Burning slowly
Eastern Kentucky, a region destroyed by the coal industry, overwhelmingly supported Trump and the GOP in 2016. This is the aftermath.
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The image of Kentucky traditionally brings to mind an Antebellum farmhouse, a herd of horses pounding the grass on the rolling green hills that surround it, or perhaps a crowd of racegoers clad in Derby gear — flamboyant hats and colorful dresses, crisp suits and ties. But these are only the upper echelons of this divided society — what most likely doesn’t come to mind is the hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians living in poverty.
That poverty is centered in eastern and southeastern Kentucky, parts of the state that cut deep into the heart of Appalachia. Although, geographically speaking, it’s rather isolated from the rest of the country, this coal-rich region is far from immune to the political forces sweeping the nation. Since the Clinton era ended with the turn of the century, Kentucky has followed the same course as much of rural America. In 2016, the Kentucky State House flipped to Republican control for the first time since 1921. Once a Democratic stronghold, eastern Kentucky was in large part responsible for drawing a curtain on a part of history that was long overdue. Eight of the ten seats that swung to the Republican side were situated in eastern Kentucky.
The flipping of the House gave Republicans the coveted trifecta in state politics — control of the State House, the State Senate, and the Governor’s Mansion. This was the culmination of a slow decline for Kentucky Democrats that has been at work for generations. One of the poorest parts of the country has made a defining decision. In an effort to revitalize its economy and bring in new jobs, eastern Kentucky has chosen to elect a Republican majority into office. Yes, this means a focus on lower taxes, more jobs, and an effort to bring back the coal industry — but it also means cutting back on healthcare, social security, and education standards, all of which the state desperately needs. Eastern Kentucky has reached a point of near collapse—and it’s clear that the Trumpian wave that brought the GOP majority into being is proving to be even more disastrous than critics had feared.
Eastern Kentucky carves out a sizable part of the central Appalachian Mountains. The region, originally a part of Virginia, has long had a history intertwined with the rest of Appalachia. The area was first settled by Irish and English settlers in the 1700s but failed to develop at the rate of the rest of the country. By the turn of the century, eastern Kentucky, much like the rest of Appalachia, had been left behind — and not for the first time. That all changed in 1900 when coal was discovered in the community of Betsy Layne.
Betsy Layne, Kentucky, was the site of the first coal mine in eastern Kentucky. This tiny town was one of the first developments in the Appalachian Coal Field, one that would grow to become one of the largest in the nation. The start of World War I saw investment pour into this remote corner of Kentucky, with coal towns like Betsy Lane popping up all across the state. World War II and the Korean Conflict saw the need for cheap coal rise exponentially, resulting in a second, even more profitable, boom. As urban growth and the advent of mechanized production drove an American energy vacuum, the need for Kentucky coal continued to rise. The meteoric rise of the coal industry in eastern Kentucky employed thousands of workers. As the industry continued to expand, entire towns grew around the coal mines — families dedicated themselves to coal jobs. Able-bodied men, often entire families — fathers, brothers, uncles, sons — worked in the same mines for generations.
These jobs, although the laborers worked long and often grueling hours, brought a steady supply of income in a region that was severely lacking other industries. In their heyday, jobs in coal provided stability and assurance for many Kentuckians, and this was met with a fervent dedication to the industry — even today, coal is the defining factor in Kentucky politics. But although these wages were steady, they were often not enough to pay for essential living needs. The coal industry has historically been one of the worst abusers of workers’ rights. Like steel and automobiles, coal was no stranger to the powerful monopolies that dominated 20th-century industry. Local magnates took most of the high profit margins for themselves, while their loyal workers’ salaries continued to decline. This only precipitated eastern Kentucky’s inevitable impoverishment.
Of course, other factors played strong roles as well. The increase in automated drilling and extraction have rendered many of the coal miners’ jobs obsolete. Mountaintop removal mining (MTR), a process in which entire landscapes are leveled to extract the coal seams beneath, has placed an even heavier burden on the coal industry to rely on heavy machinery. MTR has grown in popularity in the Appalachian coal-mining industry for its efficacy and relative feasibility. But not only does the machinery, in turn, reduce the need for hard labor, it also drastically ups the cost of coal mining. The coal from eastern Kentucky, in particular, is renowned for being some of the most energy efficient (meaning less coal has to be burned for more energy) and also some of the cheapest in the world. To keep up with this standard, MTR and expensive mining equipment have forced coal companies to lay off more and more workers and slash the salaries of the few that remain. From 1921 to 2016, jobs in the American coal industry have plummeted, by more than 94%. Coal jobs breathed life into Kentucky itself, but as of now, the industry makes up for less than one percent of jobs in the state. In eastern Kentucky, this means that unemployment has skyrocketed since coal began to decline. In some counties that has equated to an unemployment rate of over 20% — one in five.
But the death blow for Kentucky coal came in the form of the environmental movement. Since the Clinton administration, coal has been targeted as one of the most powerful factors of global warming. Although contradicted by some, in reality, this identification is entirely justified. Coal is the single dirtiest fossil fuel and the single largest anthropogenic contributor to climate change. The amount of carbon dioxide released globally from coal alone is upwards of tens of trillions of tons of gas — burning it has effectively become a commitment to our environmental suicide.
The elimination of coal-powered plants from our nation’s energy supply has become a deeply ingrained part of the Democratic platform. Developing green jobs has been a clear goal for every Democrat since the 1990s. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Obama administration sought to radically improve emissions standards, effectively rendering coal inept. Especially in 2006, following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, public perception against the expansion of coal power was utterly destroyed. While the rest of the country has moved past the burning of fossil fuels, coal-producing Appalachia has been left in the dark.
The decline of coal was inevitable. From the beginning of the environmental movement, we knew that jobs in unsustainable energy sources like gas, oil, and coal were going to suffer. But for the people of eastern Kentucky, who have no other industry to fall back on, an assault on coal means an assault on their own livelihoods. As the EPA began placing more and more restrictions on the coal industry, it estranged more and more Kentuckians from the Democratic Party. Eastern Kentucky for a long time relied on the state’s Democrats to protect their right to unionize and to provide social programs to combat the powerful regional monopoly held by Big Coal. On a national scale, however, encouraging a shift to green energy has persuaded many Kentuckians that they are somehow “under attack” from their own government.
But in early 2016, this rhetoric had only been exacerbated and weaponized by the GOP, struggling to get a foothold in a state that, according to national trends, it should have been sweeping in every single election. In March of 2016, Hillary Clinton said the following at a CNN Town Hall.
“Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities. So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?
And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”
— Hillary Clinton (at a CNN Town Hall, Mar. 13, 2016)
It was pretty clear, overall, that this message was positive and encouraging. The Democrats’ goal has always been to make a complete shift from coal jobs to alternative forms of energy. Mountainous areas, like eastern Kentucky, are a prime location for the extraction of geothermal energy. And the entire northern border of the state is outlined by the Ohio and Big Sandy Rivers, waterways that are more than large enough to provide substantial sources of hydroelectric power. But as for Clinton’s remarks, the message spewed by the Trump campaign and FOX News pundits was one single line.…
“Because we’re going to put a lot of coal companies out of business, right?”
That question was repeated a countless number of times by conservative media and Republican campaigns. The power that it had was so immense that one Democratic organizer in Kentucky went on to call it “toxic.” It cost Clinton the primary election against Sanders in West Virginia and nearly again in Kentucky. She won both states by enormous margins over Barack Obama in 2008. Clinton’s alienation of the coal vote in 2016 is far from the only example. One of Obama’s main goals for his first hundred days was to prevent the construction of new coal-fired power plants. Consequentially, he won only four of the eleven counties in eastern Kentucky that John Kerry had carried four years earlier. During his first term, the Obama EPA accomplished that goal and also set out to severely restrict MTR and impose the harshest emissions standards the country had ever seen. In his 2012 reelection, he won only one of those four counties. Hillary Clinton made history for Kentucky Democrats in 2016 by failing to win any county in eastern Kentucky. The only two counties she did win were Jefferson and Fayette counties, home to the traditionally liberal urban centers of Louisville and Lexington.
The Trump campaign’s promise to bring back coal jobs played right into the growing skepticism of Democratic values in rural Kentucky voters. Eastern Kentucky’s flip to the Republican side was driven by trumped-up and conflated rhetoric over coal and other economic issues. Most voters perceived the Trump message, even in its social aspect, to be about job creation, a natural fit for impoverished and unemployed eastern Kentucky. Rhetoric from the Republican side, including the conservative myth of “clean coal” helped to drive a sentiment that Democrats were only playing their issues for their own “radical” agendas.
The clean coal conspiracy is rooted in some truth. Some coal deposits, like the one in eastern Kentucky, naturally contain less carbon and thus produce less of a greenhouse effect when they are burned. (This unique attribute of Kentucky coal is one of the reasons this piece of right-wing propaganda was so successful in Kentucky.) Other parts of the theory imply that by using alternative technologies, coal can be burned with little to no effect on the environment. But, as for naturally cleaner coal, what Kentucky’s lacks in carbon content, it makes up for in sulfur, a chemical that is much more potent and has much harsher effects on human health. And the CO₂ it does produce is still more than enough to continue the speed of global warming at the same rate it is today. As for the alternative technologies, in 2003, the Department of Energy released a list of 22 mitigation processes to reduce coal emissions. As of today, not one coal-fired plant in the country uses these techniques due to the incredibly overbearing costs they require. “Clean coal” became the conservative answer to liberal critiques about climate-change and it aided in convincing the voters of eastern Kentucky that the Democratic platform had no standing.
Although both Kentucky Democrats and Republicans at least somewhat support the continuation of coal mining, the national Democratic stance on the issue has been a death sentence for local Democrats. Trump’s “clean coal” delusions and Clinton’s misperceived comments about the coal industry surely played a major factor in Kentucky Republicans flipping the State House. And the intensity of emissions standards and MTR restrictions under the Obama administration eroded the Democratic vote more and more. But how exactly does an industry that makes up for less than one percent of Kentucky’s GDP have such a prominent role in the state’s politics?
Much of the coal mined in Kentucky is also burned in Kentucky. The state ranks 26th in population but 13th in energy production. The energy efficiency of Kentucky coal also means that it can be burned at one of the lowest costs anywhere in the country. Thus Kentucky energy is the third cheapest in the nation. In recent years, this has attracted droves of manufacturers and production facilities to the state — just not to certain parts. Since the Great Recession, this has led Kentucky’s statewide GDP to grow by nearly $20 billion. Likewise, its population has grown by an average of 200,000 people per year since 1990. But, in a state that is on the rise, eastern Kentucky’s population is in decline, as families flee the economic vacuum for jobs in cities like Louisville and Cincinnati.
The combination of mechanization and environmental activism has caused the number of people employed by coal companies to plummet. In 2016, that number was close to 6,900 employees, but since Trump has taken office, that number has fallen by around 1.5%. The Trump administration can repeal as many Obama-era policies as it wants in an effort to turn back the spiraling collapse of the coal industry — it doesn’t change the fact that coal jobs haven’t grown since the 1920s. In fact, the sad reality of the Trump EPA is that it is actually harming the very people he campaigned to protect.
Coal not only drastically contributes to global warming, but its mining and burning also present one of the worst ecological disasters imaginable. Fly ash, a byproduct of burning coal, contains radioactive uranium and thorium at 10 times the concentration of unburned coal. Fly ash also contains potent contaminants including arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals. Left stored or disposed of with little to no regulation, it often is picked up by wind, scattering radioactive matter within a mile radius of coal-burning power plants. Not only are people living within this radius, referred to as a “stack shadow,” subjected to exposure to unmonitored radiation, but this ash often makes its way into waterways and agricultural sites. Ash, carrying toxic contaminants, then make its way into the food and water supplies, increasing the risk for fatal cancers and other diseases among millions of people.
In 2008, years of ignorance and a lack of any sort of regulation came to fruition. A coal-ash spill in neighboring Tennessee brought national attention to the devastating effects the pollutant can have on the environment and on those subjected to life under stack shadows. The Tennessee spill was even larger than Alaska’s Exxon Valdez disaster and covered more than 300 acres of essential waterways, which it literally filled with toxic sludge. A tsunami of more than 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash barreled down the Emory River, annihilating everything in its path. The pervasiveness of these catastrophes has only grown since 2008. In the last decade, coal ash spills have destroyed communities in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Alabama.
