For some less funny (Debbie Downer-ish) stuff:

While I admittedly am not an expert on the subject, I feel as though we can't entirely fault the West Virginia political powers-that-be for trying to protect what contribution they do make the American economy and keep their maligned state financially afloat. Granted, they aren't exactly lighting the world on fire researching alternatives (carbon sequestration = still-dirty path of least resistance), but I have yet to come across a compelling economic proposal for the state that would compensate for such a devastating loss as wiping out WV coal (I welcome any information informing me otherwise).

Immediately mining all coal out of West Virginia's economy would be a domestic first cousin of Bush/Cheney Iraqi policy: Upend the only semblance of economic stability, declare victory in the name of the Earth, and see ya!!

I realize that's not being called for explicitly, but pursuing that thought further (for the sake of argument) leads to a disturbing conundrum: Is the climate situation in such dire straights (or will it soon be) that it requires plunging our own citizens into the relative depths of poverty (even temporarily) for the sake of long-term preservation? If so, then WV would be the first domestic case of the choice that other developing nations face in the name of climate change.

At its core, the climate crisis is economic based, both in its cause and in its potential solution(s). We may soon see if it either results in a global redistribution of wealth (see Brazil: cash for trees) or developed nations choose a hot and watery grave rather than give up their Hummers.

I have two issues to take up with this post - (1) The Devil is in your statistics -- you grossly misrepresent the data you reference and actually get the issues wrong (in my humble opinion) (2) your blaming the governor of West Virginia when the culprit is really corporate and consumer greed (enabled, yes, by a pushover state government - far worse than the governor are WV supreme court justces who are bought out by Massey Energy).

Your statistics: I am the first to point out the extremely low percentage of people out of the work force in WV - many of them disabled from working in the mines or the low median per capita income which just so happens to be associated with counties producing the most coal. However, consider that the statistics you reference for educational services and social assistance measure expenditures in one year compared to a base year -- West Virginia's population is declining, small, and rural which will always bias WV in comparision to other states. For example, social assistance measure you reference shows that West Virginia actually spent less money on social programs in the base year over the current year -- well, people have moved, new programs have been created  -- it is unclear to me if your statistics capture this. In my opinion, a much more dire issue in West Virginia is the multi-generational dependence on social assistance programs not the lack of programs.

True, much of West Virginia's population is disabled -- however, if you look at the profile of people moving TO West Virginia from other states, these people are more likely to be disabled, without a job, and of retirement age than people living in the state.  The extremely low cost of living in West Viginia AND the coverage of state disability programs(!) actually attract people with disabilities to the state.  So one way of looking at it is that many other States actually are freeriding by exporting their disabled to WV.

(And, please double check your reading of the alcohol consumption statistic you reference. The way I read your statistic West Virginia actually consumes less alcohol than other States. If you do have the statistic backwards, I'm sure that moonshine was not included. :-)

I would be most grateful if you would respond and remove items from your post if you deem my argument valid. I will then share with you some suggestions about how YOU could help West Virginia with YOUR actions. As Obama pointed out in the Middle East today -- everyone wants to suggest what Obama did or did not commit to do, yet no one wants to step up and actually do something him or herself.

I appreciate your insight on the state and I (and I'm sure others) would love to hear more from you about how you see the state's problems and possible solutions. There are some great grassroots things happening in the state, for sure:

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/29/coal

(PS: I grew up next door in TN.)

I do not have much time so here it goes:

Most of my friends from high school are college educated.  The job market in WV forced many of us to move out of state.

As for coal being the main source of fuel, the environmentalist have added to the problem.  A few years ago there was a proposal for wind power.  It was shot down because of the migratory pattern of birds and the opposition thought it would be a blight on the landscape.  I was on this bandwagon until I took a business trip to Spain where I witnessed the wind turbines.

