‘‘Most of the people here really don’t believe in what is happening with our climate,” Jerry Whisner says to me matter-of-factly over his desk in the offices of the Mineral County Commission in Keyser, West Virginia.
Whisner is a Republican and a native son of the county he leads, sandwiched in the mountains where West Virginia meets Maryland on the Upper Potomac River. This is – or at least used to be – coal country, and loyalty to mining runs deep. Every day coal trains nearly two miles long rumble up the Potomac valley on their way to the coast from the handful of still-active extraction sites. Old habits die hard, and places like Keyser are ground zero in the fight to pull America kicking and screaming towards carbon neutrality.
Whisner has more important things to think about than carbon emissions. Keyser is in a region decimated by America’s opioid crisis. He believes that economic decline has made West Virginia a prime market for predatory drug gangs, and is lobbying for an interstate highway to create more jobs. Former US President Donald Trump is still popular here, despite the scandals that have dogged him. A big part of the appeal is his deep disdain for the environmental regulation that many West Virginians blame for the rapid decline of the mining sector. “Anyone that stands up and says they’re gonna bring back coal in West Virginia is great,” says Whisner, who used to be a card-carrying Democrat but jumped ship over what he saw as metropolitan dominance by coastal elites in the party.
Everywhere I stop on my trip through America this is a familiar refrain, as voting patterns solidify along the urban-rural divide and educational attainment rather than economic status. Driving from Washington DC to Chicago across America’s rust belt, it is clear that the fight to wean America off carbon is about much more than just green investments and reducing emissions. The target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, outlined in the Paris Agreement, has become another front in the culture wars that the Republicans have orchestrated around wedge issues, from abortion rights to gun control.
On his first day in office in 2021, President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s populist withdrawal from the Paris treaty four years earlier. In 2022, after much horse-trading, the president finally pushed through the landmark Inflation Reduction Act. With $369 billion earmarked for climate change mitigation and energy security, it is the single biggest piece of climate funding in American history. The name of the package was all part of the hard sell by the White House to sceptical Democrats and a public more concerned about food prices and energy costs than climate science, but the legislation aims to cut US emissions by 40 per cent by 2040.
Where are the jobs?
I’m in Mineral County because the area has been lavished with attention by the east coast press as an example of what life after coal looks like for the America of tomorrow. West Virginia alone is set to benefit from $240 million of investment in clean energy under the IRA, and Mineral County is already the site of a huge wind farm. There’s just one problem though – it doesn’t create any jobs.
“The wind farm employs about three people,” Whisner says when I ask him about what green transition looks like in the valley. The only benefit the town sees is a small community fund that dishes out a few thousand dollars at a time to compensate for the county’s chronic lack of tax funds. The company that owns the wind farm is based in California and is ultimately an asset of French oil giant Total. Their press officer declined my request to speak to any of the local employees, citing tensions on the ground.
Hunting for any sign that Keyser might yet be the hotbed of green renewal it has been portrayed as, in the window of a run-down theatre in Keyser’s main street I spot a placard reading CLIMATE VOTER. It belongs to Steven Satimi, a Californian who moved to West Virginia to set up a distillery on a farm in the steep-sided Appalachian valleys and who runs the community art space.
“There are a few people that would support us and maybe do come in here because they see that sign,” sighs Satimi, “but it’s like a new food, they just prefer to stay away from it. There’s some prejudgement when you have a sign on the door like that, and that’s just how it is.”
Talking about decarbonisation in Mineral County is a challenge when the populace has swung heavily behind Trump’s robust fossil fuel Republicanism. Even local Democratic senator Joe Manchin – the last relic of a time when blue-collar Democrats dominated in the state – owns millions of dollars of coal shares and takes campaign funding from the state’s powerful coal lobby. Manchin’s intransigence was the main reason it took two years for the White House to make the IRA a reality.
