More on the southern coalfields

Lots of people even beyond WV are starting to track the situation in the southern coalfields, where mining jobs have been dramatically declining. Something about this piece by environmental writer David Roberts in Grist rubbed me the wrong way, at least a little.

It looks like I'm not the only one. Two people I think highly of responded at some length, Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo and WV native Jeremy Richardson with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

On a more positive note, WV Senate President Jeff Kessler announced the formation of a 13 member senate task force on the southern coalfields going by the acronym SCORE (Southern Coalfields Organizing and Revitalizing the Economy), which will hold listening sessions with coalfield residents and develop legislative proposals to assist the region. SCORE is modeled in part on Kentucky's SOAR (Save Our Appalachian Region) program.

Some ideas the group will explore include

Increase funding for tourism advertising and development.

Education and workforce development and retraining initiatives.

Dedicating monies for viable redevelopment projects.

Agribusiness and rural development opportunities.

Increase Broadband access.

Expanding and supporting intermodal transportation.

          Explore development of coalbed methane reserves.

Support clean coal research and development.

Kessler and his fellow senators deserve a lot of credit for taking this on. You can find more about SCORE here and here.

Coalfield blues

There's no doubt about it. These are hard times in the southern WV coalfields. Unfortunately, while the rhetoric is white hot (accent on white, by the way), straight talk is hard to find, especially in an election year. Here's a glum assessment of the current state of political debate here from my friend Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo.

On the positive side, some state leaders want to actually do something about it. State Senate President Jeff Kessler is holding a press conference tomorrow announcing the creation of a coalfield revitalization initiative. Obviously, it's way too soon to even guess how this will go but I think it's a big step forward just to create a task force to talk about the issues.

Meanwhile, people are starting to talk about the idea of some kind of federal assistance for displaced miners. Here's a piece from Grist titled "Should the feds bail out coal miners?" My short answer to that is, yes, as in programs modeled on other efforts to help workers displaced by trade agreements.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Republican WV Congressman David McKinley introduced a bill with a Democratic co-sponsor from Vermont to do something like that. The odds of it making it through congress any time soon don't look good, but it's another step in the right direction.

Another positive step that I've mentioned before is the What's Next, WV? effort, which is going to hold deliberative forums all over the state about our economic future.

None of this, however, is a big help right away to the over 5,000 miners who have lost jobs in southern WV over the last few years due mostly to shifting market forces.

A soft landing?

According to projections, coal production in southern West Virginia is likely to go down in the coming years. However, this may not have the same long term impact on jobs. As this blog post from the WV Center on Budget and Policy points out, there is some chance that employment may actually rebound or even increase over the long term.

Going after highly priced but relatively scarce metallurgical coal, most of which is underground, may require more "miner hours," which adds up to more work for miners.

Of course, all of this is speculation. Southern West Virginia is headed for a rough transition regardless and it makes sense to prepare for that by convening an economic transition task force and by creating a Future Fund so that West Virginians in the years to come will enjoy some of the fruits of the extraction of non-renewable resources.

Blaming the president and the EPA for problems that go way beyond either, which is the sport of many of WV's political leaders, is intellectually and morally dishonest. And it just plain won't work in the long term. Whether southern WV is in for a hard or soft landing, we need to prepare.

CHILDHOOD NEGLECT is bad for the brain.

STRANGENESS may improve creativity. That explains a lot.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Are we there yet?

Step by step...

As a kid I used to torment adult drivers with that question on long trips. As a parent, I used to torment my kids when they were little by telling them that our still distant destination was just around the next bend.

I keep asking that question myself lately about health care reform. It has been a long strange trip, from unknown years of talking about it in the abstract to a long hard year of pushing for it in the concrete.

I guess we'll know what's up by the end of the weekend, but this item from the Washington Monthly website puts it in context:

THREADING AN IMPOSSIBLE NEEDLE.... It's probably an esoteric point, but it's worth pausing to appreciate just how ridiculously challenging it was to craft this health care reform proposal. There's a very good reason this legislation has never passed up until now, and why presidents who've tried have failed, and it goes beyond just right-wing hysterics and corporate pushback.

Think about the scope of the task -- Democrats were told they needed a health care reform bill that spends a lot of money on covering the uninsured, lowers the deficit, strengthens Medicare, helps businesses, eases government budgets, protects consumers, and controls costs, all at the same time. It would also need to earn the blessing of Congressional Budget Office, the American Medical Association, the AARP, and the nation's largest labor unions.

Democrats were also told they needed to do all of this in the face of unanimous and apoplectic Republican opposition, far-right manipulation of gullible conservative activists, and media coverage that largely ignores the substance of the bill while pretending every right-wing attack deserves attention.

Oh well...I'd hate to think we spent all this time and effort trying to do something easy.

AND HERE ARE SOME MORE REASONS to get it done.

SPEAKING OF HEALTH, this is no surprise, but the coalfield counties of southern WV have the worst in the state.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. The budget for El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia included some additional Medicaid funding for in home care for elderly people with disabilities.

YOU GO, JOE. Congratulations to Governor Manchin, who is considering vetoing a bill that would create a gun sales tax holiday during a time of serious budget problems. Manchin was quoted as saying,

I can't look at children in the eye, and struggling families in the eye, and all these people in the eye and say, "I'm sorry we couldn't help you, but, by God, if you want to buy a gun, we can really take care of you.

Don't get me wrong. There are fire sticks in the closet at Goat Rope Farm and I have been known to hunt (without a great deal of success lately, let it be noted) but this was a silly bill.

PRISONS. The population warehoused in state prisons nationwide declined in 2009 for the first time since 1972.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED