The decline of coal was hastened by public policy, but was inevitable. Also, other parts of Appalachia haven’t met West Virginia’s fate because the states successfully diversified their economies and don’t rely as heavily on extractive industries.
West Virginia’s issue — as a state - is a deep seated cultural unwillingness to adapt or change. The decline of goal is the trigger, not the problem.
> West Virginia’s issue — as a state - is a deep seated cultural unwillingness to adapt or change
As illustrated by the 2016 election.
One candidate said coal had played a vital role in making the US what it is but it is in decline due to both the need to address climate change and falling demand due to advances in other forms of energy production. That candidate proposed a $30 billion dollar plan to "ensure that coal miners and their families get
the benefits they’ve earned and respect they deserve, to invest in economic diversification and job creation, and to make coal communities an engine of US economic growth in the 21st century as they have been for generations" [1].
The other candidate said he would reverse the decline in coal and bring back the jobs and mines that had gone away over the previous decade. He offered no hint at how he would accomplish that, and nearly all analysts and even more coal mine owners said that because of the shale revolution and the rapidly falling prices of wind and solar coal would remain in decline no matter what the government did
West Virginia overwhelmingly voted for that second candidate giving him a larger percentage of their vote (68%) than any other state.
As someone who was born and raised in WV, I’ll say that though the coal industry had been the state’s lifeline for over a century, the relationship was toxic at best. Appalachian coal miners are among the most used and abused groups of workers in modern history. The pay is good for the area yes, but it requires trading away your health and risking death. Coal companies are shameless when it comes to workers’ rights and that traces all the way back to their origin point. They’re part of the reason that governmental worker protections exist now.
Realistically the state government should’ve started to seriously try to attract alternative industries decades ago, because the state was always going to spiral if it relied on coal… the only difference is the speed of the spiral.
Yup, things like “portal to portal” rules for Amazon warehouse workers have their origin in the subterranean portals of a mine, because coal companies didn’t want to pay their workers for the hour ride down or up the mineshaft. Which is the analogy Amazon drew to their frisk lines at the exits, even if they require it it’s not “part of the job” etc.
Coal companies were the Uber of their time, “innovating” in a space and time when the law hadn’t kept up with industrial progress, and obviously one of the places you can extract value is from the welfare of your workers.
This sort of victim mentality is endemic to the region.
WV could have taken the path of western PA. Not perfect, still some deep scars, but a flourishing new economy that can help pay for long term recovery and provided youth with some sort of future.
WV chose victimhood over adaptation, for decades, and here we are. The article isn’t just about cutting humanities departments. WV is so thoroughly hollowed out that it can’t even afford to keep its flagship Computer Science department fully staffed. It’ll be left out of the great onshoring because there is not sufficient human capital or infrastructure.
It’s the state government version of a private equity “strip mine the assets and wind it down” operation.
Constant victimhood is a self fulfilling prophecy. Opportunities were there. WV was too busy being obstinate to take them.
Heh, this family is in Western PA which I left in the early 2000's for greener pastures outside of PA entirely. I love the area and the people, but pretending things are economically rosy in Western PA in the extraction areas undercuts your credibility. Leave Pittsburgh once in awhile.
1. These sorts of presumptive comments are presumptive and serve no purpose in the conversation. Believe it or not, you aren't the only person on the internet with your background.
2. Western PA is an enormous region, and it's not just Allegheny County that is doing well relative to West Virginia.
3. Having some base of economic activity outside of coal is still better than nothing, even if resulting employment is concentrated in metro areas.
Realtalk, one of the biggest problems with the United States is that there’s no mechanism to adjust or reboot states after statehood.
In some of these cases the state would simply go under and be reformed or reabsorbed into neighboring states, but thanks to the federal mechanism this cannot happen. The US taxpayer will always be injecting federal money into the state and that’s enough to stave off total collapse, it is unpossible for even a natural disaster to push even the shittiest corrupt state under or anything else. And in many casss that means these corrupt ineffective states continue to linger on far past their actual shelf life and after they would have been reformed into a more stable one under any other system.
This also has the effect of crippling the federal government with a lot of “pocket boroughs/rotten boroughs” that have constitutionally-allocated voting rights yet have almost no residents and potentially no economic activity. And there is no mechanism to reform this without the consent of the states, which will never be given for political reasons even if the states themselves wanted it (which they don’t).
It is also not a coincidence that when the Slave States left that the north got a bunch of regulatory stuff passed while they were gone. The marriage is really not a happy one and part of that is that these state governments continue to be set up in an undemocratic fashion which continues to promote and empower these same folks over and over - like the 1910s/1920s and 1950s/1960s flareups of the Klan. But again, we rebuilt the same antidemocratic (by design, to suppress threats to oligarchic slaveholder power) government structures after the war and expected a different outcome somehow. And there just is no mechanism for reform without another war and re-admission to the union as being a club to force reforms.
This lack of a reform mechanism for state allocation and structure is going to be the thing that kills the union for good, I very much feel this is the singular underlying issue that’s been rattling around the untied states for almost 250 years now. Fix the state allocation and the senate or presidency aren’t as undemocratic a structure.
And yes, I understand full well that the slave states would never have joined the compact if such provisions were included. They should have been, and the slave states would eventually have collapsed or initiated a fatal war and been assimilated into a more stable structure. The economic collapse of the south in the 1840s/1850s as they missed the industrialization wave due to the Resource Curse of slave labor would have pushed them under in the alt-history timeline too.
(and yes West Virginia was the loyalists who stayed with the union, but, culturally and economically they have weighed with the rest of Southern Appalachia more in the intervening era, and suffered similar resource-curse economic failure due to coal rather than cheap slave labor.)
You keep equating killing an industry with killing people - this is a false comparison.
Ending the use of coal saves human lives and does not take any human lives. The batman comparison is irrelevant.
No longer using asbestos saved lives and didn't take lives.
Removing lead from consumer products saves lives and didn't take lives.
I'm sure you there were people in the asbestos industry who weren't happy about the change and they would have gladly gone on giving people cancer. Just like people in the coal industry still bemoan the fact they can't keep killing as many people.
If I kill a car's engine or kill the music or kill this conversation do you understand what I mean?
The executive branch killed the coal industry. It was a swift action to bring something to a close.
That people in this thread can't disentangle one sense of "kill" from another is disappointing. My "murder" examples probably didn’t help but I figured people might enjoy the nuances (All of them could have been written about turning off, or killing, a bad radio station vs a good radio station and the arguments hold). Lesson learned.
My point has never been about the extent to which coal usage ends the life of humans. Frankly, that doesn't matter to anything I have said.
West Virginia’s issue — as a state - is a deep seated cultural unwillingness to adapt or change. The decline of goal is the trigger, not the problem.