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…
Energy & Environment
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.…
The Dominion Post - Mason Anderson is a 21-year-old contracted worker at Mobile Power Washing who works at the coal-fired Fort Martin power plant in Maidsville, West Virginia. Last year, he decided he wasn’t going to continue his education at West Virginia University in civil engineering. Instead, he decided to attend asynchronous courses at Salem…
Charleston Gazette-Mail - I was trying to find a word that sums up the 2021 legislative session, and after much consideration, it came to me: Despicable. Read the full article. Despicable, in that the Legislature committed acts of cruelty for no reason but the sheer pleasure they derived from doing so. They passed a despicable…
Mountain State Spotlight, Beckley Register-Herald - Two bills to change how West Virginia’s natural resources are valued for property tax purposes are moving through the Legislature. Proponents say the measures — which would probably lower the taxes companies pay — are necessary to address statutory and constitutional requirements. But it could also reduce the tax…