Kty2 Bak

see main kentucky for older

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Appalachia

this also refers to cultural region

gerry/ supermajority?

see va and west va

bak 4 24

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see epic fail on black lung

see frack wastewater

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'Stay out of all Walmarts': Kentucky GOP house candidate arrested on strangulation charge - Alternet.org

Kentucky strips power of Democratic governor to appoint Mitch McConnell’s successor - Alternet.org

2 in one day:

an 4 24

a republican state representative in Kentucky is proposing a bill that, if passed, would repeal the requirement that employers provide workers with lunch breaks. It also includes language that would result in a reduction in net pay for many workers.

The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy (KCEP) — a fiscal policy think tank in the commonwealth — recently broke down House Bill 500, which was sponsored by Republican Rep. Phillip Pratt. Aside from its language allowing companies to avoid having to provide lunch breaks to workers, it would also eliminate mandatory rest breaks and end the requirement to pay time-and-a-half wages to employees who work seven days a week. HB 500 also removes any liability for employers who don't pay workers for time on the clock traveling between jobs, and allows companies to not pay workers for tasks associated with starting and ending a job.

Additionally, the bill reduces the amount of time workers have to report labor violations from five years to three years, and blocks plaintiffs from being paid punitive damages for suffering emotional distress, humiliation or embarrassment over wrongful termination.

READ MORE:[(Opinion) Republicans are trying to flood the labor market with cheap child labor

"Collectively, these provisions weaken multiple common sense protections for safe working conditions and fair pay that have been a part of Kentucky’s safeguards for more than half a century," the KCEP wrote in its analysis of the bill. "HB 500 will make work more dangerous by depriving workers of food and rest, incentivizing them to travel too quickly to get to their job site, and discouraging them from taking proper precautions at the start of shifts. And it will take pay away from workers when they are moving between job locations, working excessive weeks, and engaging in necessary tasks at the beginning and end of the work day."

Should the bill pass, Rep. Pratt would stand to reap a financial benefit, as he is the owner of a lawn care and landscaping business in Georgetown, Kentucky. Outdoor workers like landscapers typically have to take frequent breaks throughout the day due to the physically demanding nature of their jobs — particularly in hot summer months. In Texas, for example, the City of Dallas mandates that construction workers have a 10-minute break every four hours (a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law last year eliminated mandatory water breaks).

Even if the bill passes the Kentucky legislature, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear is unlikely to sign it into law. But Kentucky Republicans have the ability to override him due to their veto-proof majorities in both chambers. The Kentucky legislature's official website shows that HB 500 has not yet received a full floor vote.

Rep. Pratt announced in late 2023 he will not seek a fifth term in office, and will serve out the rest of his term, which ends on December 31.

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/kentucky-cops-release-kkk-member/

6 23 raw

kKK members pulled guns on pro-LGBTQ protesters — but Kentucky officers let them go free: police docs

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no lnx an 7 23

just days after a federal judge blocked a Kentucky ban on gender-affirming car for trans youth, the state's Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron sought to counter the rulingFriday, The Washington Post reports.

Cameron, according to the Post, led an "emergency motion" to a federal appeals court lift the injunction that "temporarily blocked parts of the Kentucky law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and hormones on minors."

Last month, Louisville Courier Journal reported "Judge David Hale for the Western District of Kentucky 'sided with the ACLU of Kentucky" by "issuing the temporary injunction, keeping puberty blockers and hormone therapy legal and accessible to those under 18 in Kentucky while a larger lawsuit plays out."

READ MORE: Judge blocks Kentucky’s gender-affirming care ban from taking effect

The Post reports Hale, insisted the plaintiffs — who are "seven transgender children and their parents" — displayed "'a strong likelihood of success on the merits' of their constitutional challenges."

The plaintiffs specifically challenged the law "arguing it violates their constitutional rights and interferes with parental rights to seek established medical treatment for their children," according to the report.

In his argument, the GOP attorney general promised to "do everything in my power to protect Kentucky kids from this radical agenda, and my office will continue to defend this law at every turn,"adding parents possess the "fundamental right to make decisions concerning the medical care of their children."

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which represents the plaintiffs, has said "bills that ban essential medical care are not based on science or best practices and are not supported or endorsed by the leading major medical groups," noting, "These unconstitutional measures are political attacks from groups with a fundamental opposition to transgender people being able to live openly, freely, and affirmed as who they really are."

READ MORE: Trump-backed Kentucky AG welcomed donation from community center his office is probing: report

The Washington Post's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'I have never been targeted so specifically': Trans activist blasts Trump campaign’s 'bully-like' ad ›

'Carte blanche to kidnap': Florida Republicans advancing extreme 'Don't Say They' anti-trans bills ›

Kentucky Republicans override governor's veto to enact draconian anti-trans law ›

Injecting Waste in Geologically “Unsuitable” Locations

The oil industry’s largest trade group, the American Petroleum Institute,claims that injection wells aresafe and environmentally reliable, in part because the waste is going so far beneath the ground and far below sources of groundwater. But that assertion assumes the wastewater stays put.

In 2019, wastewater injected into the Redbird #4 well in Washington County in southeast Ohio resurfaced through a couple of entirely separate oil and gas wells located five miles away, moving far outside of the permitted area.

“We’ve seen an increase in incidents recently where oil and gas waste is migrating underground and returning to the surface,” Hunter, the Earthjustice attorney, said. “If you have something traveling that far underground and then coming back up, then the shallower [groundwater] aquifers can be at risk.”

Brine hauler and class II injection well. Morrow County, OH. Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance, 2015.

A technical analysis, commissioned by Earthjustice and conducted by Robert Rossi and Dominic DiGiulio, two research scientists with PSE Healthy Energy, a nonprofit energy science and policy research institute, documented a long list of problems with both the permitting and due diligence of ODNR regulators overseeing injection wells. The analysis looked at six injection wells, and the results of the study were submitted to the EPA along with the Earthjustice petition as evidence of ODNR’s failures.

Wastewater is supposed to be injected beneath an impermeable layer of rock, which would seal it off from drinking water aquifers higher up in the subsurface. But the scientists found that ODNR was allowing injection wells in shale formations that had a fractured network of rock, which allows wastewater to find fissures and travel far away from its intended location. The geologic conditions were therefore “unsuitable” for wastewater disposal, the analysis concluded.

Because the Redbird well’s wastewater traveled five miles laterally and almost 2,000 feet vertically, the report concluded, “it is exceedingly clear that the injection formation was not isolated and begs the question of if the geological suitability of this formation was even considered by the ODNR during permitting.”

A second finding was that ODNR was allowing too many wells to be located near each other, resulting in “overpressurization” of the subsurface.

“There’s so much injection occurring, that [the formation] just can’t support injection any longer and you’re seeing things rise to the surface as a result of that,” Hunter said. Instead of looking at the cumulative impact of so much high-pressure wastewater shoved underground, ODNR assesses permits individually.

In a statement to DeSmog, Stephanie O’Grady, a spokesperson for ODNR, said that the U.S. EPA “has consistently reaffirmed that Ohio operates an effective regulatory program that meets federal standards and protects public health, safety, and the environment. The Division takes our responsibility to protect Ohio’s groundwater, surface water, and environment seriously, as demonstrated by our rigorous permitting process, regular inspections, and enforcement.”

New rules issued by ODNR at the start of 2022 dial back the approved pressure and volumes allowed for injection wells. But they still permit injection in the exact same shale formation that saw wastewater escape and migrate long distances underground. If toxic waste is moving so far beyond its intended locations, then sources of drinking water could be at risk, the petition alleges.

“How is it affecting us?”

Even when everything goes right, the day-to-day of living next to a wastewater injection well has its downsides.

Michele Garman lives in a rural area north of Youngstown, Ohio, not far from the Pennsylvania border. About six years ago, with very little public notice and against community opposition, a local company called Kleese Development drilled an injection well adjacent to her property and visible from her house.

Class II injection well in Vienna, OH. Credit: Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance, 2016. Aerial support provided by LightHawk. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

She said trucks bringing the wastewater for disposal run frequently and sometimes at odd hours. “I notice them more at two or three in the morning,” Garman told DeSmog. And she recalls, at one Fourth of July party, “We watched the trucks come in and out all day.”

In addition, Garman said that at times there are terrible oily odors wafting from the well pad. While she opposed the injection well when it went in, she has largely learned to live with the trucks and smells. But those aren’t her only concerns. “The worrisome part is what’s going on underneath us. The stuff you don’t see or hear,” she said.

Very little public information exists revealing specifically what is in the waste destined for injection wells like the one next to Garman’s land, but what is known is concerning.

“We know that the waste in the Marcellus/Utica region in particular is radioactive, highly radioactive,” Hunter said. “We know that it has PFAS in it. Of course, we already know that it is extremely salty and that it has heavy metals and other organics that are dangerous and harmful to human health and the environment.” (PFAS are also known as “forever chemicals” due to their long-lived nature and are linked to various potential health impacts.)

But there is no requirement for operators to detail or disclose any specifics. Moreover, there are no studies on the human health impacts of wastewater injection wells, so the hazards are largely unknown.

For Garman, all the uncertainty surrounding fracking wastewater is disconcerting. “Where is it all going? How is it affecting us?” she said.

A brine hauler in Ashtabula County, OH. Credit: Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance, 2015. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Nearly a decade ago, eastern Ohio resident Tom McKnight said he saw people who were hauling brine bringing in paychecks that were “pretty doggone respectable.” With three kids to support, he decided to get into trucking as well. He worked as an oil and gas brine hauler in Ohio between 2014 and 2018, and in the first year made $70,000.

However, McKnight believes he was exposed to radiation from his years trucking fracking waste. “The most dirty, dangerous water I think that I’ve ever been around is what they call the ‘flowback’ while they are bringing a new well online. That is some nasty, dirty stuff,” he said. Flowback is the water and chemical mixture that shoots up out of an oil and gas well after it has been fracked and the well is in the process of coming online.

He recalled one time when he was sucking wastewater out of some tanks, and he opened up the manhole and stuck his head in. “At the end of the day, between my gloves and my shirt sleeves, and my face and my v-neck on the chest, I looked like I had been out in the sun all day,” he said, thinking that his reddened skin was the result of exposure to radiation. “So I’m pretty sure I got a pretty good dose that day.”

McKnight no longer works because he has Thymoma, a form of cancer of the thymus, a gland in the chest. He had several operations to remove part of his liver and a six-pound tumor from his chest.He also had throat cancer. But it’s not easy to definitively link workplace exposures like McKnight’s, and the appearance of cancer. “It could have come from anything, or the accumulation of everything,” he said.

“It Was Going in Whether We Wanted it or Not”

When Garman voiced opposition to the project next to her home in 2015, she felt like neither the company nor the state cared. “It was going in, whether we wanted it or not. That’s my general feeling,” she said.

When a waste company applies for an injection well permit, its approval is essentially a foregone conclusion, environmental experts say, and whatever public notice happens appears to be lacking.

“Typically, communities wouldn’t even know they’re getting an injection well until a drilling rig shows up,” said Mills of the Buckeye Environmental Network.

Even when communities are aware of a proposed project and push back, the state agency largely ignores the complaints.

“The problem with the [public] hearing is that even though the public provides input on safety issues and concerns with injection wells, the ODNR director has no discretion. As long as the permit is correctly filled out, their permit gets granted,” Lenny Eliason, Athens County (Ohio) Commissioner,said on a call with reporters in October. “So why have a public hearing? Why involve the public in a sham process when you’re not going to do anything about acting on the information that’s provided during that public hearing?”

In a statement to DeSmog, O’Grady, the ODNR spokesperson, said that the agency “does believe that its permitting process has adequate public notification and input.”

DeSmog followed up with specific questions asking for documentation on how many times the agency has denied injection well applications and enforced violations. O’Grady said the agency has denied 12 applications this year, but when asked for documentation, she sent denials to only four applications, and said ODNR could not comment further. ODNR also did not respond to a request for documentation on its history of enforcement.

EPA vs. State “Primacy”

The governance of wastewater injection wells falls under the Safe Drinking Water Act. While it is a federal law, it gives states leeway to apply for “primacy,” which is the ability for states to govern their own injection wells. Ohio successfully obtained primacy back in 1983, and as a result, has overseen the proliferation of injection wells over the past two decades with the boom in fracking.

Pennsylvania, on the other hand, has federal EPA supervision over its injection well program.Both states have extensive fracking operations, but because it is much easier to dispose of fracking waste in Ohio, convoys of brine trucks often haul toxic and low-level radioactive waste from drill sites in Pennsylvania across the border to Ohio.

McKnight trucked waste to and from well sites across much of eastern Ohio, as well as from oil and gas wells in southwest Pennsylvania to injection wells in Ohio. “It’s a big industry. It’s a big employer,” he said.

In fact, more than 40 percent of the waste injected underground in Ohio actually comes from out of state, according to datafrom FracTracker.

“Our state legislators will stand at the state line and just wave them on in. ‘Come on in. We love ya,’” Mills said, characterizing Ohio’s willingness to take huge quantities of waste from Pennsylvania.

Class II injection well. Mahoning County, OH. Credit: Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance, 2019. Aerial support provided by LightHawk. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But geologically speaking, there’s no reason Pennsylvania can’t dispose of its own fracking wastewater, said Ted Auch of FracTracker. He said the industry doesn’t have much interest in applying for permits in Pennsylvania because “they can rely on Ohio to dispose of its waste.” That puts added pressure on Ohio regulators to deal with this flood of fracking wastewater and the injection wells needed for its disposal, and the environmental and community coalition filing the petition to the EPA thinks the state isn’t keeping up with that responsibility.

