s up from 16,233 at the 1997 production peak. The figure shows that the struggles of West Virginia’s coal country can’t be pinned solely on the Obama administration.

That’s right, more people are employed in coal in West Virginia than in 1997. Obama is not the enemy here. It’s a century of coal industry profit-taking, terrible political leadership, poor planning on the county and state level, and structural disadvantages related to the region’s long-standing poverty. Coming out of Oregon logging towns collapsing in much the same way during the 1980s and 90s that have not recovered today, I get the despair and hatred of outsiders that is animating the people of coal country. But like it was not environmentalists’ fault in Oregon in 1990, it’s not the Obama administration now. But protecting your culture by blaming outsiders is the easiest thing to do. When they are a bunch of long-haired tree huggers or are a black guy in the Oval Office, it’s even easier.