If you look way back in history, many of WV's problems started before the 1820's.  A good portion of the area belonged to absentee landowners.  Present-day WV was under developed to discourage settlers from moving in and shifting political power from the the east.  Many of the absentee landowners only cared about the bottom line so West Virginia's ecomony has always been based on natural resouces.  At first timbering, then it moved on to silica (glass making), salt (the chemical industry), and coal.

Cause and effect: I did a little study a few years ago, looking up which counties in WV, VA, PA and KY had produced the most coal cumulatively, and which were the poorest (as measured by per capita income and unemployment rate). The correlation was not perfect but it was damn close. I am SO tired of lectures about how we depend on coal economically--the favors it has done us have brought us to the point where we're 49th or 50th, or first, in so many statistics. Manchin is an abject coal whore--all WV pols are. The people I would say are fairly evenly divided between support for coal and hatred of it--but everyone hates Massey.

It's not all about mountaintop removal. That is an atrocity, as you can see from the hideous, high-resolution pictures on the OVEC website www.ohvec.org . But it's not over when they have the coal separated from its former home in the mountain: then the washing of the coal produces lakes of toxic sludge, and the cheapest way to deal with them is just to leave them nestled in the mountaintops, or inject the nastiness into old mines (which are EVERYWHERE) and hope it doesn't percolate into someone's drinking water. And then deny it. So of course that's what they do. Then they truck the coal, in special trucks allowed to carry 120,000 pounds (for all others it's 80.000) over our old roads and bridges--the coal industry agreed to chip in for the extra expense of repairing these, whenever it feels like it. And then the coal is burned--much is exported, but a lot of it is burned right here in WV. It's true that 99% of our electric power comes from coal--it's also true that 3/4 of the power produced here is exported. If you look at www.catf.org 's website and check out the map of premature death from power plant emissions, you'll see it looks like a bullseye centered over WV. There are eight of these plants within 30 miles of Morgantown, where our flagship university is, and they're building a ninth. Finally, after the burning you have the ash. If you install scrubbers to reduce the sulfur and other crap going into the air, you get more of it in the ash, which is to say in the water sooner or later.

What to do about all this? I've lobbied in Charleston and DC, gone to countless hearings, written letters to the editor and op-eds--nothing seems to make any difference. In February I went for direct action, trespassing with 13 others on the MTR site I deem most obscene, on Coal River Mountain where the local people have produced studies showing the advantages of developing the mountaintop for a wind farm instead (with a little transitional underground mining)--but the land is owned by a corporation based in Pittsburgh, and its owners care about immediate profits, not the long-term good of the area. This mine also involves blasting within 100 feet of a lake holding  7 billion gallons of toxic sludge, atop lots of old abandoned mines which is 400 feet above an elementary school.

But neither the magistrate nor the judge granting Massey's request for an injunction would listen to any of these concerns--the only question was whether the protesters were on Massey's (leased) land or not, and whether the videojournalists should be treated any different from the others. It's hard to maintain hope, or to see what should be done to protect our mountains and the streams and air and above all--for me--the climate all of our descendents will have to try to live in. Many of the protesters are going under the name Climate Ground Zero, an appropriate name. Here in ground zero, the land is lush, the forests amazingly diverse--I had to learn more than 100 species of trees in a class I took--so beautiful, but in the areas cursed by coal, doomed.

However, let's not give the Governor a free pass on this one.  John's point in response to my initial comment correctly calls out the Gov. for being guilty of some comical and thinly-veiled lobbying tactics.  This is the symptom of larger problem that (as I mentioned in my first comment) the WV PTB have yet to put forth any kind of economic road map to wean themselves off coal (whether it be natural gas or any number of things John mentioned). 

Coal not only harms the climate, it harms the welfare of it's population.  Air quality, water quality, destrution of the landscape via mountain-top removal, coal slurry - one can only wonder how these things correlate to degraded health care, cycle of poverty, etc. etc.  That the WV PTB have not put any sort of plan together (again, the myth of clean coal doesn't count because it's more than just carbon) is lazy at best and self-preservationist greed at worst.