The coalition is calling on the federal agency to initiate a rulemaking process that would eventually lead to Ohio losing its “primacy” and having regulatory oversight revert back to the federal government. The process is lengthy and could take several years, if it succeeds at all.

Ohio is not necessarily unique in this regard. Other states, including Idaho, Michigan, and Oklahoma, have wrestled with whether or not the state or the federal government should have primacy over injection wells. But revoking state primacy due to poor regulatory oversight would be unprecedented.

In the meantime, the army of brine trucks will continue hauling fracking waste to injection wells in Ohio.

Auch says the petition for the EPA to take over is “kind of the last hope” for reforming the problems documented with Ohio’s injection wells.

“We know that the state doesn’t collect good data. We know that the state rubber stamps injection wells,” he said. Looking at Pennsylvania, which has a more methodical permitting process due to EPA oversight, Auch said, “it’s like, maybe we should sign up for that.”

POLITICS AND POLICY ENERGY SOCIAL JUSTICE

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/joe-biden-pledges-support-kentucky/

rand paul mcc not flood visit

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manchin a coal millionaire (son and bro?) trying to block climate in BBB

coal is making electricity more expensive than mortgages in West Virginia: 'It does feel wrong'

Alex Henderson

October 25, 2021

Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, not unlike former President Donald Trump, has been unwavering in his support of fossil fuels — which he obviously believes plays well with West Virginia voters. But the...

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621 kos an

If you were to ask me how I wanted to spend my week, I can think of few things I would enjoy less than spending it among people who tried to sell the former guy a "campaign theme song" and spend a lot of time celebrating the idea of mixing "mudding" (which is actually somewhat enjoyable) with drunk driving, combined with assaulting women and maybe slashing a throat here and there. If you ask me, that sounds far more like the plot in a horror movie than anything I want to join in on. Butin Kentucky's Blue Holler Offroad Park, that's exactly the kind of action attendees were welcome to enjoy. Welcome home, Mitch McConnell!

What more could you ask for, reallly? There are certainly attendees who were not on a Biden-hating bring-back-the-confederacy tilt, but a quick search of Facebook and YouTube turned up mostly images of vehicles with Confederate flags, pro-Trump memorabilia, or anti-Biden and anti-Harris statements. Well, hey, if you're going to roll around in the mud, I guess you might as well show who you are, really. The details are grizzly.

FromThe Daily Beast:

By the end of the five-day bash, dubbed the "Redneck Rave," one man had been impaled, one woman had been strangled to the point of unconsciousness, and one throat had been slit. In all, Edmonson authorities arrested 14 people, and charged four dozen people from five states.

Oh my! I really want that! That sounds so entertaining! The opportunity to listen to terrible music, get yelled at by drunks, and then impaled. Awesome.

Yahoo News goes into depth:

A five-day party in Kentucky ended in 14 arrests and 48 people charged with drug and alcohol, traffic, and assault-related offenses over their participation in what was billed as an occasion of "mud, music, and mayhem."

Numerous others were cited by police, and some were injured after partygoers descended on Blue Holler Offroad Park in Edmonson County from June 16-20 for the "Redneck Rave," an event that reportedly was held twice last year and during which one person died.

"The first vehicle that came through, we found meth, marijuana, and an open alcohol container," Sheriff Shane Doyle, who set up checkpoints in anticipation of trouble, said, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. "And then one of the occupants had two active warrants ... We were like, 'Well, this doesn't bode well for the weekend.'"

Doesn't bode well for the weekend? Just the weekend? I worry it doesn't bode well for the hometowns where the attendees will be returning if they aren't still locked up or in recovery programs.

I guess only one sentiment sums up my reaction:

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/west-virginia-coal-mines/

salon

on Earth Day this year, as President Biden assembled world leaders to a climate summit to focus on a "clean energy future," retired coal miner Chuck Nelson hunkered down in the green hills of West Virginia, recovering from a recent stroke and with one remaining kidney, as thousands of tons of explosives from mountaintop removal strip mining operations detonated nearby with a toxic haze of coal dust.

Yes, Greta (Thunberg), we still blow up mountains in the United States to mine deadly coal.

While coal mining has decreased dramatically in recent years, state permits for reckless mountaintop removal operations by absentee corporations, which involve only small numbers of non-union heavy equipment operators and explosives, in contrast to labor-intensive underground mines, continue to be doled out in central Appalachia in a desperate attempt to shake down the region for a final coal tattoo.

In fact, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection celebrated Earth Day by rubber-stamping a new strip-mining permitfor an out-of-state coal company, slated to destroy 1,085 acres of forested ridges and wreak havoc for neighboring communities for the next eight years, despite decades of protestby local citizens and reams of shocking health studies on heightened cancer, heart andbirth defect rates associated with mountaintop removal mining dust.

The endless war on the central Appalachian mountains continues. Needlessly, we should add.

"Millions of acres of Appalachian mountains have been permanently destroyed, and thousands of miles of streams have been permanently buried," emailed Nelson, whose wife died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in 2019. "With a flow of permits being processed right now, thousands more acres are planned to be wiped away forever. As devastating as mountaintop removal mining is to our majestic mountains, and the people's health impacts, only 3% of it is for electrical demand — only 3%. Mountaintop removal mining goes against everything we're fighting for in trying to deal with the climate crisis. These are criminal acts carried out by criminal enterprises."

Instead of recognizing thecentury-old legacy of ruin in coal country, from Appalachia to Alaska and 20-odd states and several First Nations in between — including an enduring array of abandoned mines, dangerous coal slurry impoundments, fraudulent "reclamation" projects, polluted waterways, desperate black lung victims, and gutted and sick communities with few economic options — the Biden administration risks falling into the trap of outdated policies.

Two days after Earth Day applause, the Department of Energy quietly awarded millions of dollars "to boost the economic potential of coal and power plant communities," and subsidize "critical mineral extraction from coal and associated waste streams," as well as widely debunked carbon capture and storage schemes.

Listen here: Advocates in coal country have been calling for a Green New Deal since 2008 — and acoalfields regeneration fund for everyone in coal mining communities, not simply the out-of-state companies, and not just throwing out a few job training opportunities for the dwindling ranks of largely non-union miners.

If the Biden administration and Congress truly want to build back better, they should have passed the RECLAIM ACT years ago, simply to start the process of reclaiming and reinvesting in all mining regions. And they should now double down on the commitment and make the Appalachian region, like all extraction zones from the Illinois Basin to the Navajo Nation to the Powder River Basin, a showcase for a clean energy economy, not a backwoods of denial.

If the Biden administration and Congress want to end the war on Appalachia, they should simply pass the Appalachian Community Health Emergency (ACHE) Act,which calls for a moratorium on such devastating operations until a basic health study is completed.

This is one of the most shameless realities in regulation: One of the Trump administration's first acts was to cancel a long-term health study on the impacts of mountaintop removal mining.

The sad truth is that this humanitarian and environmental crisis has been a federally sanctioned disaster since Jimmy Carter begrudginglysignedthe Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, complaining that it would allow "the mining companies to cut off the tops of Appalachian mountains to reach entire seams of coal."

Let's repeat that phrase, "cut off the tops of Appalachian mountains" — as in the tops of more than 500 mountains for over a half-century, literally clear-cutting deciduous forests and the region's ancient carbon sink, blowing ridges into oblivion with explosives and dumping the toxic remains and pulverized heavy metals in polluted streams, and ravaging the lives of citizens considered collateral damage, along with everything else in the way.

It doesn't have to be like this. Last month, Canadian government officials reversed their own 45-year policy for open-pit coal mining, admitting, "We didn't get this one right."

It's time for Biden and Congress to get this one right in Appalachia and all mining communities.

Just listen to Vernon Haltom, director of Coal River Mountain Watch, based in the frontline extraction zones of West Virginia, not in Washington, an organization that deserves as much support as possible:

With millions of Americans seriously ill or dead from the COVID pandemic, the stockholders and executives of Alpha Metallurgical Resources have no qualms about filling the air in Appalachian communities with carcinogenic blasting dust. Their enablers at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection have no qualms about rubber stamping new and renewed mountaintop removal permits, "just following the law" to sentence innocent people to death and misery. People like WVDEP permit supervisor Laura Claypool face no negative consequences for their actions, apparently not even remorse, but the people face the consequences of death. How do they sleep at night? It's not as if they don't know about the dozens of peer-reviewed health studies demonstrating that mountaintop removal is a deadly public health threat. No, they sleep soundly in the comfort of a steady job doing the coal barons' bidding. The WVDEP has made it personal by approving the death of friends and family like Judy Bonds, Larry Gibson and Joanne Webb, so they shouldn't be surprised if we make it personal about their cold, inhumane decisions. But since they've proven their incapacity for basic human decency, we need the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency (ACHE) Act, H.R. 2073 in this U.S. Congress, to protect the people.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Kentucky voters reject every McConnell stance on COVID-19 relief

Joan McCarter / Daily KosJuly 22, 2020

The voters of Kentucky roundly support the key provisions of the HEROES coronavirus relief bill from House Democrats, and roundly oppose Sen. Mitch McConnell’s push to reopen schools in the…

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/29/america-coal-mining-enery-climate-crisis

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no lnx pix video twet

https://www.ajc.com/news/trump-defends-angry-protesters-who-stormed-michigan-capitol-with-rifles/Lcmt25QHIoZcRDjU5xHOeP/

www.ajc.com

Members of the Michigan Liberty Militia, including Phil Robinson, right, join protesters at a rally at the state Capitol Thursday in Lansing, Michigan. Hoisting American flags and handmade signs, protesters returned to the state Capitol to denounce Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's stay-home order and business restrictions due to COVID-19.

Photo: Matthew Dae Smith/Associated Press

Trump defends angry protesters who stormed Michigan Capitol with rifles

NEWS May 01, 2020

By ArLuther Lee, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

State lawmakers report wearing bulletproof vests to work during ongoing demonstrations by militia members

President Donald Trump is defending hundreds of protesters angry about stay-at-home orders who marched into the Michigan Capitol on Thursday, some armed with rifles, and tried to force their way to the chamber floor but were blocked by state police.

“Let us in! Let us in!” the jostling crowd shouted inside the statehouse, according to multiple news reports. It is legal to carry firearms inside the Capitol, according to The New York Times, but demonstrations are not permitted on the House floor. Thursday’s “American Patriot Rally” in Lansing was ignited after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed three executive orders Thursday, renewing a state of emergency that will keep residents under stay-at-home orders through May 28.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants people to stay at home longer.

Photo: Associated Press

Her action came after the state’s Republican-led Legislature refused to extend her original emergency declaration, which expired Thursday night. Reports say state lawmakers want to strip the governor of her power to declare emergencies.

“The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.” — President Donald Trump said in a tweet

“While some members of the Legislature might believe this crisis is over, common sense and all of the scientific data tells us we’re not out of the woods yet,” she said. “By refusing to extend the emergency and disaster declaration, Republican lawmakers are putting their heads in the sand and putting more lives and livelihoods at risk. I’m not going to let that happen.”

“Lock her up!” chants could also be heard inside the statehouse Thursday.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.

210K

5:42 AM - May 1, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

103K people are talking about this

Trump tweeted about the episode Friday, calling the protesters “very good people.”“The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.”Photographs from inside the statehouse Thursday showed a scene of mutiny, with men brandishing semi-automatic long guns in a gallery above lawmakers, screaming anti-government slogans, according to reports. Hundreds more demonstrators were outside the building. The Guardian reported a protest sign outside the statehouse that read: “Tyrants get the rope.” Other signs said: “Stop the tyranny!” and “Freedom over fear!”

Craig Mauger

@CraigDMauger

A sign currently on the lawn:

View image on Twitter

Legislators were concerned enough about the ongoing protests that some have begun wearing bulletproof vests to work. “Some of my colleagues who own bulletproof vests are wearing them,” state Sen. Dayna Polehanki wrote Thursday on Twitter, with an accompanying photo of the demonstrators above her.

Senator Dayna Polehanki

@SenPolehanki

Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us. Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our Sergeants-at-Arms more than today. #mileg

View image on Twitter

The armed militia group leading Thursday’s protest appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of extreme anti-government groups. Reports said the crowd included a mix of the Michigan Liberty Militia and people carrying signs in support of Trump, who three weeks ago called for his followers to defy state lockdowns and “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA! and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” »

MORE: CDC director warns virus could come back stronger, deadlier in fall]

The resulting protests have skirted social distancing restrictions that were supposed to be in place nationwide until at least April 30 but were supplanted by a new White House plan for a gradual reopening of the country. Some at Thursday’s protest wore protective face masks. At least 31 states are set for a gradual reopening of businesses that started a week ago amid the pandemic. »

MORE: Fauci says reopening too quickly will ‘backfire’

The nation’s top health experts have warned that reopening the economy too soon would lead to a resurgence of virus infections. Many governors, including Whitmer, are choosing to follow the advice.Michigan has the third-highest death toll in the nation after New York and New Jersey. “For anyone to declare mission accomplished means they’re turning a blind eye to the fact that over 600 people have died in the last 72 hours,” Whitmer said at a virtual town hall Thursday night.A new poll Friday by ABC News found most Americans said they felt uneasy about returning to normal, with only some saying they would visit a restaurant or bar if the coronavirus restrictions were lifted now.

Similar scene in January

On January 31, armed protesters entered Kentucky's state Capitol in Frankfort after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam pushed for new gun control measures. The episode along with ongoing threats led Northam to declare a state of emergency.

