How ‘the energy capital of the US’ regained its power
GILLETTE, Wyoming: The resurrected feeling of American possibility came not from pontificating TV pundits or a radio host in a studio miles away. Optimism arrived here because of what people were seeing: The unemployment lines getting shorter and their daily commutes getting longer.
Tom Gorton, 41, drove through those increasingly congested streets in his Arnold Machinery truck late on a spring afternoon, under the watch of mountains covered in white from a spring snowstorm. As Gorton settled behind his desk, he was heartened to see how messy it was with orders, one year after hundreds of layoffs at two nearby coal mines cost him his job and delivered a gut punch to a county that produces more than a third of the nation’s energy supply.
In another room at Arnold’s, branch manager Adam Coleman fixed his eyes on statistics tracking economic trends. Electricity had flatlined and, to Coleman, this was good news.
“I can’t put fully into words this feeling I’m feeling, but it is much better,” Coleman said. “I believe the economy as a whole is going to recover and when it does, electrical use will increase. It’s not going down, so that’s a good thing. We’ll be back.”
In Gillette and nearby Campbell County, people were beginning to feel the comeback they voted for.
Unemployment has dropped by more than a third since March 2016, from 8.9 per cent to 5.1 per cent. Coal companies are rehiring workers, if only on contract or for temporary jobs. More people are splurging for birthday parties at the Prime Rib and buying a second scoop at the Ice Cream Cafe.
Maybe it was President Donald Trump. Much was surely because of the market. But in times when corporate profits are mixed with politics, it was difficult for people here to see the difference.
I can’t put fully into words this feeling I’m feeling, but it is much better. I believe the economy as a whole is going to recover and when it does, electrical use will increase. It’s not going down, so that’s a good thing.
“I’m back to work,” Gorton said. “It’s real. Did Trump do it all? I don’t think so. But America voted in a man who was for our jobs.”
In a divided country, optimism had bloomed here in a part of the country united in purpose and in support of the president. Close to 90 per cent voted for the same presidential candidate, and 94 per cent of the population is the same race. And everyone has some connection to the same industry.
They felt optimistic about the tangible effects of the Trump economy, which favours fossil fuels, and the theoretical ones, which favour how they see themselves. Once on the fringes, their jobs had become the centrepiece of Trump’s American mythology.
“I happen to love the coal miners,” Trump said Thursday, in announcing US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. Trump said he backed out of the global agreement, in part, because it “doesn’t eliminate coal jobs. It just transfers those jobs . . . to foreign countries.”
Even so, Trump’s decision on Paris wasn’t what many here wanted because they felt it was better for the US to be part of an agreement that so directly impacts their livelihoods.
“Given that several of the coal companies in the Powder River Basin have expressed their desire for the US to stay in the accord,” Gillette Mayor Louise Carter-King said, “it would be prudent to heed the wishes of the industries to be most affected by the accord.”
At least, though, they had a president who was trying to protect their jobs.
When the mines laid off workers last March, the city spiralled down into a period of job- and soul- searching. Environmentalists on the coasts had long derided their type of work as toxic.
Democrats, led by presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, declared their jobs passe. Gillette had coal, oil and gas, but so much attention was placed on wind and solar and turning miners into computer programmers. In an increasingly interwoven country, residents grappled with whether there was still a place in America for their kind of community - even if it kept the lights on.
“We once powered the nation,” Gorton said. “But you got the feeling that things are not quite the same and that political forces are encroaching on your livelihood. It’s like they are willing to take away your town.”
Now the fear of what might be taken away was carried by someone else. There was another side of this American story, a tenser and more terrifying one, where immigrant families worried about deportation raids and liberals marched with witty placards to protest the “war on science.”
Far beyond the borders of this isolated town, many Americans were gripped by the latest evidence of the president’s cosiness with the Russians and wondered why the white working and middle classes hadn’t abandoned their increasingly unpopular president.
In that America, the early optimism about Trump was fading. A Quinnipiac poll released last month noted that 52 per cent of Americans were pessimistic about the country’s direction, 20 per cent higher than when Trump was inaugurated.
Gorton found it difficult to reconcile those two polarised feelings; it seemed that either you had to believe in the country’s pending prosperity or its impending doom.
“I know there are people who are scared about where the country is headed, but before I was scared,” Gorton said. “Either they’re dreaming, or I’m dreaming.”
There was a time when residents here were thankful for big government.
In the 1970s, as the federal government stiffened environmental regulations, energy companies looked westward in search of cleaner coal. They found it here in the Powder River Basin, a prairie soaring 4,500 feet above sea level, where coal lingered just below the surface.
It created less energy than the coal of Appalachia, but it also emitted less carbon dioxide and sulfur. There was oil and gas in the city, too, and a place whose best-known landmark was literally once a pile of rocks turned into an American boom town.
Strip malls and highways and schools and a Rockpile Museum were built, and over time the population swelled from a few thousand to 30,000. In 2016, the median income in mining was about US$ 78,000.
The problem with being a one-industry town is that the economy lives and dies on how the market performs. During the oil crisis of the 1980s, Gorton recalled walking into school one day and seeing that half his class was missing. “It’s just how it was,” Gorton said. “But by next year, the classes were filled back up again.”
Carter-King said the city didn’t despair too much in those down times because the market was cyclical. If oil and gas production was down, that would generally mean companies were buying coal. If coal prices were too low, jobs in oil and gas provided some relief.
The last great boom came with the advent of fracking in the mid-2000s. Although most of the country reeled from a recession, officials in Gillette were recruiting workers from job-starved Michigan.
Developers carved out subdivisions on the southern end of the city. The county and school district built a gleaming, elaborate recreation centre, complete with indoor tennis courts, modern gym equipment and a 42-foot rock- climbing wall in the shape of nearby Devil’s Tower, a national monument.
So confident was the city in its growth potential that officials spent US$ 2.5 million to purchase 320 acres of barren land from the state. — WP-Bloomberg