Yet, the Trump EPA, headed by climate-change-denier Scott Pruitt, has moved to roll back Obama-era policies passed after the Tennessee spill. The laws that Pruitt has decided to revoke are the only ones which prevent the coal industry from blatantly pouring toxic waste into public rivers and streams. Environmental lawyer Frank Holleman of the Southern Environmental Law Center pegged the repeal as nothing more than a handout to Big Coal.
“Toxic pollution that exceeds limits would require utilities to stop their coal ash pollution and restore our water resources to natural conditions. But, giving a favor to industry lobbyists, the Trump administration … wants to weaken this provision and protect the polluters instead of the people and clean water.”
— Attorney Frank Holleman (to the Washington Post, Mar. 2, 2018)
While a massive coal-ash spill hasn’t yet struck eastern Kentucky on the scale of Tennessee, the issue remains pertinent. The coal burned in the region is sure, sooner or later, to cause an even greater ecological disaster. And Pruitt’s deregulation has opened up a stream of fly-ash contaminants into eastern Kentucky, which, quite frankly, doesn’t have the capital to undergo any sort of environmental cleanup. As of now, what will destroy eastern Kentucky may not be the massive downpour of a coal-ash spill but, rather, a slow drip of the coal industry’s exploitation that will most assuredly go unchecked.
But coal ash is just one of several effects of the coal industry that have ravaged eastern Kentucky. Another is MTR.
From its name alone, mountaintop removal mining quite makes clear its adverse effect on the environment. The devastating consequences of the practice include the hellish floods as a result of erroneously disruptive dump sites, the free-falling biodiversity across Appalachia, and the chemical runoff that dyes mountain streams black and orange. But perhaps the most disheartening effect of MTR is the human toll.
Removing such a massive amount of rock from the landscape produces an equally massive amount of dust, which, like fly ash, contains heavy metals and toxic chemicals. Unlike fly ash, however, the dust produced from MTR isn’t introduced into rivers and streams through human disposal — this dust is airborne. MTR dust, launched into the air by the dynamite needed to move millions of tons of rock, can travel much farther than fly ash. This dust covers communities and towns far from the actual mining site itself — in some areas, on a bright day, it’s even possible to see the dust settling on houses, streets, and yards.
The true devastation of this dust lies in its contents. Silica, a powerful carcinogen, is found in incredibly high concentrations in the dust produced by MTR. Breathing in this dust has resulted in horrific lung diseases that have decimated the local population. Emphysema, bronchitis, PMF, pulmonary cancers, and more have been on the rise in eastern Kentucky for decades. According to a study done by Professor Michael Hendryx of Indiana University, the number of excess deaths due to diseases like these in the communities around Appalachian MTR sites reaches over 1,200 people per year. In addition, birth defects have grown to become an even more harrowing indicator of the human toll the coal industry is exerting on the region. The same study found that in eastern Kentucky, even when you eliminate factors like smoking during pregnancy or premature births, a baby is 181% more likely to be born with a birth defect than those born just a few miles away in a city like Lexington or Louisville. Comparatively, drinking or smoking during pregnancy only increases the risk of fetal birth defects by around 30%.
The Trump EPA is just as complicit in the disaster of MTR dust as the disaster of fly ash. The administration has revoked laws limiting permits for the procedure and completely demolished any restrictions. Pruitt and Trump have even gone so far as to eliminate a government study into the health effects of MTR — just another destructive payout to Big Coal. And as Professor Hendryx also points out, this MTR dust has also ruined eastern Kentucky from developing any other industry at all besides coal mining.
“Blowing up mountains, deforesting large tracts of land, polluting streams, destroying roads from all the trucks going by, coating the landscape in dust, making people sick — what other employers are going to move into that area?… The perception that people have is that this is kind of a trade-off between the environment and jobs, and it’s really not — it’s a trade-off between the environment and the profits of a few people.”
— Michael Hendryx (to YaleEnvironment360, Nov. 21, 2017)
So the workers left behind have no choice but to accept unemployment or to find a job with another coal company. The cyclical nature of the region’s destruction has made eastern Kentucky a sort of sacrificial lamb for the rest of the country. The people of eastern Kentucky give their lives by living near or working in a coal mine, while the rest of the state and the rest of the country profit off of the energy source they provide for us. At what point does the situation in eastern Kentucky become a humanitarian crisis?
As I said before, the unemployment rate in eastern Kentucky can reach up to 20%, and statistical analysis proves that the same is true of other indicators. Clay County, sitting in the heart of Kentucky coal country, is the poorest county in the nation — its average annual income is so close to the poverty line that one New York Times writer remarked that it “might as well be another country.” But the economic instability that Hendryx touched on means that practically any effort to build industry in eastern Kentucky will most likely fail. And the coal dust isn’t the only reason for that. Eastern Kentucky is incredibly hilly, which makes transportation incredibly difficult. And unlike other coal-producing areas like Pennsylvania and Illinois, which got their starts hundreds of years before, commercial development didn’t reach eastern Kentucky until the 20th century. So the groundwork to support infrastructure and basic economic development just doesn’t exist.
So far, the only inroad to combat this problem has been a government-based high-tech initiative called TechHire Eastern Kentucky (TEKY). TEKY is just one of around 72 tech communities, a word TechHire uses to describe is training programs across the country. The flagship program, begun by the Obama administration in 2015, aims to create high-tech jobs in areas of the country where industry is declining — eastern Kentucky was one of the first locations chosen for the program. TEKY has partnered with local tech companies, like Louisville-based Interapt, that can help to branch out to developing regions. TEKY aims to train workers who have lost their jobs to adapt by teaching coding skills and technological proficiency. The partner program in place allows graduates of the program to continue to do these jobs from eastern Kentucky. The program’s original goal in 2016 was to create 185 jobs within three years. Successfully completed, that goal would mean (theoretically) that TEKY’s mandate would be renewed, the program would receive more funding, and, most importantly, it would expand. So far, the program is on track to meet its 2019 goal, but it is unlikely that the current administration will renew its funding. As the Republicans in Washington continue to cut government funds and regulations like clockwork, TEKY will probably be lost in the next round of budget-trimming.
Although the program’s yield seems utterly minuscule in the face of the more than 50,000 unemployed people living in eastern Kentucky, it is one of the only programs of its kind. TEKY is attempting to combat a resurgent and resurfacing problem that may have no solution. Perhaps the coal industry and Republican deregulation have so devastated the environment of eastern Kentucky that any sort of revitalization program, economic or otherwise, could never succeed. But without support from the government, these programs will surely wither and die before their seeds even have time to sprout.
Another program, in solidarity with TEKY, is also under siege from the Trump administration — and establishment Republicans. Although the war being waged on Obamacare is much more obvious, it has seen wild and rapid success in Kentucky. In 2013, the state’s last Democratic governor, Steve Beshear, opted to expand Medicaid coverage, cutting the uninsured rate in some counties from a monumental 20% to only 5%. More than 400,000 people gained healthcare coverage as a result.
But it seems, for eastern Kentucky, that not even providing basic medical treatment can go right. Since his election in 2015, Kentucky’s current governor, Matt Bevin, has pledged to gut Obamacare and Medicaid spending. This proposal would remove coverage from nearly 90,000 poor Kentuckians. Even so, Governor Bevin made it a signature part of his campaign. A GOP media storm swept him to victory, claiming that Obamacare in Kentucky “didn’t work” and that its expansion was “unfair to the taxpayer,” while failing to recognize the necessity of the program in much of the state. Like Trump’s attempts to “bring back coal,” however, Bevin will be most assuredly more harmful than he will be helpful. Because the only chance Kentucky has for solving its endemic health problems may be too far out of reach, the situation continues to worsen. For many living in one of the poorest and sickest parts of the country, options like Obamacare and Medicaid are the only ways to survive.
In a place like eastern Kentucky, where the coal industry’s toxic waste has created one of the most diseased areas in the country, Obamacare and Medicaid coverage provide the only options to avoid almost certain death. Eastern Kentucky has some of the highest rates in the nation for deaths from cancer, lung disease, and cardiovascular disease, and the area has a life expectancy rate that is progressively falling. With the rates of private health insurance providers increasing at an alarming pace, and jobs shrinking equally fast, the people of eastern Kentucky rely on government programs to get essential treatment. Under Obamacare, Kentucky’s uninsured rate has fallen well below the national average. Just as they did with their deregulation of the coal industry and its plainly destructive nature to eastern Kentucky, Trump and the Republicans are only making the situation worse. Government healthcare funds are absolutely vital in such an impoverished state —they have become the only respite from the barrage of challenges eastern Kentucky has had to face.
And soon, they may be gone.