Getty Images News

Gun rights activists carrying semi-automatic firearms walk through the Capitol Building on January 31, 2020 in Frankfort, Kentucky. ??: @woolstonphoto

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, visitors to the Kentucky Capitol building are banned from entering with items like umbrellas or protest signs that can be “used as weapons,” but guns and rifles are permitted.

Joe Gerth

@Joe_Gerth

Weirdest thing about guns in the Kentucky Capitol: if you have one, you’re told to walk around the metal detector. Others must pass through and get wanded.

Embedded video

walks back https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/anti-lockdown-protests-are-imploding-because-the-koch-network-has-soured-on-them-columnist/

post Mich guns?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/kentuckys-gravy-train-is-now-in-danger-thanks-to-mitch-mcconnells-heartless-greed/

no lnx

Kentucky’s gravy train is now in danger — thanks to Mitch McConnell’s heartless greed

Written by Daily Kos Staff April 26, 2020

As of 48 hours ago, few people knew that Kentucky was the nation’s leading recipient of federal largess, and certainly had no clue just how much the state received compared to the rest of the country. Then, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, started whining about “Blue state bailouts,” and the shit has hit the fan.

Andrew Cuomo

@NYGovCuomo

NY has given $116 billion more to the federal government than we received since 2015.

Kentucky *took* $148 billion more from the federal government than it gave.

Just give NY our money back, Senator McConnell.

Embedded video

Looks like it’s time to reexamine Kentucky’s privileged status.

Blue states have been happy to carry the burden of funding red states for … kinda forever. California, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, in particular, have pumped untold hundreds of billions over the last several decades into mostly rural red states.

That dynamic carries forth in states themselves, with large urban centers paying for rural regions, like the upstate-downstate divisions in Illinois and New York, or Philly-central Pennsylvania.

And that would be fine! Liberals are okay with helping out those that are less well off. Liberals have no problem with the federal government subsidizing telephone and mail service to rural areas—services that would not be justified by capitalistic math. We’re okay subsidizing rural health care. We’re okay subsidizing rural education, or opioid treatments, or transportation networks (e.g. roads).

The problem here isn’t our willingness as liberals to help our disproportionately rural Conservative brothers and sisters. The problem is twofold: 1) the bullshit pretense that these same people are “anti-government” and that urban liberals are somehow feeding off the government trough, and 2) the refusal of these same assholes to help when blue states get hit with catastrophe. Instead, Mitch McConnells and his asshole buddies suddenly discover the evils of the budget deficit—a deficit that wouldn’t be so large if Kentucky wasn’t bleeding the country dry.

Still, once upon a time, liberals and Blue states were like “whatever, we’ve got it good, we’re the United States of America. We’ll help.” But McConnell’s toxic brew of greed and cruelty has shattered that pretense.

Conservatives have pretended for far too long that it is they, the “heartland,” the “real America,” that supposedly makes this country great, and it is the cities, the Brown and Black people, the feminists, the liberals, who are dragging it down. Yet it is us paying for their infrastructure, for their health care, for their Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps and aircraft carriers and all the things that make their society functional.

They wouldn’t last a week without our assistance. Yet not only is there zero appreciation, but they act like they’re the ones being screwed over.

If Republicans want to finally acknowledge that we are all in this thing together, that we are a United States of America, then great, we can continue being generous.

But that’s not what’s happened. Quite the opposite. Their divisive up democratic talk, in fact, has sown the seeds for a national breakup.

And so now, Kentucky’s largess is firmly in the sights of Democratic lawmakers. No more flying under the radar. No more free ride. I’m going to embed this tweet one more time for effect:

No more red-state bailouts.

So every time Mitch McConnell mentions the deficit? Kentucky first.

Mitch McConnell doesn’t want state bailouts? Kentucky first. Return the $148 billion in extra money it received the last five years.

Mitch McConnell wants to rail against the evil federal government? Then by all means, Kentucky, return that evil tainted federal cash.

Mitch McConnell wants to rail against New York or California? Return the money paid by New York and California taxpayers.

The red-state anti-government scam is fully exposed. No more.

icn 320

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20032020/appalachia-future-center-petrochemicals-coronavirus-plastic-ethane

see massive fail on black lung

In 1974, NIOSH first called for silica exposure limits twice as strict as those in place for coal miners and other workers. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that MSHA and others began to get serious about silica in coal mines.

NPR and FRONTLINE obtained internal memos from the Clinton administration that showed alarm back then about clusters of advanced lung disease among coal miners as young as 40. MSHA sent out alerts to coal mining companies, warning about excessive exposure to silica dust and severe disease among miners. NIOSH again called for a silica exposure limit that would be twice as tough, plus separate regulation of silica, as did a Department of Labor advisory committee.

“We started a national campaign first to raise awareness,” recalled Davitt McAteer, the assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health from 1994 to 2000.

“And it was that campaign that began to try to go after the silica requirements, raise the silica standard, and start on a separate path to control silica.”

McAteer proposed a major overhaul of the dust samplingsystem, which included other loopholes that permitted excessive exposures and inaccurate measurement of coal mine dust.But the effort encountered stiff opposition from the National Mining Association, the industry’s biggest lobbying group. The group sued over some elements of the plan and won.

“And then we ran out of time,” McAteer says. “And it’s something that’s unfortunate and put a lot of lives at risk.”

Mine dust loopholes

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320

kentucky Koch Group Opposes Saving Hospital – Patient Care and 2,000 Jobs at Risk

:{By :(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;white-space:pre-wrap"):}::{:{Don Wiener}:}::{:{ | March 4th, 2020 at 8:11 AM (CST)}:}:

:{Americans for Prosperity-Kentucky is so far the lone group weighing in against a state loan to save Louisville’s Jewish Hospital that has strong bipartisan support.:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:

Who's Missing?

But can the United States fight climate change with only half the states engaged? America's Pledge stresses that, yes, it has the potential. The states, cities, businesses and other institutions in its coalition represent 68 percent of U.S. GDP, 68 percent of the population, and 51 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

But the most carbon-intensive economies in the U.S. are still not part of the fight.

Sixty-five percent of the remaining U.S. coal power capacity, for example, is located in the 25 states that arenot part of America's Pledge, led by Texas, Indiana and Kentucky. The America's Pledge analysis found that the U.S. could still make progress without the help of these states. It calculated that if just a handful of the states that have already shown some willingness to act adopted stronger policies, like those set by climate leaders like California, the U.S. could cut emissions up to 37 percent by 2030, even if the most carbon-intensive states and the federal government refuse to act. But that's not where the U.S. needs to be if it hopes to reach net zero emissions by mid-century, as the science says is necessary to stave off climate change's worst ravages.

"None of the states who are climate leaders would say that what they're doing is enough," said Arroyo. "But you've got to start to do what you can do, and prove the concept that you can do this without breaking the bank, and in fact you can do it while growing your economy, creating jobs and enhancing the quality of life."

RMI's Frisch said the real lesson of the state and local climate effort so far in the United States is that it is essential, but not sufficient.

"The states are the reason for the progress that we've had so far," she said. "And their effort will still be fundamental going ahead. But we can't get where we need to be without the federal government, and the federal government can't do it without the states. We need to have both."

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-mitch-mcconnell-gave-a-sweet-deal-to-the-kentucky-coal-industry/

no lnx

How Mitch McConnell gave a sweet deal to the Kentucky coal industry

Written by Maureen Nevin Duffy / DC Report December 30, 2019

Kentucky coal miners—along with the rest of us—will be paying the price to keep the government running next year. And we can thank Kentucky’s senior senator, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for the sellout.

Buried in the giant $1.4 trillion government spending package that McConnell ushered through the Senate last week was a relatively modest $15 billion, 30-year payout to sustain the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund—a boon to the majority leader’s home state coal miners. As many as 1 in 5 of coal miners suffer from black lung.

But here’s the kicker: What McConnell had removed from the must-pass funding legislation. In order to keep the government running, McConnell threw out provisions that would have forced coal companies to commit to higher payments toward the health-care costs of their employees and retirees, nixing requirements to extend the commitment period and modestly increase the tax on coal mining companies that are supposed to support the trust fund.

In short, McConnell let the coal industry skip out and leave the $15 billion black lung tab for everyone else to pay.

The move was mind-boggling, considering McConnell is already under scrutiny and criticism for partnering with a previously sanctioned Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, who McConnell voted to de-sanction. Deripaska, who owns Rusal, a Russian-owned coal company, joined McConnell in a project that his home state of Kentucky voted in 2017 to invest $15M of taxpayer money.

‘A Handout’

“This is a handout. This is a giveaway,” Jim Waters of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, told WaPo in August. Waters reasoned that judgment might have been clouded by the possible thousands of area jobs that could be added. “I think the excitement of that overrode some of the due diligence.”

McConnell’s strange allegiances to influences domestic and foreign have clearly reached the grassroots level. As Mikaela Curry, a community organizer and member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, wrote in an op-ed in the Courier-Journal, Feb. 22, entitled, “Mitch McConnell is silent on coal while Kentucky miners suffer and die”: “When McConnell speaks up for coal, it always seems to align with the people profiting in the fossil fuel industry and not the hard-working people he is supposed to represent.”

Disabled Miners

Most poignant are the call outs to McConnell from those suffering physically as well as financially from his unwillingness to make the coal companies own up to their responsibility to their current and retired workers and their families. Patty Amburgey, now secretary of the local black lung association in Letcher County, is the widow of a coal miner who died of Black Lung Disease after leaving mining, “blind, unable to feel his legs or arms, and constantly short of breath,” according to his obit.

“I’m asking [Mr. McConnell] to please remember that East Kentucky is a mining area,” his widow wrote in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. “And we do have a lot of miners and the election is coming up. I want him to understand that.” Obviously, Mr. McConnell is betting his Appropriations Bill will heal these sores and smooth his way to re-election.

But that may not be so easy in practice. Instead of increasing the excise tax rate in effect in 2018, which sunset on Jan. 1, 2019, Congress failed to act, which allowed the tax for coal companies to reset to 1985 rates, lowering contributions by 55% (from $1.10 per ton of coal from subsurface mines to $.50 and from $0.55 per ton for coal from surface mines to just $0.25), which many in Congress had contested.

Companies Protected

After congressional wrangling, the 2020 tax rate will revert to 2018 rates of $1.10 and $0.55 per ton, respectively. But those prices will sunset again on Dec. 31, 2020, and if not renewed will revert to the 1978 rate of $0.50 and $0.25 per ton. The companies also are protected from market price rises by a ceiling cap on the tax of 4.4% of its coal selling price.

In June, the House Ways and Means Committee approved a 10-year extension as part of a broader package. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) proposed the rate be renewed at a higher rate through 2029. He and co-sponsors want to see the Trust Fund fully funded with no sunsets.

While Moscow Mitch steers millions toward business ventures with oligarchs, many in Appalachia want lawmakers to realize that a hike in the excise tax of $0.14 per ton for surface-mined coal and $0.28 per ton for underground-mined coal would eliminate the debt in the Fund completely by 2050, according to the General Accounting Office.

Appalachia’s Strip-Mined Mountains Face a Growing Climate Risk: Flooding

BY: JAMES BRUGGERS

A new analysis of satellite images shows how the area of West Virginia with the most strip-mine damage is also the most susceptible to increased stream flow as the planet warms

How the teachers strikes gave Democrats a win in deep red Kentucky

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abortion vs kitchen table issues in the Kentucky governor’s race

Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/kentucky-senate-president-thinks-gop-controlled-state-legislature-could-review-gubernatorial-election-and-challenge-democratic-beshears-victory/

no lnx

Kentucky Senate president thinks GOP-controlled state legislature could review gubernatorial election and challenge Democrat’s victory

Written by Alex Henderson November 6, 2019

On Election Night 2019, Democrat Andy Beshear pulled off a shocking political upset when he defeated incumbent Republican Gov. Matt Bevin in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race. But it was a very close race. Bevin has yet to concede, andRepublican Robert Stivers (president of the Kentucky State Senate) has suggested that Kentucky’s GOP-controlled state legislature could end up choosing Kentucky’s next governor.

Kentucky, unlike Florida, does not have automatic vote recounts in gubernatorial elections. But Bevin has the option of requesting a recount. And under Kentucky state law, a candidate has 30 days to formally contest an election’s results after they have been certified by the Kentucky Board of Elections. As of Wednesday morning, Beshear’s victory has not been certified.

The 57-year-old Stivers, the Courier Journal reported, said that according to the research of his staff, the election could ultimately come before the Kentucky State Legislature for review. And The Week notes that Section 90 of the Kentucky State Constitution says that “contested elections for governor and lieutenant governor shall be determined by both houses of the General Assembly, according to such regulations as may be established by law.”

According to the vote count on Tuesday night, Beshear won by about 5100 votes. Stivers asserted, “There’s less than one-half of 1%, as I understand, separating the governor and the attorney general. We will follow the letter of the law and what various processes determine.”

Sam Marcosson, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Louisville, told the Courier Journal that it’s a risky “proposition to suggest that the General Assembly would take vague allegations of unspecified irregularities and call into question a gubernatorial election.” And Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky, told the Courier Journal that in order for the Kentucky State Legislature to review the election results, Bevin would need to call a special session of the Kentucky General Assembly; after that, a panel consisting of eight members of the Kentucky House of Representatives and three members of the Kentucky Senate “would hear evidence and make a final determination — and that determination would be final.”