It's great to see people who do take pride in their home state; I'm hoping that the green revolution that has shown seeds of promise in my home state (Michigan) will heal the economic devastation from the auto industry collapse.  It's our job to put the government PTB (whose policies can reign in corporations) on notice that we want something better.

There's a reason people used to use leaded gas and still use coal.  It's cheaper, does a great job in keeping cars and power plants running. 

Now we have given a monopoly to refineries which make unleaded gas and they've tripled the price and keep forcing it up 10% per month.  The more we eliminate competitive industries by regulation, instead of promoting incentives to clean up their industry to make it more environmentally sustainable, the more we force up inflation, the lower we force down wages, and the hungrier our children remain. 

     I get it.  Sarcastic and witty.  It's supposed to be funny but cutting with it's unabashed delivery of truth, right?  But what's so funny about poverty, inequality, and the suffering of people?  The people represented by the statistics presented here live lives that do not control the future of the coal industry.  The future of the coal industry is being controlled by politicians, multinational corporations, special interest lobbyists and us consumers and voters.  Jokes like the ones that appear here don't help the situation.  Instead, they just make the author look cruel and, not to be too mean myself, a little lame for thowring a rawkus sucker punch in lieu of real political and sociological analysis.  It also creates infighting like this.  For a more indepth (and compassionate) read see Ron Eller's newest book "Unlevel Ground: Appalachia since 1945".  Or for a quick look to see how quality of life indicators correlate to surface mining (especially MTR) see:  http://www.kftc.org/countyprofiles.

     There are "great grassroots things" happening all over the region- KFTC, OVEC, SOCM, CRMW, SAMS- and nation!  Their are real solutions people can plug into by supporting the grassroots groups named above and lobbying thier representatives at home to fund clean power solutions and stop the worst abuses of surface mining such as Mountaintop Removal Mining.  This past winter, anti-MTR bills were entered into the General Assemblies of several states (South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Maryland...) that would ban utilities in those states from buying mountaintop removal mined coal.  Check out Appalachian Voices to learn more at http://www.ilovemountains.org.  And while you're there- find your personal connection to Mountaintop Removal coal mining- http://www.ilovemountains.org/myconnection.

    Power to the people of West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia... and even the author's Tennessee!  Coal is a dirty lie, but let's keep our resistence and muckraking respectful to Appalachian people.

P.S.  Tennessee isn't actually next door to West Virginia.  It's pretty far away- especially depending on where in Tennessee you're from. 

We should pension off those who are still mining, as renewables come in and coal starts to decline. Anyone who is a child of a miner can claim benefits equal to the GI bill.  Turn states and areas like WV from the least educated to the most well educated, with resulting economic gains.  I would even suggest some sort of tax on energy from renewables, enacted in a manner that would pay benefits to those displaced by the end of coal. 

We have to take care to make whole, those who by economic necessity depended on the old climate wrecking industries.  It is just.  It is smart.  It will cut the feet out from under those fighting climate action.

Randy Cunningham   Cleveland, OH

Also gotta point out that while the jobs of current miners are the excuse to keep it going, the real power is in the corporations; making the miners whole wouldn't ease the transition because they aren't the block against progress, corporate lobbyists are. And for all their hand-wringing and songs of lamentation about the poor miners, they don't hesitate to slash jobs when it serves their own purposes. Indeed the whole point of mountaintop removal mining is to cut costs by replacing most of the workers with enormous machines.