Driving south out of Keyser I hit a classic example of what climate finance experts call a “stranded asset” – in this case literally – and one of the reasons the campaign dollars have flowed to Manchin and other friends of coal in Washington. Three thousand feet above sea level on a plateau in the Appalachians sits Mount Storm power station, a gargantuan private coal plant that is having to reach further and further afield to feed its furnaces as the mines around it close. How long the plant can survive is uncertain. Up the hill sits its nominal replacement, the colossal Mount Storm wind farm owned by the same multinational as the installation above Keyser. Just like in Keyser, though, the local community sees little benefit.
“You get some engineers coming by occasionally,” says the woman behind the till of the local Liberty petrol station with its star-spangled frontage, “but there’s nobody here getting rich off of it.”
'Married to the miner'
Down at the other end of the state lies Charleston, West Virginia’s modest state capital. With its maze of roads and industrial lots, it looks identical to a hundred other small cities across America. Strung out along the banks of the Kanawha River, it sits in the middle of one of the country’s biggest coalfields. But even here, closures, increasing efficiencies and a dwindling workforce mean that the writing is on the wall for the black stuff.
Pride of place on the campus of West Virginia’s state legislature is given to a statue of a coal worker, but the image of the West Virginian miner as the bedrock of the economy and the state’s identity is at odds with the reality of the industry today. Work is often temporary and dangerous, with owners cutting corners to maximise profit and with better careers available outside the industry.
The complexities of the state’s relationship with coal are laid bare by Brandon Steele, a member of the West Virginia lower house who represents Raleigh County in the southern heartlands of West Virginia coal country. Born into a mining family, Steele is anti-abortion, pro-gun and deeply suspicious of the federal government, but he is also under no illusions about which way the wind is blowing. He moved out of state to train as a lawyer rather than going down a mine, and it opened his eyes to how far behind West Virginia was.
“What we’re dealing with going into the 21st century is a world economy that, by and large, wants to develop cleaner energy and wants to be carbon neutral,” says Steele, as he guides me down the grand corridors of the West Virginia Capitol. The golden-domed building is the tallest in the state, built during the region’s industrial heyday, but it now feels more like an underfunded public museum.
“Right now we’re the fifth largest energy producer in the nation and we’re 91 per cent coal,” he points out. “A company moving in will look at that and say they can’t meet their environmental, social and governance guidance.”
In a recent debate, Steele shocked some of his colleagues when he said that West Virginians considered coal a “deity” and that this hindered their ability to think clearly about the future. “I am not married to the mineral; I am married to the miner,” Steele tells me. “The miner is the one that needs the job. The miner is the one going home at the end of the day trying to keep the lights on. That’s who I’ve gotta look out for.”
The IRA means that at least some of the miners Steele talks about will have alternative careers to turn to. Green Power, a startup making electric school buses thanks to a staggering $4 billion in IRA rebates for schools across America, aims to create 900 jobs and put West Virginian engineering at the heart of every American community. When I meet him in Charleston’s freeway-bordered downtown it is not obvious that Green Power’s VP Mark Nestlen is a vital cog in America’s roadmap to carbon neutrality. The Oklahoma native talks mostly in the manner of a strategic investor, but his enthusiasm for industrial transition is real.
“People are thanking us for investing here,” says Nestlen, “and what we have found is that communities will rally around green tech companies that can come in and provide jobs for folks.”
One of the core aims of the IRA is to reduce American dependence on Chinese and European renewable technology, handing billions in direct and indirect funding to electric vehicle makers for production and energy technology research. Even in carbon-loving West Virginia that is welcome.
Leaving West Virginia behind, I take the freeway over state lines into Kentucky and towards Ohio. Appalachian coal used to fuel the mills and factories stretching out along the border of the three states, and as America’s fossil economy grew exponentially the entire basin of the Ohio River that links them was transformed into an industrial powerhouse.
Today, though, many of the mills are gone, leaving behind a toxic legacy. The river is now one of America’s most polluted, dealing with a poisonous combination of industrial waste, agricultural contamination and mining runoff.