Beshear’s victory is stunning in light of how Republican Kentucky is. In 2016’s presidential election, Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton by 3 percent in Kentucky — and Trump visited Kentucky in a last-ditch effort to save Bevin’s reelection campaign. But Bevin was deeply unpopular in his state; even so, a Democratic gubernatorial victory was a major political upset.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/10/kentuckys-leaders-are-siding-with-the-coal-industry-and-its-poorest-residents-are-paying-a-price/

no lnx

ENVIRONMENT

OCTOBER 28, 2019

Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price

“If we don’t do something really powerful and really meaningful soon, then the people who live in vulnerable areas … will suffer the most.”

RACHEL LEVEN

ZACH GOLDSTEIN

Joanna Eberts

This story was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.

Todd Bentley stepped onto his porch and saw the storm swelling the creek near his home. If this kept up all night, he feared, the creek could overflow its banks and wash out his neighborhood’s road. He headed out into the rain with his teenage son to secure his mother’s trailer across the street.

In minutes—before they could finish—they were up to their waists in floodwater. They had to clamber into the hills to escape. There they crouched for hours in their family cemetery, lightning striking around them, the water below them carrying cars, ripping up pavement and lifting homes off foundations.

“He started crying on me, it was happening so fast, and I, literally, I shook him,” Bentley recalled. “I said, ‘Son, listen. We’re fighting for our lives now—you’ve got to keep it together.’”

Nine years after they survived the flood, storms fill Bentley with dread. He watches the creek. He paces.

What if it happens again?

Flash floods have troubled Kentucky for decades. Now, extreme rainstorms are worsening with climate change, increasing the odds of more disasters like the one Bentley’s community endured. For Kentucky’s poorest residents, the people living in flood-prone hollows with surface mines nearby, that means an ever-present threat to both life and hard-won possessions.

But the state isn’t on the front lines of the fight against global warming. Its leaders, concerned about the impact on coal, have positioned themselves on the other side of that battle.

That’s created a dangerous and expensive disconnect—and not just in Kentucky, a Center for Public Integrity analysis shows.

Nine of the 10 states that emit the most heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution per person helped block the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have been the largest effort by the U.S. government to limit climate change. Four of those states, including Kentucky, were among those most often hit by disasters in the past 10 years—generally powerful storms, which science shows are worsening as the planet warms.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it sent nearly $2 billion in taxpayer aid to those four states over the same period to clean up and prepare for future hits. That accounts for two of FEMA’s major programs, just part of the disaster aid flowing to states.

Kentucky alone received more than $530 million from 2009 to 2018. Severe storms and floods accounted for most of its 16 federally declared major disasters. Half of those battered Pike County, home to a quarter of the state’s active coal mines in 2018 and to Bentley’s neighborhood.

The choices that state leaders make now will have life-changing consequences for generations, experts warn. Michael Hendryx, a public health professor at Indiana University Bloomington who studies environmental justice, said he wonders whether officials promoting inaction truly think global warming is not an emergency or are simply making a cynical bet that they won’t be harmed.

“They’ll be the people who have the money and power to defend themselves as climate change gets worse,” he said. “If we don’t do something really powerful and really meaningful soon, then the people who live in vulnerable areas … will suffer the most.”

In some parts of Kentucky, residents say they believe the state’s treatment of coal has increased the risk of disasters in yet another way. Consider the Harless Creek flood that threatened Bentley’s life. Water rushing down the hills from mines—including one the state had allowed to operate on an expired permit—intensified damage from the pounding rain, according to an engineering study prepared for a lawsuit. Afterward, the state cited two companies for violating laws intended to protect people living nearby.

The Kentucky governor’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. John Mura, a spokesman for the state’s mine regulator, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, wrote in an email that the agency concluded the mines above Harless Creek did not contribute to flood damage. But both the agency and the companies settled lawsuits filed by people living along the creek.

The state now has a system in place to prevent companies from mining with expired permits, Mura wrote.

“The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet has worked with mining companies to increase safety practices while it has been extremely diligent in holding permit holders accountable to their permit obligations,” he wrote.

Harless Creek was one of at least three cases in Kentucky in which engineering studies found that inappropriately operated or cleaned-up mines worsened flood damage, said Jack Spadaro, a former federal mine regulator who served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in lawsuits about those incidents. The floods collectively killed at least one person and destroyed the homes or belongings of more than 250 residents, according to news reports.

But the problem is far more widespread than just those three cases, Spadaro said. And the areas around mines tend to be poor, making recovery much harder for the people living there.

“When they lose their house,” he said, “they lose everything.”

‘Misguided reasons’

In September, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevinstepped up to the lectern in a historic downtown Louisville hotel to deliver the keynote speech at an energy conference for leaders from southern states.

Days before, dozens of countries and businesses committed to swift action to stem the climate crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Demonstrators turned out in cities around the world, including Louisville, to demand that elected officials do better. But at the Louisville conference, sponsored by oil, gas, coal and electric-utility interests, speakers suggested that the causes of global warming are uncertain. Bevin called people pushing for climate action irrational. His message: Leave fossil fuels alone.

“We are prematurely abandoning our [fossil fuel] assets for what I feel—and I think it’s probably shared by others—may be misguided reasons,” said Bevin, a Republican whose state is the country’s fifth-largest coal producer.

In fact, the science is clear: What’s happening to the planet is different from the natural variability of past eras, when Earth gradually warmed and cooled as its orbit shifted. The world has never in recorded history been so warm, or warmed this fast, U.S. and international research shows. Most of that change occurred in the past 35 years, triggered by decades of heat-trapping, man-made emissions, the federal government says. Burning fossil fuels such as coal is the primary cause, according to decades of scientific studies.

Kentucky’s lung-damaging sulfate pollution, pumped out by sources such as coal power plants, used to partially shield the state from warming because the particles reflected sunlight into space. Those emissions have plummeted. For two decades now, temperatures in the state have risen.

Scientists say the consequences include more heavy downpours. Kentucky storms dumping at least 2 inches of rain over a 24-hour period—storms that pose a flood risk—have increased 20 percent since the early 20th century, said Kenneth Kunkel, lead scientist for technical support for the federal government’s National Climate Assessment.

“We see very strong evidence for extreme rainfall increases across the eastern U.S.,” he said.

Kentucky disasters often hurt poorer areas. For example, more than half the counties hit by federally declared major disasters from 2009 to 2018 had larger shares of households receiving federal food aid than the state overall.

That’s a common problem nationwide, one the federal disaster relief system doesn’t effectively address, said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator. Congress didn’t set up FEMA to account for inequalities that precede disasters, such as homelessness and poverty, he said.

“The system was built for the middle income,” Fugate said. “If you’re poor, the system is not designed to make you whole.”

In Kentucky, Bevin’s administration is basing its preparations for disasters on climate science, even as he casts doubt on it. A 2018 state flood risk assessment, citing a 2017 federal study about climate effects in the region, warns that flooding events are likely to become more frequent and severe.

At the same time, the state continues to push for the status quo on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In September, Bevin intervened in court to support the Trump administration’s “pro-coal” replacement to Obama’s climate rule—a substitute that projections by the independent research group Resources for the Future suggest would reduce U.S. climate-warming emissions just one-tenth of a percent by 2050.

Bevin is up for re-election Nov. 5. His opponent, Democrat Andy Beshear, acknowledges climate change is happening but also pushed for the demise of the Clean Power Plan — a rule put in place by the Obama administration—and has supported its replacement.

Planning for climate-worsened disasters, as Kentucky is doing, can save money and lives. Flooding is already the state’s “most frequent and costly natural hazard,” killing 41 people over a recent 11-year period and causing an average of $40 million in annual losses, according to the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management.

But simply planning won’t be enough, experts caution.

It will be impossible to protect people and infrastructure from climate change in the long term without also reining in—what scientists call mitigating—heat-trapping emissions, said Lynne Carter, a Louisiana State University adjunct professor.

“Right now, we’re … incrementally coping. We’re not even coping very well,” said Carter, a co-author of the most recent National Climate Assessment, released by the Trump administration. “If we don’t do any mitigation, the problem is going to just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Kentucky isn’t the only state preparing for the very climate disasters its policies help fuel.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Democrat-turned-Republican, leads a state that emits more carbon dioxide per person than all but two others; he says he doubts the science that man-made fossil fuel emissions are warming the planet.

Meanwhile, his emergency managers are planning for a future of more rain and landslides triggered by climate change.

In Nebraska, the state with the ninth-highest carbon dioxide emissions per person, Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ administration has questioned whether climate science is settled while relying on a hazard mitigation plan calling climate change “an increasingly important factor” in local risks.

Like the Kentucky governor’s office, Bevin’s campaign spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesman for Beshear, Bevin’s challenger and Kentucky’s attorney general, wrote in an email that all energy sources are needed to address the planet’s warming—he did not say how that would lower greenhouse gases—and the right strategy would provide jobs for Kentuckians.

“Mining plays an important role supporting Eastern and Western Kentucky families,” Sam Newton, the Beshear campaign spokesman, wrote in an email. “Andy is on Team Kentucky, which means he’ll fight policies that hurt Kentucky families and work with anyone to help Kentucky families.”

The offices of the West Virginia and Nebraska governors didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

There’s a cost to ignoring climate science. U.S. taxpayers already have begun paying it.

Seven states—all of which opposed the climate-focused Clean Power Plan—account for more than a third of FEMA spending to help communities rebuild after and adapt for natural disasters in the past 10 years, according to figures from the agency. Those states, including Texas and Florida, received $21 billion between them.

‘Ticking time bombs’

Small and seemingly benign, Harless Creek meanders beside a road that shares its name. Homes sit nearby between two mountains—Todd Bentley’s among them.

On a sunny day in June, his family gathered at his mother’s hair salon, a white-paneled house with a wooden porch that overlooks the creek.

Around a coffee table cluttered with newspaper clippings and photos of the flood, they remembered Bentley’s grandmother escaping up the mountain that night in 2010 in her pajamas, a quilt over her head. His mother, Janie Caudill, racing back from Tennessee, stopping only to pick up rubber boots. Residents shining flashlights across the creek to signal that they were alive.

The next day, Caudill’s uncle, Bill Blackburn, stopped by on the way to his house. He lived in the hollow and also hadn’t been there during the storm.

“He said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go home … I’ve got the keys right here in my pocket,’” Caudill remembered. “We didn’t have the heart to tell him that he didn’t have a door there to unlock.”

Pike County has a history of flash floods. Officials here cut a mountain in two in the 1970s so they could reroute the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River to avoid flooding, a $78 million operation that was one of the largest land movements in the Western hemisphere. But Harless Creek took everyone aback.

Seven inches of rain fell between 4 p.m. July 17, 2010, and 1 a.m. the next day. By 8:40 p.m., Harless Creek was over its banks, transforming into a torrent. The floodwaters damaged, destroyed and in some cases carried off more than 100 people’s property: homes, vehicles, sheds. In a county where nearly 30 percent of residents live in poverty, it represented an especially heavy loss.

The amount of rain the storm dumped was brutal, but Bentley and other residents suspected that nearby coal mines played a significant role in the flood. They hired lawyer Ned Pillersdorf, who asked an engineering firm to investigate.

The firm’s findings: The operations of two companies’ mines in the mountains above the neighborhood increased the size and speed of the flood. That’s because unstable dirt and rock surfaces exposed through mining sent more water downhill instead of absorbing it, Spadaro said. Forty-four percent more water rushed into the area, the firm concluded, increasing the “destructive energy of the flood waters.”

On behalf of the people with property damage, Pillersdorf sued both mines’ owners, Cambrian Coal and AEP Kentucky Coal. The businesses’ failure to follow mining rules worsened the flood and residents’ losses from the incident, he alleged in the lawsuit. The companies settled over the next two years, the amounts confidential.

Then Pillersdorf went after the party Bentley’s family thinks ultimately is at fault: the state of Kentucky.

First he sued the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, alleging the agency didn’t properly enforce mining rules — endangering residents—and demanding the state do its job. In 2014, the agency agreed to a confidential settlement and brought in federal investigators to ensure the mines complied with the law.

He later filed another claim against the state. Harless Creek residents requested payment from Kentucky’s claims board, asserting that the energy cabinet’s negligence increased their flood losses, but the cabinet argued that these claims were filed too late. An appellate court recently agreed with the state. The Kentucky Supreme Court is considering whether to review the decision.

Sitting inside his first-floor office in Prestonsburg, west of Pike County, Pillersdorf said it doesn’t surprise locals that companies would ignore mining rules to save money.

“What they don’t understand is, why is the state so damn indifferent to how dangerous these ticking time-bombs are?” he said.

After the storm, the state issued citations to Cambrian Coal for violations that included mining without a permit, inappropriate cleanup and poorly designed and operated sediment ponds, which are intended to capture soil moved during operations. The penalty, after Cambrian Coal appealed, was eventually set at about $50,000. The state cited AEP Kentucky Coal for improper conditions that led to mudslides, fining the company $400.

U.S. taxpayers paid more than five times those combined penalties—almost $300,000—just to rebuild Harless Creek Road, according to federal data obtained by Public Integrity.

AEP Kentucky Coal maintains it didn’t contribute to the flood. The state mine regulator’s spokesman agreed. The residents’ engineering firm did not. While the company settled, it did not admit liability and only “participated in the settlement to promote a prompt conclusion to the case,” AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry wrote in an email.

Listen to a radio version of this story here:

Cambrian Coal didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did Booth Energy, which previously owned the company.

Bentley’s family has far more complicated feelings about the mine owners than about the state’s handling of the situation.

Bentley’s son, Tyler, now 24, is a coal miner. So were Bentley’s father and grandfather, and Bentley himself, before an accident on the job in 2002 left him unable to work. Judi Casalino, his aunt, used to be a sales executive for a coal company.