*Editing my comment to add a bit more:  Is it any wonder why more of my fellow West Virginians aren't involved in the environmental movement?  Environmentalists treat us like white trash or children, they make snide comments about us and look down their noses at us poor mountain people.  Making classist jokes about West Virginia DOES NOTHING TO HELP US.  Don't you understand that much of the citizenry of WV hates what Big Coal is doing to the state just as much as the rest of the country does?  We have been beaten down for years and the coal industry holds all the power.  It's an uphill battle for us.  Why don't environmentalists want to help rather than make jokes about our dental care?  (This article is the SECOND of its kind in recent months, by the way, and it is why I'm unsubscribing from Grist.  You can be insightful and informative and even funny without resorting to disgusting stereotypes and classist humor.  I'll get my environmental news elsewhere, thanks.)

I'm not sure what Pomelo is talking about regarding the wind project "a few years ago," but there certainly is one now that has a great deal of support.  Visit http://www.coalriverwind.org.  It's the most visionary, grassroots, citizen-driven project WV has ever seen.

In the meantime, I understand that making jokes about us hillbillies being toothless is high comedy.  Take into account, though, please, that such has a great deal to do with the fact that our water has been poisoned with substances from coal mining that have a direct connection to our overall toothlessness.

So the next time you have a giggle about us toothless hillbillies, do so in the full knowledge that we're toothless in part because the not-quite-as-American-as-you resource colony known as Appalachia has been exploited for the sake of "cheap" electricity for the rest of the U.S.

But speaking of victims, even ordinary people have to take some responsibility for what they do, such as being willing to destroy the Earth to make a living.  This does not at all absolve those who use the electricity created by destroying the Earth, and those with more money and power should be held more accountable.  But this childish American idea that everyone should have all these freedoms without taking any responsibility has to end; it's gone a long way toward totally destroying our planet.

I harp a lot on the need for a just transition because it removes a barrier to progress, but if I'm honest I'll admit that I kind of resent the "miners" making $70,000 a year to drive heavy equipment destroying our mountains, telling themselves and us they're making them better; no surprise such people will fight hard to maintain those jobs, since without a college education the alternative is flipping burgers for a couple bucks above minimum wage--while my last job, which required a college education, paid $20,000.

As for the offensive nature of Roberts' remarks, I suspect he meant to laugh with us, not at us, but if he's surprised he's pissed people off, he needs sensitivity training. Would you have made similar jokes about inner-city blacks, David, also a victimized group?

Another reader commented that the author is attacking the Governor and not the people.  I get this, but you can't deny that it's at the expense of the people of West Virginia.  The environmental movement has to learn that they cannot sacrifice people by making gross generalizations or classist/racist remarks about people to prove their point.  It just alienates everyone and keeps us all down. This is a human rights issue as much as it is an environmental issue.

To Appalachiantransplant I'd say- dont' discontinue your grist subscription.  There's a lot of great coverage on here and people need to hear voices like yours.  Although it's unjust and completely ridiculous that we have to defend ourselves within  "progressive" and "alternative" media outlets we have to engage indialogue with the white, middle class (or upper class) and mostly middle age men who dominate these forums. Traditional 'environmentalists' need an education and more undestandings about the lives of working class and minority communities- whether it be an African-American community in Natchez, Mississippi dealing with the effects of a coalfired power plant, members of the Navajo Nation fighting against mining on sacred lands or Appalachian people living with the true cost of coal. 

And a personal pet-peeve... It's not okay to lay claim to some kind of insdierness to a culture or identity to justify or rectify some kind of bad behavior or insulting remark.  The author's claim that he is from Tennessee as a means to say, "i'm laughing with you" or  "I'm one of you and this is all just a big misunderstanding" doesn't not amount to some kind of holler cred nor make hillbilly jokes okay.  And like I said earlier- Tennessee ain't West Virginia.  And there's a big difference between growing up poor in Jellico and growing up wealthy in a suburb in Franklin, TN. If the author was the son of a miner from East Tennessee I doubt his comments would have been so insensitive haivng grown up with the stigma you get from being a "hillbilly" in America. But even if he has a mining or working class mountan background, it doesn't mean his comments would be any less hurtful.  Thus, some kind of claim to an ambiguous shared identity doesn't really mean anything- and it's certainly not a good excuse. 

