What should we do instead?
Imagination and communication needed for coal communities.
Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a newsletter on local & state climate action.
I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here. You can also read and share this edition online
TLDR: Read this story about a Washington state coal community’s complicated transition.
Last edition, we talked about my story about a community throwing a literal Hail Mary to save their coal-fired plant — and the company that swooped in with a vision of the future, one that still included coal.
As I detailed in the story, Pleasants County doesn’t have a Plan B, and that makes communities and others like it all the more receptive to big promises — the alternative is both existentially-bad and imminent. Like the residents of Louisiana’s coastal parishes, where some of the fastest-rising waters in the world is combining with climate change super-charged hurricanes and a collapsing home insurance market, these kinds of communities are being split apart by the effects of climate change today.
It’s one of the reasons why West Virginia politicians are so aggressively pro-coal, despite its contribution as one of the dirtiest fossil fuels and being more expensive than both renewable powered and gas-fired electricity. Yet, as I mentioned in the last edition, aggressive investment in fossil fuel businesses does not always mean the communities around them thrive.
So if coal plants are being shut down for economic and pollution reasons, and some of the fossil-focused alternatives seem questionable at best — what alternatives do coal communities have?
Renewable/nuclear development?
This story from the Montana Free Press lays out the stakes for the communities around Colstrip, Montana, including one nearby Native American tribe that chose not to develop a coal mine in the 1970 and one that did. Many people from the Crow and Northern Cheyenne did work for the mines, but the mine developed on Crow land sent all their workers home in 2023, and a different mine nearby has a number of customers expected to exit their contracts in 2025.
But local leaders are not counting out coal yet, in part because there are — for now— still tax revenues from coal businesses funding these communities, and because a mix of electrical infrastructure, utility politics and inertia are slowing development of renewable and nuclear industries there. Despite Montana being exceptionally placed for wind power, wind farms don’t replicate the same kind of job market that coal mines did. Most frustrating is the gap between the benefits available through America’s first major climate law and the capacity to get them:
“A lot of people think coal is still the future… I haven’t heard anything about federal job training opportunities. There are no engineers here to design or build the infrastructure projects from the IRA,” Sharon Stewart-Peregoy, a professor at Little Big Horn College on the Crow Reservation and a Democratic state legislator, told the Free Press.
Capacity to get the money on offer is especially rough for reservations, Stewart-Peregoy tells reporter Robert Chaney.
For example, Billings ranks among the top 4% of the nation for staffing, resources and expertise to engage with federal programs…
The sovereign nations of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne tribes, 70-odd miles away, fall much further down the list, in the 59th] and 94th percentiles, respectively. Both lack planning offices (although they do have extensive federal connections through agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs). Both have almost a quarter of their families living below the poverty level and lacking health insurance. Less than three-quarters of their residents have broadband access.“You have to know that mundane stuff to get stuff done,” Stewart-Peregoy said.
There are renewable developments slowly coming online in Montana, and small nuclear projects may eventually gain more of a foothold, but their impact on the community itself is unclear.
New manufacturing?
Among the many climate related grants from the 2021 infrastructure law and the IRA was nearly $500 million for a variety of new manufacturing efforts focused on the energy transition in coal communities. With awards of anywhere between $5 to $90 million dollars each, the idea is to jumpstart or speed up businesses like “carbon-negative” insulation to recycled cement and repurposed EV batteries, and incentivize them to do so in places that were previously reliant on coal businesses.
But given President-elect Trump’s attitude towards anything related to climate funding, the question for efforts like this (and other parts of the IRA) is has this money actually been spent preventing it from being clawed back? Think back to the last story you noticed about any federal government spending. It’s extremely likely when you saw that headline that it was nowhere near hitting the recipient’s bank account. As POLITICO mentions about the “mystery number that’s key to whether Biden’s spending survives”:
Federal agencies and departments have announced tentative awards for roughly two-thirds of the $145.4 billion appropriated to climate efforts by the Inflation Reduction Act, according to information tracked by the White House. But the Biden administration has provided no accounting of how much of that money it has formally committed, or obligated — a number that could be crucial for the coming GOP debate over how much of the law to repeal.
The Environmental Protection Agency previously told POLITICO’s E&E News that it has obligated $33.5 billion, or 80 percent of its $42.1 billion in IRA appropriations, as of Oct. 22. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation obligated $1.1 billion from its $4.6 billion share of the climate law money, according to data that it posts online.
But few other agencies have offered a comprehensive breakdown of the IRA dollars that might be secure from Trump’s promised efforts to claw them back.
Obviously there are also other companies involved in new manufacturing options not under this grant program. This is where knowing what’s being proposed and being built around your community is so important — and what kind of impact on the community they are promising and the quality of those promises.
More than one industry — and grants on coal’s way out
One of the first things I heard about while reporting the Pleasants Power story was “The Centralia Model,” a decade-long process in Centralia, Washington created, among other things, a multi-million dollar fund financed by the coal company that’s about to close
I can’t speak to the merits of this model, or how applicable it is other places, but I do highly recommend this story from StateImpact Pennsylvania. Reporters well-versed in Pennsylvania and wider Appalachian coal history went to Washington to understand how the fund and the planning for closing the coal plant came together.They didn’t find easy answers, but it’s a unique story about one community’s transition and the need for imagination and communication.
Related: Mixed reactions to development at a closed refinery outside of Philadelphia
What I’m reading:
Solar energy helped keep the lights on after Helene, but not how you might think (WFAE)
Hiring experts to testify in utility cases is expensive, but a Minnesota law is helping more groups participate (Energy News)
Arizona students just pressured the Tucson school district to pass an aggressive climate resolution (Fast Company)
See how America’s first major climate law is affecting your community (Washington Post)
Here we go again: California prepares to battle Trump over environmental policies (Calmatters).