“It’s hard for me,” she said. “I know that coal mining had a whole lot to do with what happened up here,” but she couldn’t help but also think of Cambrian Coal’s economic impact.

She pointed to Jim Booth, who’d long run the company: “That one man employs 500-something people right now in eastern Kentucky, so let’s give him credit where credit’s due. If he weren’t in the business, it’d be a whole lot of people would have no jobs.”

Just days before, though Casalino didn’t know it, Booth had resigned as a director and shareholder at the company. Shortly afterward, Cambrian Coal and related businesses filed for bankruptcy protection. As of early October, the company owed local governments and schools more than $1 million in unpaid taxes, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.

Today, the mines that settled with neighbors over the flood have been cleaned up, according to the state. But people here remain shaken.

One neighbor sleeps in her clothes every night “because she’s afraid she might have to get out,” Caudill said, while Bentley, his stepfather and his son “get really paranoid” if there’s a storm brewing. Some people are gone: They couldn’t bear to live here after the flood.

And Blackburn, the uncle who didn’t have the door to lock? Two years afterward, he was dead.

“He grieved himself to death,” Caudill said. “He just couldn’t deal with what he’d lost.”

The powerful and the powerless

Five days after Cambrian Coal settled the lawsuit brought by Harless Creek residents, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., delivered a tribute on the Senate floor to a fellow Kentuckian — Cambrian’s then-owner, Booth.

Booth is a “treasured citizen,” “someone who has taken it upon himself to make an investment in the betterment of his community, county and state,” McConnell said. “Booth’s story is one of success in the free market, and a testimony to what can happen when a small business is given room to take root and grow.”

What prompted this 2012 outpouring by McConnell, one of the most powerful men in Washington, isn’t clear.

But Booth, named by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014 as one of “Kentucky’s top 10 ‘power players,’” is a reliable political donor who has supported many of the state’s key officials, including McConnell, Bevin and Beshear, the attorney general.

Bevin tried to unseat McConnell in the 2014 Republican primary, and Beshear—a Democrat—is running against Bevin in the governor’s race this year. But when it comes to coal, they’re on the same page.

Beshear took over his predecessor’s legal fight to block the Clean Power Plan. McConnell marshaled states across the country to resist the rule, and this year — five weeks after acknowledging that human activities are changing the climate—declined to bring up for a vote a bill to keep the U.S. from pulling out of the international agreement to slow global warming. Bevin tapped a former coal executive to head the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet and pressed an electric utility earlier this year not to close a coal plant.

Newton, the Beshear spokesman, wrote in an email that the attorney general bases his policy decisions on what he believes is best for Kentuckians.

McConnell, Bevin, and Booth didn’t respond to requests for comment. But as recently as this month, McConnell called the Clean Power Plan a “misguided,” “job-killing” and ineffective approach to addressing climate change. Bevin has argued that such rules would suffocate businesses and wouldn’t help anyone. And in a 2013 interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, Booth said, “When we say there’s a war on coal, we’re sincere.”

The coal mining industry has sunk at least $2.2 million into state and federal Kentucky elections since 2012, according to data from the National Institute on Money in Politics. But these companies don’t need donations to get politicians on their side.

“In Kentucky, it’s more the perception,” said Erin Savage, a program manager for Appalachian Voices, an environmental group. “If you’re not a friend of coal, then you’re not going to get the votes.”

Despite the sector’s enduring political power, coal bankruptcies are mounting as competition from natural gas, solar and wind intensifies. That creates problems beyond job losses: Kentucky and states across the country haven’t required companies to set aside enough money to clean up mines when operations cease.

Mary Cromer, deputy director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, worries that the fallout from rising bankruptcies and idled mines could mean more sites that increase flood risks. Her team, which represents coal miners, their families and others in Central Appalachia pro bono, can’t keep up with the demand for help as it is, she said.

That’s because Kentucky law makes it hard for people to get legal assistance with damage caused by mine-worsened floods. Coal companies aren’t required to pay victims’ attorney fees—as they would be if they’d instead contaminated local drinking water—so that expense often comes out of any settlement or court-ordered payout. Too often, Cromer said, cases don’t make financial sense for a private attorney to take.

Harless Creek residents benefited from a perverse sort of luck: They were so numerous that they could seek help from the same lawyer and spread the impact of the fees between them. On top of that, they alleged that the flood damaged well water, not just their homes.

But that wasn’t the case for Laura Thacker and her husband, Elvis, when their property in another part of the county was damaged—twice. They live next to the Bevins Branch mine, owned by the Justice family.

Doug Tackett, head of Pike County’s emergency management division. Rachel Leven / Center for Public Integrity]

The state began negotiating with companies connected to the West Virginia governor and his relatives in 2014 to resolve hundreds of violations there and at other mines. In 2016, after that work was supposed to be completed, a flood destroyed the Thackers’ home. That same day, the state cited the mine for not meeting runoff control requirements. Similar flooding damaged the Thacker’s garage in 2018. The Justice companies blamed the incident on the rain, but the state pointed to the poor cleanup of the mine.

The settlements the Justice company offered the couple weren’t enough to cover the cost of rebuilding, Thacker said. But the lawyer she consulted warned that attorney fees would probably eat up whatever extra money they won if they went to trial. The Thackers had to replace their house with a smaller double-wide trailer. Their loan payment costs them $200 more a month. They couldn’t afford to move.

“People don’t understand when you go through a flood how fast everything can be taken away from you,” Thacker said. “We don’t have anything at all against coal. But … there’s rules and regulations that they need to follow.”

Mura, the Kentucky mine regulator spokesman, wrote in an email that the state is taking further action to ensure the Justice companies comply with their permit. Spokespeople for the companies and the West Virginia governor’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Spadaro, the former federal regulator, said state officials who don’t require mines to promptly fix problems put people at risk. Violations are common. Only 57 percent of Kentucky mines inspected from July 2017 to June 2018 fully complied with the law, according to the most recent federal evaluation. More than one in 10 permitted sites had infractions that created off-site impacts, the report said.

A spokesman for the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement put a positive spin on it, noting that the share of Kentucky mines out of compliance with the law was the lowest in a decade.

Spadaro, who investigated for West Virginia the notorious 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster, in which three coal-related dams in that state failed and killed 125 people, has a harsher perspective: “There’s not one mine that I have found in compliance.”

‘Say a prayer’

Doug Tackett, Pike County’s emergency management director, isn’t sure what to think about climate change. Sitting in his downtown Pikeville office in June, he explained that he regularly hears from the National Weather Service about weather cycles, not the planet’s warming. The rhetoric about climate change causes and solutions is confusing, too, he said.

“They blame it on things like fossil fuels and stuff like that. But I don’t think you’ll ever get away from fossil fuels,” said Tackett, surrounded by computers, a large radio console and a walkie-talkie that murmured continuously. “It keeps the economy and everything else moving.”

A little more than half the county’s residents believe climate change is happening and 44 percent say it’s mostly caused by human activity, a lower share than the nation as a whole, according to a 2019 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Communication. When politicians express doubt about climate science, that has an effect, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale’s program.

What Tackett is certain about: He’s never seen anything like the Harless Creek disaster.

It was one of two flash floods in Pike County that July night. In the other, rescue teams were able to navigate the waters to save people in 75 homes.

In Harless Creek, that wasn’t possible. Water that normally burbled a shallow 6 inches in the creek bed had become a 12-foot-deep monster that split a house in half and carried a couple down the hollow as they held on in terror. If responders went in, Tackett said, they would have been killed. He waited, feeling helpless, trying to anticipate what people would need when it was all over.

“Neighbors were trapped, and nobody could get to them,” he said. “You say a prayer and hope they’re OK.”

Afterward, Tackett’s team trained more swift-water rescue teams. And in flood-prone areas, the county has helped elevate some homes.

But preparation only goes so far. If another flood like Harless Creek happened, Tackett said, the rushing water would still keep rescuers out. It would destroy everything in its path. Again.

Whether people lived or died would come down to luck and how well they could fend for themselves.

Rachel Leven and Zach Goldstein reported this story for the Center for Public Integrity. Joe Yerardi with Public Integrity and Sydney Boles with Ohio Valley Resource contributed to this article. Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative newsroom in Washington, D.C.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-throws-hail-mary-pass-in-desperate-attempt-to-save-unpopular-ky-governor-from-defeat/

an 919

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/gop-incumbent-resorts-to-racism-in-close-governors-race/

Exactly one year before Kentuckians will decide whether to reelect Mitch McConnell, they face a governor’s election in which the incumbent, Republican Matt Bevin, faces a challenge from Democratic state Attorney General Andy Beshear.

According to Morning Consult, Bevin is the most unpopular governor in the nation. Campbell Robertson explained why.

He has tangled with journalists, union representatives and Democrats, but he has been startlingly harsh on less typical targets — like public school teachers. After thousands of educators walked out last year in protest of budget cuts and proposed changes to teacher pensions, Mr. Bevin accused some who picketed a state senator’s business of having a “thug mentality” and called others “selfish” and “ignorant.” He blamed those involved in the walkouts for hypothetical poisonings and sexual assaults as well as a very real shooting.

Quite the charmer, isn’t he?

The state of Kentucky shares some things in common with its neighbor, West Virginia. The population is more than 80 percent white, and the Republicanization of southern states that followed the passage of civil rights legislation is not quite complete.

The current era of all-or-nothing partisanship is an awkward fit for Kentucky. It would be easy to take the state these days for an unquestioned stronghold for Republicans, given their supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature and the fact that Republicans hold all but one of the state’s seats in Congress.

But the thoroughness of the Republican takeover was recent; registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans in the state and in even some of the strongest pro-Trump counties, the rural county courthouses remain all-Democrat shops. As in many Southern, or at least Southern-adjacent, states, the Democratic label is fine for the county clerk but quickly loses its luster the higher the elected office.

Those are the dynamics that lead to Democratic statewide officeholders like Senator Joe Manchin. Bob Moser described their politics as “business-friendly centrism, with heavy doses of gunfire and Jesus.” From that perspective, Beshear (son of Steve Beshear, Bevin’s predecessor) is a flaming liberal who acknowledges the reality of climate change, and supports Obamacare, marriage equality, a woman’s right to chose, red flag laws, and medical marijuana legalization. It will come as no surprise, however, that his main issue is support for teachers and public education.

In announcing his candidacy for Kentucky governor Monday, Attorney General Andy Beshear said he wants to honor teacher pensions and break away from the current culture of “bullying” in Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration.

With educator Jacqueline Coleman as his running mate, Beshear, a Democrat, is the first candidate of either party to announce a bid for governor in 2019…

“Governors have a moral responsibility to act with decency, to do their best to provide good-paying jobs and to provide justice to all Kentuckians,” Beshear said Monday in Louisville. “… We will move forward, and these days of bullying, name calling, and my-way-or-the-highway will be left in the past.”

At this point, there hasn’t been much polling in this race, but it appears to be close. Bevin might have signaled that he’s worried with the release of this television ad....

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/gop-incumbent-resorts-to-racism-in-close-governors-race/

According to Morning Consult, Bevin is the most unpopular governor in the nation. Campbell Robertson explained why.

He has tangled with journalists, union representatives and Democrats, but he has been startlingly harsh on less typical targets — like public school teachers. After thousands of educators walked out last year in protest of budget cuts and proposed changes to teacher pensions, Mr. Bevin accused some who picketed a state senator’s business of having a “thug mentality” and called others “selfish” and “ignorant.” He blamed those involved in the walkouts for hypothetical poisonings and sexual assaults as well as a very real shooting.

Quite the charmer, isn’t he?

The current era of all-or-nothing partisanship is an awkward fit for Kentucky. It would be easy to take the state these days for an unquestioned stronghold for Republicans, given their supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature and the fact that Republicans hold all but one of the state’s seats in Congress.

But the thoroughness of the Republican takeover was recent; registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans in the state and in even some of the strongest pro-Trump counties, the rural county courthouses remain all-Democrat shops. As in many Southern, or at least Southern-adjacent, states, the Democratic label is fine for the county clerk but quickly loses its luster the higher the elected office.

In announcing his candidacy for Kentucky governor Monday, Attorney General Andy Beshear said he wants to honor teacher pensions and break away from the current culture of “bullying” in Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration.

With educator Jacqueline Coleman as his running mate, Beshear, a Democrat, is the first candidate of either party to announce a bid for governor in 2019…

“Governors have a moral responsibility to act with decency, to do their best to provide good-paying jobs and to provide justice to all Kentuckians,” Beshear said Monday in Louisville. “… We will move forward, and these days of bullying, name calling, and my-way-or-the-highway will be left in the past.”

At this point, there hasn’t been much polling in this race, but it appears to be close. Bevin might have signaled that he’s worried with the release of this television ad....

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/mitch-mcconnell-screwed-over-kentucky-miners-to-fund-russia-linked-aluminum-

no lnx

Here’s how Mitch McConnell screwed over Kentucky miners to fund Russia-linked aluminum plant: report

Written by Travis Gettys / Raw Story September 10, 2019

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a measure that would have funded pensions and health care for coal miners in his home state of Kentucky, not long after steering almost the same Treasury Department funds to an aluminum plant linked to a Russian oligarch.

The Kentucky Republican doesn’t like the “Moscow Mitch” nickname that’s been stuck to him, but these latest revelations might make it difficult to shed, reported The Daily Beast.

