Imagine if you had a job. A good job, one that required skill and critical thinking and had a broad impact in the community where you lived. A job you didn't just show up to do. It was a job you were good at, and because of it, you were able to provide a roof over your family's head, put your children through college, or help pay for their wedding, and once a year, it gave you the ability to carve out a week or two to take the family on vacation.
Now, imagine that job becomes the center of political debate, one far removed from the Laurel Mountains, where this town sits. Within two decades, your profession goes from being championed by the Democratic Party and labor officials to one that they want to destroy....
Several things bother Fisher and Charles regarding how others look upon those in the mining industry. One is the stereotype of anyone in their business as either anti-intellectual or anti-clean environment. The former they consider insulting, the latter ridiculous.
"Not only do we drink the water and breathe the air here, but we also hunt, fish, and swim here. We are the first people who want whatever we do here to be safe," Fisher said. It is a common refrain from energy workers across the country.
The other thing that gets under their skin is when politicians flippantly suggest they can quickly get another job. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently said people who lost their job to climate justice might find a climate-conscious job.
And President Biden himself suggested coal miners should just learn to code. Last year in New Hampshire, in the middle of a brag of how Barack Obama had placed him in charge of judging what the jobs of the future would be, he said, "Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well."
It is still astounding to witness the contempt and disdain politicians and the press have toward the lives and livelihoods of people who aren't like them, people who don't live in their ZIP codes or attend the same universities they did.
People often asked after the 2020 election what will happen with the Trump voters (Fisher and Charles voted for him twice). The thing is, this complex conservative populist coalition existed long before it helped catapult Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016.
Harvey Charles's hands after working in the mine.
(Justin Merriman / for the Washington Examiner)
His win was, in part, the result of a culture that became detached from the people they served in various institutions, whether it was the government, the entertainment industry, or the college campus. Many people ultimately rejected all of them.
But if you never understood that. If you always thought it was about Trump, you never understood who they were and why they voted the way they do.
And you never understood how someone who lives in the suburbs of Arizona or Kenosha or Miami could have anything in common with someone who works the mines in Appalachia. And you didn't understand that because you didn't care to, because you hoped for its destruction.
ACOSTA, PA. — On a warm June morning, a large crowd gathered in the lush, gentle folds of the Allegheny Mountains to hear President Donald Trump live on video.
“I’m absolutely thrilled to be speaking with you on this great, great day,” he said. “The miners of Pennsylvania are mining coal again.”
On a stage, five men unfurled a gold banner that blared, in large black letters: “Trump Digs Coal,” as the audience went wild.
For the first time in nearly a decade, a new coal mine has opened here, and a US president has rallied alongside an industry deemed by many as obsolete.
The Acosta Deep Mine in Somerset County marks a dramatic upturn for the area. And while President Trump cannot claim that he brought the industry back here personally (this new mine was already being developed before the election), he is an effective cheerleader for folks who’ve been discounted by the political elite.
“We will begin by employing 70 to 100 miners and we hope to open a total of three new mines in the next 18 months — and that will mean additional hiring,” said George Dethlefsen, CEO of Corsa Coal, which owns the mine.
More than 400 people applied for the first wave of jobs that will pay from $50,000 to $100,000, Dethlefsen said.
In a region where the median household income is $29,050, and nearly 12 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, the economic injection is huge.
‘I don’t think people outside of our small town understand how life-changing this development is.’
It also creates a ripple effect: For every new job generated by the mine, even more jobs like waitresses, hotel workers, barbers or grocery workers are needed to support the community.
“The money essentially stays here in our hometown,” said Greg Griffith, owner of Griffith Excavating, who was working the mine last week with his crew. He has hired new people to take on the workload and will employ even more as the other mines open.
“I don’t think people outside of our small town understand how life-changing this development is.”
He’s right about that. Just days after the event, progressives on Twitter slammed the mine, comparing the opening of an energy-supplying coal pit to the launching a VCR factory in the digital age. In their minds, it’s a waste of time.
And the response from the people of Acosta? Stop treating other Americans like the enemy.
They also point out that the criticism is wildly misinformed. The coal from this mine is not going to be used for energy — instead, it will be used for the production of steel for the next 15 years. (According to the World Steel Association, coal is used to make 70 percent of the steel today.)
Every single one of us relies on steel in our daily lives. It’s found in our cars, bikes and public transportation. Those wind turbines so loved by environmentalists? Made of steel. The utensils we use to eat? Steel. Medical devices used to save lives? Steel.
This Labor Day, America has 83,000 fewer coal jobs and 400 coal mines than it did when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, showing that the president has followed through on his pledge to “bankrupt” the coal industry.
Environmentalism has always been the plaything of the rich, the tool of the rich, and the hell with the little people.
Aubrey McClendon, the former Chesapeake Energy CEO, died March 2 in a car wreck the day after being indicted for conspiracy to rig bids on oil and natural gas leases. He will likely be remembered for two things: being a pioneer of the shale gas boom and a possible criminal who, in death, may have eluded a prison sentence. [He will also be remembered for committing suicide by car as a way of avoiding prison]
But McClendon may have had one other lasting legacy: he helped hasten the collapse of the coal industry in the United States.
Between 2007 and 2012, McClendon and his associates contributed around $26 million to the Sierra Club to oppose the building of new coal-fired power plants. McClendon’s motivations were hardly pure; he knew that preventing new coal plants meant more demand for his company’s product, natural gas. And the contributions led to a scandal for the environmental group, whose well-funded “Beyond Coal” campaign has been instrumental in not only preventing new plants, but also shutting down aging ones.
Executive director Michael Brune had a simple explanation for accepting money from a big gas company that was drilling hundreds of wells using hydraulic fracturing: the enemy of our enemy is our friend. “The Sierra Club board of directors … determined that natural gas, while far from ideal as a fuel source, might play a necessary role in helping us reach the clean energy future our children deserve,” Brune wrote in a 2012 blog post. “The idea was that we shared at least one common purpose [with Chesapeake]—to move our country away from dirty coal."
The Sierra Club turned down further contributions from McClendon and his Chesapeake colleagues as it began to worry about the boom in natural gas fracking. That didn’t affect the outcome: McClendon’s philanthropy helped make it very unlikely that any new coal plants will be built in the U.S.—and helped push coal, the backbone of America’s power sector for more than a century, into a sudden and dramatic twilight.
Unemployed coal miners and higher electric bills that the poor can't afford is not going to be the subject for media attention. They approve.