Glimpses of the future
In Cincinnati, on the river’s north bank, I navigate the labyrinth of slip roads and viaducts to the city’s old core, now regenerated and increasingly sought after by people who want to walk rather than drive to buy their morning coffee. Cincinnati votes Democrat and is publicly committed to decarbonisation and sustainability as part of its progressive politics, but its urban fabric beyond its gentrified central neighbourhoods is a mess. The sheer scale of the climate challenge facing America becomes apparent rolling along the seemingly endless miles of concrete in its car-dependent suburbs, yet even here there are glimpses of alternative, climate-friendly ways of living.
Here I meet Tanner Yess, perhaps Cincinnati’s only long-distance cycle commuter and the energy behind a number of radical community climate projects. His family migrated to the US from Fiji and Yess is very much at home in Lower Price Hill, a multi-ethnic working-class neighbourhood squeezed between Cincinnati’s huge railyards and the river. Lower Price Hill is a laboratory for what climate intervention across urban America might look like and Yess seeks to serve those who have been left behind in America’s rush towards middle-class dormitory towns and double driveways. When we meet he has just finished installing a new roof on a local building, part of a range of interventions to help the poorer and predominantly non-white residents cope with the weather extremes headed their way in the coming decades.
“Climate change is a multipronged issue, so we try to bring everything together,” he says as he sips a beer in the sun. “Climate change is the ultimate FU [Fuck You], from colonisation, from segregation, whether we’re talking about Fiji or Cincinnati.”
Be it the Pacific or urban America, climate change hits the poorest hardest. One of the most notable features of the IRA is that alongside green technology and business subsidies, it channels finance directly to minority and vulnerable communities. America’s poorest currently struggle to afford energy and fuel, and housing is often substandard, so measures like insulation, community transport and solar panels are top of the list for the most underserved groups. Fundamentally the IRA funds projects that tackle everyday needs rather than trying to persuade people of the dangers of climate change.
“This isn’t about dying polar bears – we need to meet people where they’re at,” says Yess pointedly. “Nobody here knows anything about the Paris Agreement or Biden’s stimulus, but they know their basement floods and that their air quality is bad.”
Vested interests
After Cincinnati I cross into Indiana and head up towards Chicago, counting down the miles as the hills of the eastern US give way to the endless farms and open plains of the Midwest. Halfway across Indiana the freeway suddenly emerges into one of the biggest windfields east of the Mississippi, with new turbines stretching off into the distance on either side. The cheap energy that Americans have become used to is more likely to come from these huge turbine installations than from Appalachian coal in the future, and the plains are rapidly swapping grain silos for wind parks as farmers take advantage of generous tax breaks and land rents.
Eventually I roll into the small city of Evanston, just north of Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan. I am here for the last stop on my trip: a visit to the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University, one of America’s leading interdisciplinary climate hubs.
“As a climate scientist we often like to say that our work is policy relevant but not policy prescriptive. We like to put our information out there and let policymakers run with it and make their own decisions,“ says Daniel Horton, a climatologist at the institute, diplomatically. “The passage of the IRA was a big deal,” he admits though. “In the parlance of Biden and Obama it was a BFD [Big Fucking Deal], and that legislation has really put us on the right trajectory to start to decarbonise our economy.”
With the approval of the IRA into law, climate and environmental justice experts who had fought an uphill struggle under the Trump presidency suddenly found themselves being listened to, and provided with the money to put their ideas into action quickly. The reluctance to intervene directly in climate policy is partly due to the fact that people like Horton are the epitome of the supposed “liberal elite”, the bogeyman of the Republican party and an increasingly unhinged conservative base. In reality, opposition to the IRA and climate action is underpinned by a fear that America might begin to shift away from a system that serves the rich and powerful at the expense of both people and planet.
“Solving climate change requires systematic change, and the IRA represents a really positive big step in that direction,” Horton says optimistically, before pausing to qualify what he has just said. “Whether we can get to 1.5C change [as a limit], though, is an open-ended question.”
As I head for the airport along the dual carriageways lined with drive-thrus and strip malls sparkling in the spring twilight, I think again about Horton’s realist approach. America may now be broadly headed in the right direction, but there are still countless fights to come. Its green revolution will likely be less about building utopias than about coercion, adaptation and giving people a reason to leave old loyalties behind.
This piece is from the New Humanist summer 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