McConell voted in January to lift sanctions on Rusal, a Russian aluminum company formerly headed by Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, and just days after the Treasury Department officially de-listed the company — it announced a $200 million investment in an aluminum plant in northeastern Kentucky.

Democrats have raised questions about how much McConnell knew about the investment before he voted to lift sanctions, but a Braidy Industries spokesperson told The Daily Beast the company never lobbied Congress about sanctions, and said no employee or director of the company ever spoke to McConell about Rusal, the only outside investor in the plant.

But, the website reported, McConnell’s connection to the Rusal-Braidy deal is deeper than previously understood.

While Rusal was lobbying the Trump administration to remove sanctions, the Kentucky Republican was pushing for federal funds to be used to help build the Braidy plant near Ashland, back in his home state.

The federal government has been giving Appalachian states millions of dollars since 2016 to help clean up abandoned coal mining land, and to assist in economic development there.

But McConnell and other Kentucky lawmakers, including Rep. Harold Rogers (R-KY), helped steer $4 million away from sewer and road repair in October 2018 to preparing for construction on the aluminum plant.

It’s not clear when Braidy Industries and Rusal began, but two sources with direct knowledge told The Daily Beast that McConnell was instrumental in helping them secure the federal funding that had been earmarked for community development in his state.

McConnell then blocked a bill sponsored by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that would have pumped $4 million federal money into miner pensions.

The Treasury Department collects fees from coal companies each year that are then distributed to the Department of the Interior to clean up abandoned mines and improve the communities they’ve left behind.

McConnell argued that he wanted a more permanent fix to the pensions when he blocked Manchin’s bill, but he seemingly raided $4 million the Treasury fund to help start construction on the aluminum plant.

The Senate majority leader’s office defended the move, saying pensions should be addressed through a broader bipartisan measure, but coal miners are furious.

“We’re not ever going to quit until they give us what we’ve earned. We’re not going to quit until we get it,” said Dwayne Thompson, a retired Peabody Energy coal miner from Kentucky. “I hope Senator McConnell gets that. If he supports us, we will support him.”

Some miners believe McConnell blocked the pension funding because some union members had supported his 2014 opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, and one union leader said Congress has been stalling on assistance to them for years.

“Coal miners understand something — when people tell us ‘we’re going to pass legislation’… we don’t believe it,” said Cecil Roberts, president of the UWMA. “Anyone who understands how Congress works knows that that’s a fight.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/west-virginia-bets-big-on-plastics-and-the-backing-of-trumps-administration/

no lnx

West Virginia’s industrial might has faded, but as 2020 approaches, the state has two resources that could be crucial to President Donald Trump as he seeks reelection and tries to make good on his pledge of “American energy dominance” — Republican votes and abundant natural gas.

It was a stretch of rural counties along the Ohio River in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania that form the largest natural gas field in the world and helped Trump win the states in 2016.

West Virginia’s elected leaders see the vast reserves as a path to renewed political and economic relevance for the Mountain State, which they envision rivaling the Gulf Coast as a center for processing natural gas and producing plastics.

And to make that a reality, the state’s top officials have lined up behind a plan to spend as much as $10 billion to build a mammoth underground storage facility — big enough to hold the U.S. Capitol complex, or 10 million barrels of the liquid byproducts used in plastics manufacturing.

By providing a sizable and stable storehouse for ethane and other so-called gas liquids, the facility would, its proponents say, encourage the expansion of a chemical production corridor that is emerging along the upper Ohio River and would help bring thousands of jobs to a region that has seen its industrial moorings slip away over the past two generations.

The prospect of an energy jobs bonanza in a politically vital state stirred the interest of the White House. A senior Energy Department manager has been assigned to work on the project, known as the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. In April, the president issued an executive order on energy that encouraged “opportunities, through the federal government or otherwise, to promote economic growth of the Appalachian region, including growth of petrochemical and other industries.” And the president’s newest budget proposal includes funds to study the region’s gas-related industrial potential.

But a ProPublica examination has found that the proposed storage facility would be far larger than the region could support and that questions about its cost, its viability and its environmental risks have been overshadowed by a public relations strategy heavy on the politics of jobs and light on the economics of energy policy.

“The scale of the Appalachian hub is out of line with what industry needs or will require in the region,” said Michael Tritt, president of Lane Power and Energy Solutions, a Houston-based construction company that designs and builds energy storage caverns.

The Trump administration’s relations with China and Russia are adding to the questions about the hub. China had agreed to invest tens of billions of dollars in West Virginia’s natural gas industry but now is embroiled in a trade war with Trump. And American Ethane, a Houston-based company financed by three Russian businessmen, has signed 20-year contracts to send ethane produced in the United States to China, which could raise prices and weaken demand for the facility proposed for West Virginia.

Far from being dissuaded, state leaders, led by Sen. Joe Manchin III, are pressing forward, talking up the project and perhaps most significantly trying to secure a $1.9 billion federal loan guarantee that could attract billions of dollars in private investment.

If the hub’s developers succeed, taxpayers could be on the hook for a big piece of any failure. The federal loan guarantee sought for the hub is nearly four times as large as a guarantee awarded more than a decade ago to Solyndra, the California solar firm that collapsed in 2011. “This whole project is a gamble,” said Dustin White, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, an environmental group in Huntington, West Virginia. “Billions of dollars could go up in smoke. We just need to stop it now.”

Banks, though, would be in line for tens of millions of dollars in finance fees. “If that project gets a federal loan guarantee, banks will be lining up 10 deep,” said James Cutler, an energy industry investor and veteran chemical plant builder from Houston. “Anybody who gets involved gets 1.5 to 2% in fees just for getting the deals together. If you have a $4 billion, $5 billion project, that’s $80 million, $100 million.”

Other big winners could be Manchin, a Democrat, and Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican. The energy, construction and labor sectors contributed $841,591 to Manchin’s 2018 election campaign. Energy, finance, construction and labor contributed $169,600 to Justice’s 2016 campaign, according to Vote Smart, which tracks election campaign financing.

In an interview, Manchin said that he is looking to Energy Secretary Rick Perry for help in “streamlining” the loan review and that he is urging the Treasury Department to invoke national security concerns to halt American Ethane’s export plans.

John Houghtaling, the chief executive of American Ethane, said Manchin is wrong. “The national security threat is not exporting ethane to China,” Houghtaling said in an interview. “They need the gas. If they don’t get it from us they’ll get it from Russia and Qatar, people who don’t like us so much.”

Manchin, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the federal government has to intervene. If it doesn’t step in, the project is doomed, he said. “You can write off the storage hub for sure. You can write off everything.”

From its start where two tributaries meet at a wedge of parkland in Pittsburgh, the Ohio River surges north, then south, then west past high banks that have been the stage of every era of American industrial development. Thousands of feet below the river are thick layers of salt and seams of shale and hard rock that encompass eons of geological evolution.

Few regions of the country have been endowed with such a rich repository of water, land and minerals, or have seen natural resources so grossly mismanaged, than the three states and 50 counties along the first 180 miles of the Ohio. Forests fell to the mills that provided the first burst of manufacturing wealth in the 18th century and that produced gaping tracts that poured great gouts of mud into the river.

The nation’s first petrochemical complex emerged in the 1920s along the Kanawha River in Charleston, West Virginia, to tap salt caverns for brine to make chlorine. The air and water discharges from the plants sickened people and poisoned the river, an Ohio tributary.

Coal from mines in the three states fueled a vast metals manufacturing sector in the mid-20th century and generated wages and prosperity never seen before. When the mills shut down near the century’s end, they left miles of toxic contamination and a trail of industrial desolation.

In the late 20th century, state officials approved new strip mining practices that allowed companies to blast away at the summits of West Virginia mountains to gain easier access to coal seams. So-called mountaintop removal mining buried streams with rubble, pushed towns aside and, because of increased production efficiencies, accelerated the drain of coal mining jobs.

Brian Anderson, a chemical engineer who is a West Virginia native and grandson of a coal miner, understands this frustrating history. In 2006, he joined West Virginia University’s faculty.

It was a striking year in the history of American energy development. New technology was starting to transform the oil and gas industry by giving developers the capacity to tap deep shale reserves around the country that were long known to contain gas and oil but were impractical to develop.

Two of those fuel-soaked shale formations, the Marcellus and the Utica, lie deep below the upper Ohio region. Directional drilling allowed developers to reach the shale, then turn the drill bit axis from perpendicular to longitudinal and lay pipes for a mile, sometimes two, through the thick shale seams. Hydraulic fracturing gave developers the capacity to pump, under ultrahigh pressure, millions of gallons of water mixed with chemicals and sand into wells to fracture the rock so that oil and gas would flow out.

The new production techniques solved the challenge that had bedeviled presidents from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush to make America “energy independent.” Because of directional drilling and hydrofracking, the U.S. is pumping a record 12 million barrels of oil a day, more than twice the production from a decade ago, and producing 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas annually, more than any other country.

The wells are also yielding vast amounts of gas liquids, especially ethane, the basic feedstock for producing ethylene and polyethylene, which are used to manufacture plastic.

In Morgantown, Anderson was emerging as one of the university’s young stars, in large part because he had big ideas about the state’s energy reserves and its economy. He began talking about a hub mined from deep geologic salt or rock formations that would be capable of storing millions of barrels of natural gas liquids.

The concept has a working model in Mont Belvieu, Texas, where a hub that is capable of storing 240 million barrels of gas liquids in deep salt caverns has operated for nearly 70 years and is an important factor in the Gulf Coast’s development as the nation’s center of chemical manufacturing.

Anderson argued that such a hub would be the essential ingredient in a formula that West Virginia consistently failed to get right: how to generate durable prosperity and good jobs from an abundant homegrown resource — with, he insisted, scant harm to the environment. Without the hub, Anderson said, West Virginia would end up producing the raw materials to generate another state’s prosperity.

In 2014, Anderson established the West Virginia University Energy Institute, which he positioned as a platform to advance the hub idea.

The following year, the governors of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia formed the Tri-State Shale Coalition to pursue chemical manufacturing along the upper Ohio. The Appalachian Storage Hub was among the coalition’s top priorities.

It wasn’t until 2016, though, that the hub idea drew serious attention in Washington. That June, Shell announced it would build a plant in Monaca, Pennsylvania, 30 miles downriver from Pittsburgh, to convert 105,000 barrels of ethane a day to polyethylene for plastics manufacturing. The Energy Institute quickly assembled a team of geologists to study suitable deep salt and rock formations to build the storage hub.

Anderson and other leaders of West Virginia University opened negotiations with the Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research and Innovation Center, a nonprofit research firm in Charleston, to form the Appalachia Development Group, a partnership to develop the hub.

At a field hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, held in Morgantown in August 2016, Anderson testified that “developing storage and transportation infrastructure is a critical pathway to developing the industry in the region.”

That November, Trump was elected. West Virginia’s two senators, Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, and Justice began opening pathways to secure the administration’s support.

With funding from Congress, the Energy Department launched a study of the feasibility of establishing an ethane storage and distribution hub in the upper Ohio region. Perry told a House committee the hub would do more than serve the region’s economic interests.

Citing damage from Hurricane Harvey, which disrupted the Gulf Coast chemical industry in 2017, Perry said that establishing another petrochemical hub outside vulnerable Louisiana and Texas “is a national security issue.”

“To develop that in another region of this country, the Appalachian basin, makes sense because you’re sitting on top of Marcellus and Utica, which are prolific gas fields,” Perry told the committee during the March 2018 hearing.

In November 2018, Perry appointed Anderson director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the federal government’s leading fossil energy research center. The following month, Perry’s department released its Appalachian hub study. The authors found that the hub “could provide benefits to the broader petrochemical and plastics industries” because ethane production in the upper Ohio region would increase to 640,000 barrels a day by 2025, about a third of expected national production, and almost triple the ethane production in 2017.

Manchin, meanwhile, guided the Appalachia Development Group to the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which encourages innovative clean-energy technology by guaranteeing loans to develop and implement such projects.

The Appalachian Development Group is seeking a $1.9 billion guarantee, one of the largest ever considered by the federal government. Armed with favorable studies from the Energy Institute and American Chemistry Council, the Appalachian group cleared the first round of the application. But the next round presents a much bigger test.

Applicants are required to meet hundreds of specific design, planning, engineering, construction, environmental and finance criteria. The process typically takes years and costs tens of millions of dollars.

The Appalachian group also needs to sign contracts with companies that would use the hub, and it must raise roughly $1.4 billion more in private capital to satisfy the loan office’s financing requirements. Joe Bozada, the Appalachia Development Group’s chief financial officer, declined to discuss the group’s fundraising effort.

The most expensive project backed by the Loan Programs Office is $12 billion in guarantees for a new nuclear plant in Georgia that is three years overdue and projected to cost almost $30 billion — more than twice the initial price tag. And its most prominent loss was the $535 million guarantee, awarded in 2009, to finance the development of new electricity-generating panels manufactured by Solyndra, which collapsed two years later.

With its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the Loan Programs Office has rarely been a source of federal financing for fossil energy projects, such as the hub.

Some engineers who work in the industry say that the Appalachia hub does not appear to meet two basic criteria for the clean energy loan guarantee. It is not a one-of-a-kind project, nor is it especially innovative, the engineers say. Gas liquids storage hubs are common along the Gulf Coast, and another big one operates in Conway, Kansas.

“There’s nothing new about building and operating liquids storage caverns. They operate all over the country,” said Tritt, of Lane Power and Energy Solutions.

Steve Hedrick, the chief executive of the Appalachia Development Group, declined requests for an interview. Brian Mahar, an Energy Department spokesman, said his agency does not comment on loan applicants or applications.

