Fayetteville, W.Va. (AP) – The winner of this year’s West Virginia Coal Festival Teen Beauty draft is hiking among the ruins of a community 70 years ago, which was left 70 years ago, and introduces itself to the rusted remains of coal tips and processing of systems that are brought back to life.
Ava Johnson knows that the coal of West Virginia will never be as it used to be. But when they made themselves on their way along the overgrown railway rails near the abandoned Kay Moor-Mine in the New River Gorge National Park to look for Spikes for their collection, the 16-year-old says that they have spoken to people with the hope of the future of an industry that has brought their federal state well paid for two centuries.
“You can’t appreciate that you are a true West Virginian if you don’t realize that people risk their lives every day to improve our,” she said.
Much of this renewed feeling of hope is based on the actions of President Donald Trump, who gave modern executive orders at the beginning of this month to revive an energy source that has long been characterized by scientists as the most soiled fossil fuels worldwide, which contributes directly to heating the planet.
Trump, who has agreed to “Coal” since his first run for the presidency in 2016, made command to enable mining in federal state and to loosen some emission standards that are intended to contain the environmental impact of coal.
“All of the closed plants are opened when they are modern enough,” said Trump at the signing ceremony. “(Or) they are depressed and brand new are built.”
The news was enthusiastic in West Virginia, where residents like Johnson say that the coal industry is misunderstood and that they are fed up with feeling unstoppable with Americans. But others don’t believe that Trump will be able to fulfill promise that he has made some of his most steadfast voters.
Trump and his allies “make a wrong story,” said Tyson Slocum, who teaches energy and climate policy at the University of Maryland Honors College and is the energy program director of the non-profit public citizens. He said that the market forces had pulled away from the coal in a way that cannot be reversed, an opinion that is widespread among the economists.
“There is nothing that Trump can do, which will have a significant impact on the domestic coal market,” said Slocum in a telephone interview. “The energy markets, the steel markets, have changed fundamentally. And learning how to adapt and how to provide the actual solutions for the concerns and fears in carbon associations would be a more effective strategy than a return that will not happen.”
At a coal exhibition, renewed optimism
This was not the prevailing mood at a coal exhibition recently issued in Charleston, where Johnson and many others, which encouraged Republican President, encouraged to express coal again, even if some skepticism compared to his ability.
“For years, our industry has had the feeling of being a bit like a lashing boy like a political sacrificial builder,” said Steven Tate from Viacore, a company that makes a apparatus that helps the mountain operator to limit the amount of coal dust in a mine. “We have the feeling that we finally get the recognition that our industry deserves.”
Some said Trump’s command showed respect for workers who in the mines – 21,000 in West Virginia, the best of every state – and for a resource that contributed to the establishment of America.
“Trump prevailed all the way,” said Jimbo Clendenin, a retired specialist for mine equipment, whose grandchildren worked in coal mining three years ago. “He said he was for coal. And many people – even a few of them here in West Virginia – said: ‘I only think he said that to get into office.’
“Nobody now has doubts. He is for coal.”
In recent decades, the aggressive push of the Democratic Party has led to pristine energy to install renewable energy and to convert coal -fired power plants, which are to be heated by cheaper and cleaner natural gas.
In 2016, Trump confiscated on this topic and promised to end what he described as a democratic President Barack Obama’s “war against coal” and saved the jobs of the miners. It helped in West Virginia, where the majority of voters in every district of Trump supported in three presidential elections.
Trump did not bring the industry back in his first term. In West Virginia, which employs most miners of a state, the number of coal jobs from 11,561 at the beginning of its presidency fell to 11,418 at the end of 2020 and may snail-paced down the forceful decline of coal but not to stop.
Slocum said Trump could empty the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and deregulate the mining, but he cannot save coal.
“It is not the EPA, they are not Democrats who have declared this war against coal,” said Slocum. “It was capitalism and natural gas. And honestly for the reasons for the decline of coal is the least that we can do for coal-dependent communities instead of lying to them what the Trump government does. Sometimes people want to believe a lie because it is easier to confront a tough truth.”
A steady decline in jobs
In 2009, the EPA found that the planet warming building gases put public health and well-being in danger, a determination that the modern EPA boss Lee Zeldin Trump asked to rethink. Scientists are against Zeldin’s push, and Slocum said that the finding of the hazard and the need to move away from coal addiction is “not a theoretical debate. It is a factual, scientific, if not in the current Trump management.”
However, there is no doubt that the culture of coal is integrated into the fabric of West Virginia. A miner can be a worker in the coal industry, but also a sports team mascot, a picture that is lubricated on the state flag or the name of a breakfast sandwich in Tudor’s Biscuit World.
In the 1950s, more than 130,000 West virginians worked in the industry, which at that time had around 2 million inhabitants. Production reached a high in 2008, a year before Johnson was born. Until then, however, the number of coal workers had dropped to 25,000, mainly due to mechanization.
Heather Clay, who operates the beauty competition and the social media of West Virginia Coal Festival, said that it was particularly critical to lose coal job-hobs six-digit income-in a state with one of the country’s highest poverty rates.
“It is so much more than what people outside of West Virginia understand,” she said. “You always say:” Still hour coal “,” Standstill der coal “. So you want to close our economy? Do you want to close our families? Do you want to switch off our lifestyle? And it has for many people.”
Innovation, not elimination
Proponents of the Trump and Cabbage industry say that maintaining coal in the US energy portfolio for maintaining the power grid, growing demand through innovations such as artificial intelligence centers and the energy-independent of America is of indispensable importance.
John Deskin, director of the West Virginia University Bureau of Business and Economic Research, said that the underlying economy would be changed significantly so that the supply companies build modern coal-fired power plants.
Natural gas is cleaner and cheaper, he said, and it is the direction in which most of the supply companies deal. At the beginning of this year, First Energy plans announced that it would convert her two remaining coal -fired power plants into natural gas.
Johnson carries the sash and the crown of her pageant over a black dress and sneakers when she walks through the ruins of the abandoned Kay Moor Mine. She speaks enthusiastically about the past of the industry, but occasionally also about what she could be for a better future for coal in West Virginia for what Trump did.
“I think it won’t just affect the industry,” she said, “but people’s lives.”
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Raby reported from Charleston, West Virginia.
