The nation’s goodbye to coal is taking too long
Between May 1920 and May 1921, seven men were killed while mining coal out of the mountains and hills of Maryland’s westernmost counties, Allegany and Garrett. The person who composed an annual report on mining for Albert C. Ritchie, the governor at the time, apparently wanted him to keep things in perspective, evidenced by a paragraph titled, “Tonnage Per Fatality,” and reading as follows:
“In Allegany County there was 439,227 tons of coal produced for each fatal accident while in Garrett County there was 789,069 tons of coal produced for each fatal accident.”
I wonder who decided whether those ratios of death to tonnage were acceptable, or whether anyone besides surviving relatives and co-workers cared. There were also numerous nonfatal accidents in the Maryland mines, their details covering 16 pages of small type in the annual report.
While this is an old and familiar American story — the dangers of deep mining in hardscrabble Appalachia, the ultimate costs in environmental damage from the extraction and burning of coal — it still strikes emotional chords. Men in hard hats descended into the Earth and risked their lives to pick and shovel the fuel for a growing nation’s homes and industry. And that was before strict mine safety, and long before anyone used the phrase “climate change.”
I went to the 1920-1921 annual report for comparison purposes. I had just read the report for 2020 and was surprised to learn that, at a time when we should be moving away from coal, Maryland still allows mining for it. I was under the mistaken impression that we had said goodbye to all that.
In fact, the 99th annual report from the Maryland Bureau of Mines says nearly 1.4 million tons of coal came out of Allegany and Garrett counties last year. (That’s about 2 million tons less than the amount miners extracted the old way, in 1920-1921.) More than half the 2020 haul came from deep mines, the rest from strip mines. About 180 people were employed in coal mining last year. (More than 5,500 were so employed a century ago.) The latest annual report makes no mention of accidents or fatalities.
Across the country, hundreds of coalfired power plants have closed and more are scheduled to go offline. Maryland has embraced a generally progressive pathway to clean energy. The state legislature, with strong public support, banned fracking for natural gas. Why are we still pulling coal out of the ground and contributing to the world’s supply?
Saying goodbye to coal might be the longest goodbye of all, and we’re running out of time.
Which takes me to our neighboring state, West Virginia, and a thought I keep having about two guys named Joe.
I keep thinking that, at some point, most men in their 70s take a big scan of this troubled world and feel the shaggy bird of guilt scratching at their necks. I keep thinking that, given the chance to do so, men with the power to take bold action on climate change would want to do so, and right soon, to save the future for their grandchildren.
Joe Biden is 78. Joe Manchin is 74.
Biden, the Democratic president, wants the country to move quickly to zero-carbon
sources of electricity. He wants us to be 80% clean by 2030 and to stop burning all fossil fuels for power by 2035.
Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, wants to slow that train way down. A big chunk of his wealth comes from fossil fuels and his state is still the nation’s second-largest producer of coal. Wielding a disproportionate amount of power in Washington, Manchin opposes eliminating the burning of coal and natural gas and, according to The New York Times, he’s likely to put the brakes on Biden’s push for more wind, solar and nuclear power. He’s going to do this even as scientists around the globe issue increasingly dire warnings about climate change.
I shake my head. I can’t imagine being Manchin, chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and leaving this mortal coil without doing everything possible to move my country to clean energy as fast as possible.
He and his wife have three children and 10 grandchildren. You would think that alone would put him fully on the side of Biden’s climate ambitions. You would
think that, as a senator, he could force himself to think bigger than West Virginia and understand that coal must go.
At some point, after 65 or 70, doesn’t the public man, assuming he has a conscience, evaluate his life? Joe Manchin probably sees himself as a pragmatist who represented well his constituents in coal country. But his epitaph could also be: Joe Manchin delayed the nation’s efforts to avoid climate catastrophe, but he left his heirs lots of money from fossil fuels.
This is something I think about every time I hear a politician call for moderation and slowing things down, whether it’s about climate change or getting all Americans on health insurance or getting the super wealthy to pay for Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.
Everyone understands that the transition away from fossil fuels takes time, but we don’t have much. Not if we want to keep the Earth’s atmosphere from causing more extreme storms, sparking more wildfires, destroying crops and creating a climate refugee crisis. Not if we want to leave a livable future for our kids.