The questions facing the Appalachian hub’s developer and government supporters underscore the financial and political challenges of such a vast undertaking.

Megaprojects typically take decades to design, finance and build. In this century, new refineries, big dams, huge mines and oil and gas pipelines come online under much different market and environmental conditions than when they were conceived. Some encounter ecological turmoil — floods, storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires — and political turbulence so severe that they don’t get started, are seriously delayed or fail midway through construction. The $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline to transport oil from Canada to Kansas is years overdue and facing significant public resistance along its route across the Great Plains. The cost and difficulty of building the nuclear Plant Vogtle in Georgia is increasing so much that its completion is in doubt.

Such pressure can fracture alliances crucial to development. Last year, West Virginia University and the state government broke with Hedrick and the Appalachia Development Group.

James Wood, interim director of the Energy Institute, who took over after Anderson’s departure, said the university and Hedrick were to share the corporate leadership and management of Appalachia Development Group. But when Hedrick filed the incorporation papers in Delaware in July 2017, he named himself the chief executive and did not list any university official as an officer. The incorporation papers said the Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research and Innovation Center, known as MATRIC, was the company’s sole owner and would be controlled by Hedrick, its chief executive.

“I was shocked when I learned that,” said Wood.

West Virginia University had hired a consultant to prepare documents for the Part I application and had paid the filing fee. After the Part I application was filed with the Energy Department, Hedrick did not reimburse the university, Wood said.

The falling out with the governor occurred after Hedrick joined the West Virginia trade delegation that traveled to Beijing in 2017 to participate in the signing ceremony for a $83.7 billion memorandum of understanding between China Energy and the state. Hedrick spent another day in China meeting with companies to raise $100 million to help finance the hub. The governor publicly criticized Hedrick for promoting his company on a state-sponsored trip and required him to reimburse the state for $23,000 in travel expenses.

And the deal between American Ethane and China could affect the storage hub’s prospects. Houghtaling, the company’s chief executive, said the agreements call for supplying 350,000 barrels of ethane a day to Chinese chemical makers from a new terminal in Beaumont, Texas. But the export contracts and the terminal are on hold because of the U.S.-China trade war.

Manchinsaid he is taking his protest of the export agreements to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, an interagency group overseen by the Department of Treasury and charged with reviewing transactions involving foreign investment that could affect national security. A Treasury spokesman said the department does not comment on specific CFIUS cases.

The uncertainty and turmoil has consequences for the upper Ohio River chemical industry and the storage hub. PTT Global, a Thai-South Korean consortium, has delayed for more than a year its decision to build a $10 billion chemical plant along the river in Shadyside, Ohio.

Managers for Royal Dutch Shell, which is constructing a $10 billion chemical plant downriver from Pittsburgh, said in an interview that they had no interest in gas liquids storage or the federally financed hub.

Industrial Info Resources, a Houston consulting firm that tracks construction projects around the world, said it has identified three other abandoned proposals for ethane processing plants along the upper Ohio.

“It’s a difficult place to build a plant and to operate,” said James Cutler, the chemical plant builder from Houston who proposed two of the plants. “You have to make a lot of assumptions about the gas market, the plastics market, production and supply. There’s considerable risk that investors aren’t willing to take.”

And the need is uncertain, he said. “Do you need ethane storage to build a world-scale plant? The answer is no. Does it help? It could.”

Two companies — Energy Storage Ventures, a Colorado-based company backed by Goldman Sachs, and Marathon Pipeline, a unit of Marathon Oil — are cautiously examining the potential to establish much smaller, privately financed gas liquids storage facilities across the river in Ohio. “We’d like to believe there is local demand for 2 million to 3 million barrels of storage in the Appalachian region,” said David Hooker, president of Energy Storage Ventures. “We question the need for 10-plus million barrels based on what exists today or the foreseeable future.”

“There are going to be two or three storage locations that support development and pipeline operations in that region. They all will be smaller and done by the private sector,” Tritt added. “It takes years to get through that federal loan guarantee process. By then the private locations will be started. I don’t see any reason for the government to be involved. I don’t see a role for the government in this.”

Do you have access to information about ethane and gas production that should be public? Email keithhschneider@gmail.com. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

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619 chao fast lane

basically earmarks revival trms

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/full-fledged-banana-republic-ethics-experts-sound-the-alarm-after-transportation-secretary-chao-secures-millions-for-projects-in-mcconnells-state/

rand paul ltr trump putin

Russia to deliver a secret letter from Trump last year. Last week Russian Company, Rusal, invested in a 200 million dollar company in Paul's home state of Kentucky! #PutinsGOP. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/04/15/business/rusal-russia-kentucky-aluminum-mill/index.html …

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/this-trump-loving-gop-governor-is-in-danger-of-losing-re-election-and-the-white-house-is-worried-report/

Three gubernatorial races are scheduled to take place in 2019, but the one that might have President Donald Trump most worried is Kentucky.

According to Politico, White House officials are deeply worried about the re-election prospects of Trump-loving GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, who polls as the least popular governor in America. His approval ratings in recent months have been stuck in the low 30s.

Trump has gradually been ramping up efforts to help Bevin’s campaign. But the president’s allies are worried that if Trump stakes his political capital on rescuing Bevin, only for him to lose, it will damage the president’s credibility with Republican candidates and loosen his grip on the party.

Despite Kentucky’s conservative lean, partisan control of the state has historically been heterogeneous. Indeed, Bevin is the first GOP governor to ever preside over unified Republican control of the state legislature — and it has been working out horribly for him.

Bevin’s term has been plagued by faction fighting, and his repeated efforts to gut the state educational system has earned him wrath from educators and triggered a string of teacher strikes and sickouts. Bevin has responded with a war of words,blaming striking teachers for child sexual assault and accidental shootings.

Democrats lining up to take on Bevin include state attorney general Andy Beshear, who is currently suing to block Bevin’s war on teachers; Rocky Adkins, the state House Minority Leader; and former state auditor Adam Edelen. Bevin also faces a primary challenge from GOP state Rep. Robert Goforth.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-deep-does-the-russia-collusion-go-to-mcconnell/

On this Mueller collusion report day,it’s worth remembering the lengths to which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went to cover up what he knew before the election. The Russians were working to elect Donald Trump, and American intelligence agencies knew it. They told McConnell that. He threatened them with all-out political warfare if they tried to make that information public.

In the report, Mueller details Paul Manafort, then Trump campaign manager, instructing his deputy Rick Gates to get internal polling information from battleground states to Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch and friend of Putin, through go-between Konstantin Kilimnik. “Manafort expected Kilimnik to share that information with others in Ukraine and with Deripaska,” Mueller found. And Gates did it.

So what does this have to do with McConnell? Good question. Fast forward to January of this year, when Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer forced a vote in the Senate on Trump’s Treasury Department’s decision to lift sanctions on companies linked to—you got it—Oleg Deripaska. One of those companies is aluminum manufacturing giant Rusal. The vote failed, with McConnell voting no.

Fast forward again to this week, and this: “Russian aluminum giant Rusal spent most of last year under US sanctions. Now it’s pumping $200 million into a new project in Kentucky.” Home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. What a shock, huh? By the way, Rusal is co-owned by Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard (Len) Blavatnik, who donated $2.5 million to McConnell’s GOP Senate Leadership Fund through two of his holding companies during the 2016 campaign and a further $1 million in 2017.

Meanwhile, McConnell launched his re-election campaign Thursday morning, conveniently just as Attorney General William Barr was frantically trying to spin the upcoming disaster of the Mueller report release away. The cornerstone of his announcement was that he’s introducing legislation to raise the age for buying tobacco products to 21. As of now, Kentucky reporter Joe Sonka has tweeted that McConnell hasn’t been asked about the report and the new big investment from Russia in his state.

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desmog

Near the end of 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) hired the leading promoter within academia of a massive and multi-faceted petrochemical complex proposed for West Virginia. A month later, the agency issued a report favoring the construction of such a complex.

On November 9, the Energy Department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) named as its new director former West Virginia University Professor Brian Anderson.

NETL, which spearheads federal energy-related research and development (R&D) efforts, is currently deciding whether to grant $1.9 billion in R&D money toward building out the proposed petrochemical complex, known as the Appalachian Storage Hub.

The storage hub, say its proponents, will compete with the Gulf Coast-based petrochemical hub of Mont Belvieu and perhaps even have a pricing index for traders.

Those alarmed by the prospect of the hub point to the fact that towns along the Gulf of Mexico have higher rates of cancer. Some call that dense stretch of petroleum refineries and petrochemical plants near the Gulf the “Petrochemical Corridor,” while locals call it “Cancer Alley.”

Critics also say the project could further drive up demand for hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — of natural gas within the nearby Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale basins.

As DeSmog has reported in an ongoing investigative series titled “Fracking for Plastics,” the Appalachian hub is just one piece of a broader plan for the petrochemical industry's ambitions to transform the Appalachian region into a cutting-edge, fossil-fueled storage and refining epicenter. That could spell serious consequences for worsening the impacts of climate change.

Report to Congress

Just a few short weeks after announcing Anderson's hiring, the Energy Department published a report titled, “Report to Congress: Ethane Storage and Distribution Hub in the United States,” and mandated by the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill of 2017.

“The Department is directed to issue a report on the feasibility of establishing an ethane storage and distribution hub in the United States, given the increased production of natural gas liquids (NGLs) from shale developments and recognizing that ethane is the largest component of those NGLs,” the 2017 bill reads. “The report should examine potential locations, economic feasibility, economic benefits, geologic storage capabilities, above ground storage capabilities, infrastructure needs, and benefits to energy security.”

Moving NETL’s Needle

Anderson, during his tenure at West Virginia University, founded and headed the school’s Energy Institute. In the DOE press release announcing his new position with NETL, he did not mention his past promotion of the petrochemical hub — which in large part is represented by an $83 billion partnership between West Virginia and China — though the release does call out his involvement in “pav[ing] the pathway” for a partnership between the two countries.

“I am honored and humbled at the opportunity to serve as the director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL),” said Anderson. “The work that is being conducted at NETL is critical to advancing technologies that will transform the use and production of our nation’s vast coal, natural gas, and oil resources to protect our environment and enhance our nation’s energy security. I look forward to working with the talented and dedicated team at NETL to continue the lab’s efforts as the gold standard in advancing energy research and development.”

While Anderson did not mention his ties to the proposed petrochemical complex — which include serving as a former executive for the Appalachian Development Group, the firm which applied for the $1.9 billion Energy Department grant his office is now considering — he did receive questions about his work promoting the hub from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“As the Appalachian storage hub keeps moving forward,” he told the newspaper, “I’m certainly replaceable. It’s something that I still support, but I’m not involved in any of that anymore.”

But just a month after beginning his federal job, Anderson nearly reneged on his statement about removing himself from involvement.

[doc]

A preliminary schedule for the January 10, 2019 West Virginia Energy Infrastructure Summit lists him as one of the speakers, slotted to speak about energy infrastructure immediately after Steve Hedrick, CEO of the Appalachian Development Group.

Hedrick, who spoke at the forum about the petrochemical hub, is currently under investigation by a special counsel, former U.S. Attorney Mike Carey. West Virginia Governor Jim Justice hired Carey to investigate Hedrick’s potential use of state funds when he joined an official delegation to China. The investigation will probe whether he used the trip as a means of enriching himself and his business.

Ultimately, Anderson did not speak at the January event and did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

DOE spokeswoman Kelly Love told DeSmog that the agency did a comprehensive background check and cleared Anderson, though he will also recuse himself from issues in which he carries a conflict of interest.

“The Department follows all federal laws and ethics requirements regarding onboarding new employees,” explained Love. “The employee in question has been counseled regarding recusal from matters relating to past employers.”

Report Unveiled to Shadow Lobby

The DOE’s report touting the potential for a fossil-fueled petrochemical hub in Appalachia was unfurled where else but in the belly of the beast of the oil and gas industry. That is, at the annual meeting in Washington, D.C., for the National Petroleum Council, a body overseen by the Energy Department and created in 1946 under President Harry Truman.

The Petroleum Council, in essence, acts as a collective of oil and gas industry executives who distill their priorities during meetings in Washington alongside top Energy Department officials. The council's office sits on K Street, the heart of lobbying within the nation’s capital. One of the most recent examples of its work, produced during the Obama era, was a report calling for greenlighting offshore drilling in the Arctic.

“There is an incredible opportunity to establish an ethane storage and distribution hub in the Appalachian region and build a robust petrochemical industry in Appalachia,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said at the National Petroleum Council meeting whileintroducing the report on the potential petrochemical hub.

“As our report shows, there is sufficient global need, and enough regional resources, to help the U.S. gain a significant share of the global petrochemical market. The Trump administration would also support an Appalachia hub to strengthen our energy and manufacturing security by increasing our geographic production diversity."

[vid]

The Energy Department report explicitly points to the prospective Appalachian petrochemical hub as a complement to the one along the Gulf Coast.

“[M]arket analysis from the report emphasizes that the development of an Appalachian hub may offer a competitive advantage for the U.S. to gain global petrochemical market share while not being in conflict with Gulf Coast expansion,” explains the press release outlining the paper. “The report explains that a new Appalachian hub would enhance the geographic diversity of the vital U.S. petrochemical industrial sector, supporting U.S. economic security.”

While the report outlines the broad contours of a potential large-scale petrochemical storage and refining market — refining which would transpire at what the industry calls “cracking” plants — some West Virginia and Ohio congressional delegates have called for additional studies to further detail what such a build-out would look like.

