FAYETTEVILLE, W.Va. — The winner of this year’s West Virginia Coal Festival teen beauty pageant walks among the ruins of a community abandoned 70 years ago and imagines the rusted remains of coal tipples and processing plants coming back to life.
Ava Johnson knows West Virginia coal will not ever be what it once was. But as she makes her way along overgrown railroad tracks near the abandoned Kay Moor mine in the New River Gorge National Park looking for spikes for her collection, the 16-year-old history buff says she has heard people talking with hope about the future of an industry that has brought good-paying jobs to her state for the better part of two centuries.
“You can’t appreciate being a true West Virginian unless you realize that people risk their lives every single day to make ours better,” she said.
Much of that renewed sense of hope is based on the actions of President Donald Trump, who earlier this month issued new executive orders aimed at reviving an energy source that has long been flagged by scientists as the world’s most polluting fossil fuel, one that directly contributes to the warming of the planet.
Trump, who has pledged since his first run for the presidency in 2016 to “save coal,” issued orders to allow mining on federal land and to loosen some emissions standards meant to curb coal’s environmental impact.
“All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened, if they’re modern enough,” Trump said at the signing ceremony. “(or) they’ll be ripped down and brand-new ones will be built.”
The news was met with enthusiasm in West Virginia, where residents like Johnson say the coal industry is misunderstood and that they are tired of feeling unheard by their fellow Americans. But others do not think Trump will be able to fulfill promises he has made to some of his most loyal constituents.
Trump and his allies are “spinning a false narrative,” said Tyson Slocum, who teaches energy and climate policy at the University of Maryland Honors College and is the energy program director for the nonprofit Public Citizen. He said market forces have shifted away from coal in ways that cannot be reversed, an opinion widely shared among economists.
“There’s nothing that Trump can do that’s going to materially impact the domestic coal market,” Slocum said in a telephone interview. “The energy markets, the steel markets, have fundamentally changed. And learning how to adapt and how to provide the real solutions to the concerns and fears in coal communities would be a more effective strategy than promising them a return that isn’t going to happen.”
That was not the prevailing mood at a recent coal exposition in Charleston, attended by Johnson and many others who found encouragement in the Republican president’s words, even if some expressed skepticism about his ability to make coal great again.
“For years, our industry has felt like it’s been a little bit of a whipping boy, like a political, sacrificial pawn,” said Steven Tate of Viacore, a company that makes an apparatus that helps mine operators limit the amount of coal dust in a mine. “We feel like we’re finally starting to get the recognition that our industry deserves.”
Some said Trump’s orders demonstrated respect for workers who gave their lives in the mines — 21,000 in West Virginia, the most out of any state — and for a resource that helped b