Seven years ago, I stood on the main street of a coal town in West Virginia with the mayor. “That used to be a diner, that was a bakery, that was a small gift shop and florist,” he said pointing to the row of boarded-up storefronts in the bankrupted and empty town. Where once a quaint, American main street serving generations of families, now stood the backdrop of “The Walking Dead.”
I stopped by the local middle school which just a decade before had won a national citation from President Bush, still proudly displayed on a plaque at the front entrance. The school also was closed. Tax revenue disappeared a few years ago. The swings in the playground were still swaying. The basketball court had weeds growing in the cracks but still had nets on the hoops. Even the building itself was completely intact. No broken windows, no graffiti or trash, just frozen in time.
Where I grew up in New York City an abandoned building would not look so good. Rural America is indeed different. That town and its residents “stuck” in time and place became the heart of my organization, Power The Future. It became my pinned tweet as I launched an effort to give these people a voice. And this week, when President Trump signed Executive Orders on coal, it felt like a professional and personal victory. For the first time in decades, the President of the United States gave coal country a voice, too.
Globalists will say “free markets” hastened the decline of coal. Eco-leftists will say the “climate emergency” required its downfall. Both are mere scapegoats. The war on coal was planned, and Barack Obama launched it deliberately. While on the campaign trail in 2008, then Sen. Obama was caught on an open mic stating very clearly his energy plans would bankrupt coal plants and “electricity costs would necessarily skyrocket”. He did just that. More than 50,000 coal jobs nationwide were lost as 400 coal plants shut down because of his administration. When Obama took office, the U.S. was the world’s second-largest coal producer. Today we are 5th, all while worldwide coal consumption has increased year over year. In the name of being green, we have allowed the rest of the world to take our market share and driven small towns into poverty.
In 2019 when LSU quarterback Joe Burrow won the Heisman Trophy, he spoke teary-eyed about growing up in impoverished southeast Ohio with a poverty rate almost two times the national average. It was not always this way. Over his short lifetime, dozens of coal mines in Athens County, Ohio closed taking away thousands of good-paying jobs, tax revenue to social and government services, and driving the local towns into poverty. When everyone who worked at the mine loses their job, every home in town becomes valueless. There is no market to sell it, and the bank does not refinance mortgages down. Every shop in town has lost its customers, so they close. The tax base disappears so schools close. First responders are let go. As systemic poverty takes hold, the consequences are well-documented and predictable: depression, alcoholism, drug use, divorce rates, domestic violence, and suicides all increase. Poor areas like Joe Burrow’s Southeast Ohio and the small towns in West Virginia where Power The Future was born are not accidental. They are allowed to happen, and the reasons why “free trade” or “climate change” are irrelevant.
Billionaire former Presidential Candidate and democrat mega-donor Tom Steyer ran on a platform of shutting down coal. Inconveniently his hedge fund had invested billions in the coal industry… in Asia. Yes, Tom would be damned if a man in West Virginia mine coal, but a nine-year-old in China with no labor union or healthcare or OSHA or safety equipment or regard for air and groundwater contamination is totally acceptable for the hedge fund because “free markets” deem it profitable.
Billionaire former NYC Mayor and Democrat mega-donor Michael Bloomberg has given a billion dollars to close coal nationwide because of climate change. He once at a conference spoke with International Monetary Fund President Christine LeGarde about eliminating coal jobs with such callous indifference it made me physically angry. “We will fund other things for them to do”. “We” here on stage, the powerful, the self-appointed leaders of the world. “Them” out there, the nameless, the faceless, the powerless. I often wonder if Bloomberg has driven through coal country and seen the “them” of the people whose lives and livelihoods he destroyed with his largesse. I have not seen a billion-dollar Bloomberg donation to help “them” find “other things” to For these billionaires it seems somewhat easy to dismiss the livelihoods of fellow Americans. After all, Steyer and Bloomberg are just fine. No one is investing in their downfall. Not so for coal towns. Where neighbors once lived quiet, unassuming lives in a generational industry, those towns had been stripped of everything: family roots, community identity, personal prosperity, but most of all, dignity. Obama was right; prices did “necessarily skyrocket”. Everything is more expensive as coal and all of energy has been made expensive by green, globalist policies. To what end? Are asthma and cancer rates down? No. Is energy cheaper and the electric grid more reliable? No. Everything blamed on coal is unchanged. Everything promised with the downfall of coal is unrealized, and irreparable damage was done via a cruel, cold, calculated attack on our fellow Americans for a global agenda that made America poorer and weaker.
President Trump is righting an evil wrong with his executive orders. As Americans, we should welcome this. President Trump’s Executive Order took crucial and clever steps to declare coal a critical mineral and orders the Department of Justice to investigate legislative and regulatory bias against the coal industry. These are bold and serious steps that will over time breathe life into this crucial industry and prevent, heaven forbid, a future President doing more damage to coal country.
For seven years I have tried to be their voice in Washington, DC and in the media and public square, but now they have a consequential champion in the White House who can begin to undo what Obama, Bloomberg, Steyer, and many others including Joe Biden, did to coal miners. All immensely rich, powerful liberals who hide in urban power centers and on global conference stages too cruel, too arrogant, too indifferent to care about the malice of their actions, who deserve all the contempt and scorn of patriots. They will forever have mine.
Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture.com and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF