Yahoo News - An Illinois Democrat has been criticized after dismissing West Virginia’s economy as “irrelevant" to his party's key climate policy in the social spending package. Read the full article. The Clean Electricity Performance Program would reward utilities that adopt renewable energy sources rather than fossil fuels, penalizing utilities that do not make the transition. The…
Energy & Environment
New York Times - So Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia will be responsible for putting together the Democratic climate plan. This is both understandable and terrifying. It’s understandable because Democrats need the vote of every one of their senators, which means doing whatever it takes to get skeptics on board. It’s terrifying because Manchin might end…
Pennsylvania Business Report - ReImagine Appalachia, an organization of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia labor leaders, policy experts and community leaders, urged U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to support President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation in an open letter Sunday. Read the full article. Published as a full-page ad in the Charleston Gazette-Mail,…
Climate Wire - Climate advocates in Appalachia are urging Sen. Joe Manchin (D) to drop his opposition to the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” package. Read the full article. They say the measure, along with the $1.2 trillion investment package awaiting action in the House of Representatives, would provide billions of dollars to one…
This blog post, authored by the WVCBP's summer research associate Myya Helm, was originally published by the ReImagine Appalachia coalition. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain. In August 1921, union coal miners clashed with an anti-union citizen army near Blair Mountain, West Virginia, in what became the largest battle in the…
Charleston Gazette-Mail - In his 27 years as an underground coal miner in West Virginia, Gary Hairston noticed that it took some backup to breathe easier. Read the full article. “There was a lot better protection in a union mine,” Hairston recalled. “The union backs you.” Hairston found that a union representative would investigate miners’…
Huntington Herald-Dispatch - In front of Kayla Young under a sweltering sun in South Charleston stood an electric vehicle charging station. Draped over a podium, a sign read “#ACTNOW on Climate.” Read the full article. Behind her was the Criel Mound, thought to have been built by the Adena people about 500 B.C. “It’s really…
PA Environment Digest - On July 22, U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) introduced new legislation to revive the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) titled the “The REVIVE the CCC Act of 2021” or “The Restore Environmental Vitality and Improve Volatile Economy (REVIVE) by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Act”. Read the full article. The bill would expand…
Charleston Gazette-Mail - In April, the West Virginia Center on Climate Change’s project director envisioned Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a former scholarship football player at West Virginia University and coal brokerage founder, running with planet Earth tucked under his arm as he heads for the end zone and a game-winning score. Read the full article.…
Southerly, Energy News Network, Daily Yonder - Nina McCoy has been waiting for an answer to a question for 40 years: What happens to a coal county and the people who live in it when all the coal is gone? She still has the 1981 articles from when both the New York Times and the Louisville Courier-Journal posed the same question.…