Trump's push to save the fading coal industry gets a warm embrace in
West Virginia
[April 28, 2025] By
LEAH WILLINGHAM and JOHN RABY
FAYETTEVILLE, W.Va. (AP) — 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.”
At a coal exposition, renewed optimism
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 build America.
“Trump stood his ground all the way through," said Jimbo Clendenin, a
retired mine equipment specialist whose grandson started working in coal
mining three years ago. "He said he was for coal. And a lot of people —
even a couple of them here in West Virginia — said, ’I just think he
said that to get into office.′
"Now, nobody’s got any doubt. He’s for coal.”
In recent decades, the Democratic Party’s aggressive push toward clean
energy led to the installation of more renewable energy and the
conversion of coal-fired plants to be fueled by cheaper and
cleaner-burning natural gas.
In 2016, Trump seized on the issue, promising to end what he described
as Democratic President Barack Obama’s “war on coal” and to save miners’
jobs. It helped in West Virginia, where a majority of voters in every
county supported Trump in three presidential elections.
[to top of second column] |
West Virginia Coal Festival teen beauty pageant winner Ava Johnson,
16, collects small pieces of coal left behind at the former Kay Moor
coal town and camp in the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve
near Fayetteville, W.Va., Thursday, April 17, 2025, (AP Photo/Leah
Willingham)
 Trump did not bring the industry
back during his first term. In West Virginia, which employs the most
miners of any state, the number of coal jobs fell from 11,561 at the
start of his presidency to 11,418 at the end of 2020, perhaps
slowing coal’s steep decline but not stopping it.
Slocum said Trump can defang the federal Environmental Protection
Agency and deregulate mining, but he cannot save coal.
“It's not the EPA, it’s not Democrats that declared this war on
coal,” Slocum said. “It was capitalism and natural gas. And being
honest about the reasons for coal’s decline is the least we can do
for coal-dependent communities instead of lying to them, which the
Trump administration is doing. Sometimes people want to believe a
lie, because it’s easier than facing a hard truth.”
A steady decline in jobs
In 2009, the EPA found that planet-warming greenhouse gases put
public health and welfare in danger, a determination that new EPA
chief Lee Zeldin has urged Trump to reconsider. Scientists oppose
Zeldin’s push, and Slocum said the endangerment finding and the need
to move away from coal dependence “is not a theoretical debate. It
is a factual, scientific one, albeit one that does not occur within
the current Trump administration.”
Still, there is no doubt that the culture of coal is woven into the
fabric of West Virginia. A miner can be a coal industry worker, but
also a sports team mascot, an image emblazoned on the state flag or
the name of a breakfast sandwich at Tudor’s Biscuit World.
In the 1950s, more than 130,000 West Virginians worked in the
industry, which then had a population of around 2 million.
Production peaked in 2008, a year before Johnson was born. But by
then, the number of coal workers had dropped to 25,000, mostly due
to mechanization.
Heather Clay, who runs West Virginia Coal Festival’s beauty pageant
and social media, said losing coal jobs — often six-figure incomes —
was especially significant in a state with one of the nation’s
highest poverty rates.
“It’s so much more than what people outside of West Virginia
understand,” she said. ’They’re always saying, ‘Shut down coal,’
‘Shut down coal.’ So you want to shut down our economy? You want to
shut down our families? You want to shut down our way of life? And
it has, for a lot of people.”
Innovation, not elimination
Trump and coal industry advocates say keeping coal in the U.S.
energy portfolio is essential for maintaining the power grid,
servicing growing demand from innovations like artificial
intelligence centers and keeping America energy-independent.
But John Deskins, director of the West Virginia University Bureau of
Business and Economic Research, said it would take a significant
shift in the underlying economics for it to make financial sense for
utilities to build new coal-fired plants.
Natural gas is cleaner and cheaper, he said, and it’s the direction
most utilities are moving in. Earlier this year, First Energy
announced plans to convert its two remaining coal-fired power plants
to natural gas.
Johnson wears the sash and crown from her pageant victory over a
black dress and sneakers as she traipses through the ruins of the
abandoned Kay Moor mine. She talks enthusiastically about the
industry's past, but also, occasionally, about what she thinks could
be a brighter future for coal in West Virginia because of what Trump
has done.
“I think that it will positively impact not just the industry," she
said, “but people's lives.”
___
Raby reported from Charleston, West Virginia.
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