In West Virginia, Trump dishes fantasy, and coal supporters dig it
up.
Press reports described
the Charleston Civic Center, capacity 13,500, as "packed" as a host
of West Virginia politicos took the stage on August 21 in support of the headliner,
President Donald Trump.
The crowd booed the Fake
News and chanted "Build the Wall" and "Lock Her Up" as
though they were Trump's long-lost hits revived at an oldies concert.
They
cheered his declaration of "No Collusion" despite the fact that two key
Trump associates became multi-count felons earlier that day.
But, this being West Virginia,
Trump sang a special tune. The President crooned for the Mountain
State's heart as if he were an apricot-colored John Denver.
Behind him on the
podium, a curiously diverse group of supporters held up pre-fab placards about
how Trump keeps promises, and how he "Digs Coal." Several wore
miners' hardhats, giving the whole thing a bit of a Village People ambience.
Then Trump got down to
the realities of the American Coal industry. In a wartime scenario, he said,
windmills can be bombed back to the Stone Age. So, despite their many other
blessings, could pipelines. For good measure, he added that "you could do
a lot of things to solar panels.'
But coal, "clean,
beautiful West Virginia coal," he said, was "indestructible."
Coal, its jobs, and West Virginia's economy, were all roaring back.
Take a few minutes to watch the
C-SPAN video of the speech. Trump's coal paean begins about four
minutes in. Later, he praises Appalachia's "crystal clear water,"
despite findings that the region's water is some of the most polluted in
America.
In June, a leaked
National Security Council memo revealed a strategy to prop up economically
failing coal and nuclear plants in the name of saving the electrical grid.
There were few takers on this novel threat, though.
Hours before Trump's
West Virginia rally, Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler introduced the
Affordable Clean Energy Plan, the administration's dramatic rollback of
Obama's Clean Power Plan.
It would ease the regulatory burden on coal, and punt
most of the enforcement power to states hard-pressed to regulate anything.
The likely result is
that some coal-fired power plants slated to close would limp on for a few
years.
Another likely result:
1,400 premature deaths a year by 2030 due to an increase in fine particulate
matter that spurs heart and lung disease.
West Virginians were
left with two choices: The President's vision of clean, beautiful coal
providing West Virginia jobs till Kingdom Come, and the notion of the state as
an economically barren hellhole. Which to pick?
Trump's adoring crowd
knew the answer. Elsewhere, a few dissenting voices begged to differ. Nick
Mullins, a fifth-generation miner, told the New York Times in
a video op-ed that the industry isn't coming back.
Period.
Coal stocks scraped
bottom in 2016, and have since bounced back an average of 26
percent. Some closed Appalachian mines have re-opened, and
there has been a slight rise in mining jobs since 2016.
But the prevailing
economic view is that the industry's brief growth spasms are a prelude to its slow death.