Let's be transparent with one another and think about race, sex and class within the movement and how that shapes our approach to these issues.  Coal has got to go but so does the  discriminations of  old-school environmentalists- let's work together in the spirit of equality.

I know the Coalistas like to say "Coal: It Keeps the Lights On," but the truth is no one in the filthy, dirty, destructive, poisonous coal industry has EVER written a check for our power bill.  WE keep our lights on, not coal.  Our work and our money keeps the meter moving, not some semi-literate high school dropout living on corporate coal welfare by operating a dozer or truck on a MountainTop Removal moonscape.

It is good you do not rely on polluting energy sources for your power.  At least you are not a fake.  I asked where your electricity came from to see how green you were.  I congratulate and respect your green life and what you are doing to save the Earth from the wretched man. I am sure the rest of your existence is as green. I feel it is safe to say you do not rely on products made in foundries, steel mills, aluminum manufacturers, sweatshops processed food of any kind and use anything petroleum based.  I know, I must have left out dozens of other sources of pollution but I am trying to be green. I am sure you rely on foot power or bicycles to move around although manufacturing the components for bicycles pollute. Even the manufacture of the components in your computer causes a great deal of pollution no matter how green they say they are. 

I myself am experimenting weaving all my family’s clothes by hand from plant fibers, but I feel hurting plants for my welfare is wrong.  We are working on being Vegans, I don’t think any living thing should sacrifice its life for me.  Those are a few steps we are trying to do our part to be friends with the environment. As the trees fall we utilize the dead wood for shelter although it pains me to cause the Earth pain by digging into her.

If going green is to work, and I hope it does in reasonable ways, those involved in the movement should lighten the elitist attitude so more people would feel welcome to jump on the bandwagon. It is my hope, in time, we all can be about as excellent as you and your green friends regarding the environment.  I know I don’t want to leave a big Al Gore carbon footprint.  I hope Al don’t charge too much for carbon credits, he needs to make a living too. 

I am not responsible for the fact that Mountain Removers made horrible choices in their youth and education and have become morally and ethically bankrupt, destroying other peoples' homes and lives in order to sustain their own.  As such, they choose to do harm to me and mine and I am in no wise required to treat them with respect or any sort of solicitude, and I do not.  I pity them more than anything else, but I do despise what they do and, by extension, them, for doing it.  That's not "elitism," no matter how hard you and the rest of the Fiends of Coal try to paint it otherwise.  It's just honesty.  I don't associate with such people and I won't pretend to accept their wickedness in the name of "civility."

Ultimately, we'll stop using coal because there won't be any more coal to use.  The question is whether we deal with that fast approaching day rationally and reasonably by developing alternative energies or whether we keep going as hard as we can to hasten that day and then face a crisis of life-changing, paradigm-shifting proportions.  It sounds to me like you've chosen the former.  That's just sad.  You've chosen to be part of the problem instead of part of the solution. 

I am not responsible for the fact that Mountain Removers made horrible choices in their youth and education and have become morally and ethically bankrupt, destroying other peoples' homes and lives in order to sustain their own.  As such, they choose to do harm to me and mine and I am in no wise required to treat them with respect or any sort of solicitude, and I do not.  I pity them more than anything else, but I do despise what they do and, by extension, them, for doing it.  That's not "elitism," no matter how hard you and the rest of the Fiends of Coal try to paint it otherwise.  It's just honesty.  I don't associate with such people and I won't pretend to accept their wickedness in the name of "civility."

Ultimately, we'll stop using coal because there won't be any more coal to use.  The question is whether we deal with that fast approaching day rationally and reasonably by developing alternative energies or whether we keep going as hard as we can to hasten that day and then face a crisis of life-changing, paradigm-shifting proportions.  It sounds to me like you've chosen the former.  That's just sad.  You've chosen to be part of the problem instead of part of the solution.