These calls have come through the sponsorship and introduction of the Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act. The bill, which has yet to move far beyond the introduction phase, has received federal lobbying support from Shell and the American Chemistry Council, the former of which is building a major cracking facility to produce plastics in Pennsylvania and the latter is a collective of oil, gas, and petrochemical companies using their considerable lobbying prowess to push for the hub's creation.

The day that the DOE released its report, the American Chemistry Council released a glowing press statement about its contents.

“We welcome DOE’s report, which affirms that the Appalachian region could become a major petrochemical and plastic resin-producing zone,” said the American Chemistry Council in its press release. “Proximity to a world-class supply of feedstocks and to the manufacturing markets of the Midwest and East Coast have already led several companies to announce investment projects, and there is potential for a great deal more. It’s an exciting opportunity for the region and our nation.”

Deal Proceeds, Critics Decry

When President Donald Trump first launched the ongoing trade war against China, some observers thought the impasse might lead to the demise of the storage hub. Those predictions, however, have not yet come to pass and Chinese powerbrokers have affirmed that the deal lives on.

“We and the West Virginia government, and other related companies, have always been extremely aggressive in pushing forward this project,” said Ling Wen, president and CEO of the state-owned company China Energy Investment, at a media briefing on the company’s earnings, according to the business publication S&P Global.

Though the billions of dollars in capital needed to create a petrochemical hub in Appalachia have yet to finalize, the Appalachian Development Group also has continued to march forward on the project. In August 2018, the company signed a $3.4 billion deal with the engineering firm Parsons Corporation to form a partnership and engineer the hub.

“Parsons is honored to have been selected by ADG [the Appalachian Development Group] as a partner on this critically important project that will ultimately support the economic and energy security needs of so many communities and citizens, including economic revitalization of the Ohio River Valley states,” Carey Smith, president of Parsons’ federal business unit, said in a press release about the deal.

Not everyone remains pleased with these developments. One such entity is Food and Water Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group with chapters across the country, which opposes fracking and the creation of the Appalachian Development Hub.

“The proposed storage complex may be a profit bonanza for industry, but it is a pollution pitfall for communities and ecosystems of the Appalachian basin,” Food and Water Watch wrote in a September 2018 report titled “Another Petrochemical Sacrifice Zone.” “Converting the region into the second largest concentration of plastics and chemical manufacturing outside the highly polluted Gulf Coast will compound the Tri-State area’s already substantial exposure to industrial toxic emissions, while increasing plastic materials that largely end up polluting the earth’s oceans.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/a-federal-judge-just-struck-a-blow-to-the-trump-administrations-cruel-plot-to-gut-medicaid/

On Wednesday, a federal judge dealt a massive blow to one of the Trump administration’s pet projects.

Washington, D.C. District Court judge James Boasberg struck down work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas, ruling that the waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar were not valid because work requirements do not further the Medicaid Act’s mission of improving public health.

The rules differ in some ways, but both broadly require certain Medicaid recipients to complete a minimum number of work or community service hours each month and provide proof to the state.

Kentucky’s work requirement, known as Kentucky HEALTH, was the first to be approved by the Trump administration but was struck down last year by the same judge, and the newly revised rules were scheduled to take effect on April 1. Arkansas has already implemented its work requirement system, known as Arkansas Works, with disastrous consequences — over 18,000 people in the state have lost Medicaid coverage, many of whom actually were working but couldn’t figure out how to meet the state’s confusing reporting requirements, especially those in rural areas who don’t have easy access to the internet.

Boasberg criticized Arkansas for doing virtually nothing to help Medicaid recipients understand and comply with the new work requirement, saying “the State’s outreach efforts may well be falling severely short.” He further criticized Kentucky, which argued that their work requirement does further the mission of expanding health coverage because Gov. Matt Bevin intended to cancel Medicaid expansion entirely if he didn’t get his way: “The Court cannot concur that … states are so armed to refashion the program Congress designed in any way they choose.”

Several other Republican-controlled states are currently seeking approval for similar work requirement programs.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state program — both Congress and the states provide funding, and the states are in charge of administering the program within their borders. The Medicaid Act sets strict guidelines about how the program can be run, but the Department of Health and Human Services can approve what are called “Section 1115” waivers if a state has a custom-designed plan that would promote health and coverage beyond what traditional Medicaid does. The Trump administration is trying to flip this on its head, encouraging states to apply for waivers that will lead to fewer people being covered.

Boasberg’s ruling holds that states cannot use Section 1115 waivers in this manner. “That provision of the Act does not turn the comprehensive Medicaid program into a buffet for states,” he wrote.

Medicaid work requirements are a particular passion of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. She has claimed that denying low-income people health coverage is actually good for them, insisting that “it is not compassionate to trap people on government programs or create greater dependency on public assistance.” She has also claimed that work requirements do further the mission of Medicaid, pointing to studies that show people with jobs tend to be healthier (when in reality the correlation is probably the other way around.)

Arkansas and Kentucky were early adopters of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which made the program available to people up to 138 percent of the poverty line. The Affordable Care Act originally required states to expand Medicaid, but a Supreme Court ruling allowed states to decide whether they wanted to or not. Republicans in these states are now intent on chipping away at this progress, and work requirements are one way the Trump administration is encouraging them to do it.

For now, that effort has hit a roadblock.

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LAST AIRED FEBRUARY 17, 2019

After Coal

Author and documentary filmmaker Tom Hansell talked about After Coal: Stories of Survival in Appalachia and Wales in which he reported on coal communities in central Appalachia and South…

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https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/01/court-packing-coal-country

If a pending bill passes in West Virginia, Republican Gov. Jim Justice — a billionaire former coal company executive — will appoint 82 percent of the state's appellate judiciary in just his first term. The bill, which would create a new appeals court, is likely to pass the state Senate, but the state House declined to take up a similar bill last year. West Virginia's five-member Supreme Court of Appeals, as the high court is known, is currently its only appellate court.

In the last few months, Justice has appointed replacements for three Supreme Court justices who resigned in the wake of a scandal involving lavish renovations and overspending. Two former justices face criminal charges, and another resigned in the wake of the state legislature's impeachment of the entire high court.

The impeachment trials were halted for violating the separation of powers by a substitute state Supreme Court assembled due to the justices' conflict of interest. The substitute court criticized the impeachment process as "a rush to judgment to get to a certain point without following all of the necessary rules." By that point, three seats had already been vacated. Justice appointed a majority of the court in the span of a few months.

The legislature is now considering a bill to create an Intermediate Court of Appeals, and it would allow Justice to appoint all six members of the court, which would be divided into two districts. If the bill passes, the governor will have appointed nine of the 11 judges on the state's appellate judiciary.

This radical re-shaping of West Virginia's judiciary is happening as the state's high court hears a lawsuit over noise and air pollution from fracking, as well as other oil and gas cases. A local attorney recently argued that a new appellate court isn't necessary because the state's "population is declining, new case filings are down, and the number of appeals to our Supreme Court continues to decline."

Under the two pending bills, the new court would be up and running by July 2020, a few months before Justice faces re-election. If his picks are confirmed by the state Senate, they would serve staggered terms, from six to 10 years, and could then be re-nominated.

The bill as currently written would create the first unelected judges in the history of West Virginia. The state constitution says that trial court judges and high court justices must be elected, but it doesn't include a similar requirement for an appeals court.

The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, which spent big in 2016 to help elect Chief Justice Beth Walker, supports the creation of a new appeals court. Walkerdefeated incumbent Justice Brent Benjamin, who was elected in 2004 with the help of $3 million from coal mogul Don Blankenship.

The state Supreme Court has been a target of the Koch brothers-funded American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), which recently criticized the court for authorizing a class-action lawsuit by U-Haul customers over hidden rental fees. The ATRA lobbies for so-called "tort reform" bills that limit lawsuits, especially suits brought by the most severely injured plaintiffs. In 2018, the ATRA contributed more than $250,000 to the campaigns of two former Republican legislators whom the governor appointed to the high court. The group has also given millionsof dollars to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which runs ads to support or attack judicial candidates across the country. The ATRA supporteda previous proposal to create an intermediate appeals court.

West Virginia legislators are considering other changes to judicial elections, as well as a constitutional amendment to requireSenate confirmation for the governor's appointees to fill vacant seats. In November, voters approved a constitutional amendment giving the legislature control over the judiciary's budget, and the legislature will soon pass a budget with this new authority. Some court officials are bracing for budget cuts.

Rather than introducing bills to pack the courts, the group WV Citizens for Clean Elections is asking legislators to strengthen the state's campaign finance laws, judicial ethics rules, and the state's public financing program for judicial candidates, which allows judges to avoid relying on large campaign contributions from wealthy donors.

'Attacks on Kentucky's judges'

The push to reshape West Virginia's judiciary comes as legislators in a growing number of states are considering power grabs to gain more control over state courts. Last year, for example, Republicans in North Carolina and Pennsylvania threatened to impeach judges over rulings that they didn't like. North Carolina legislators also proposed constitutional amendments last year to give them more control over choosing judges, though voters soundly rejected the final amendment in November. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that legislatures in 18 states last year "considered at least 60 bills that would have diminished or politicized the role of the judiciary."

Those states include Kentucky, where Republican Gov. Matt Bevin referred to a unanimous ruling by the Kentucky Supreme Court last month as a "sad day for the rule of law." The ruling struck down a bill to slash pensions for state employees. When the law was passed in March 2018, thousands of teachers rallied in protest at the state capitol.

Opponents were angered by the process as well as by the law's aim. Legislators had hastily changed a short bill involving sewers into a law restructuring state pensions that was hundreds of pages long. Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear immediately sued, arguing that legislators failed to comply with the state constitution's clear procedure for lawmaking.

...

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-great-god-trump-and-the-white-working-class

...A Note on a Forgotten Land

“We’re going to put the miners back to work!” Trump declared just minutes into his speech. The crowd roared, Trump smiled, and several miners frantically waved aloft signs that read “Trump digs coal.”

Newfoundland, Ordinary, Sideway, and Spanglin are hamlets in Elliot, a typical Appalachian county in eastern Kentucky. Its residents once grew tobacco and corn, now many of them — fortunate by local standards — work at the Little Sandy state prison. Elliot’s great distinction, however, is its voting record: the last white county in the South to vote Democratic.

Indeed it has been blue in every presidential election since the county was formed in 1869. George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis all won here and in 2008 Obama buried McCain by a two-to-one margin. In 2012, despite having endorsed gay rights, he nudged past Romney. Last year, however, Elliot finally put out the lights for the Democrats, voting 70 percent for Trump and the old-time religion of the Republican platform.

In all of postwar political history, Appalachia (defined by its regional commission as 428 upland and mountain counties from Alabama to New York) has had only a single season in the sun. Thanks to best-selling books by New York socialist Michael Harrington (author of The Other America) and maverick Kentucky lawyer Harry Caudill (Night Comes to the Cumberlands), the region briefly became a major focus of the War on Poverty, but then was shunted aside after the inauguration of Nixon.

The largest concentration of white poverty in North America, the Southern mountains have been orphaned not just in Washington but also in Frankfort, Nashville, Charlestown, and Raleigh where coal lobbyists and big power companies have always dictated legislative priorities. Traditionally their henchmen were county Democratic machines and the blue faded from Appalachia only reluctantly at first. Carter won 68 percent of the vote in the region and Clinton 47 percent in 1996.

However as the national Democrats became increasingly identified with the “the war on coal,” abortion, and gay marriage, local Blue Dogs were euthanized by popular vote. The United Mine Workers and Steelworkers, under the best leadership in decades, fought desperately in the 1990s and 2000s for a major political initiative to defend industrial and mining jobs in the region but were turned away at the door by the Democratic Leadership Council and the ascendant New York/California congressional leadership.

Ironically, Clinton this time around did have a plan for the coal counties, although it was buried in the fine print of her website and poorly publicized. She advocated important safeguards for worker health benefits tied to failing coal companies and proposed federal aid to offset the fiscal crisis of the region’s schools. Otherwise her program was conventional boilerplate: tax credits for new investment, boutique programs to encourage local entrepreneurship, and subsidies for the cleanup and conversion of mining land into business sites (Google data centers were mentioned — talk about cargo cults). But there was no major jobs program or public-health initiative to deal with the region’s devastating opiate pandemic.

It was a mirror image, in other words, of her equally slim offerings to the urban poor. Ultimately the plan made no difference, as the only Clinton promise that everyone remembered was: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Her only Appalachian victories were a couple of college counties. Trump meanwhile hitched a ride with Jesus and recapitulated Romney’s vote.

The exception was West Virginia where the Democratic wipeout was so enormous that it will probably end up in Guinness World Records. Only Wyoming gave Trump a higher percentage of its presidential vote. But even more striking than his 42-point margin of victory was the fact that Clinton received 54,000 fewer votes than were cast earlier for candidates in the Democratic primary — a contest that Sanders (125,000 total) won in every single county.

The failure to carry primary voters was a stunning index of her unpopularity. Meanwhile the Mountain Party, West Virginia’s sui generis affiliate of the Greens, focused on the governor’s race (won by billionaire Democrat and self-proclaimed pro-coal populist, Jim Justice) and picked up 42,000 votes, an encouraging result. Otherwise the Republicans took over the legislature and congressional delegation of this once-famous Democratic state for the first time since dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Making sense of West Virginia’s non-linear politics is not always easy, especially since the Democratic Party has largely devolved into a personal election machine and survivalist cult for Joe Manchin (ex-governor, now senator) and his sidekick, Jim Justice, but one lesson is clear and it probably holds true for most of Appalachia: a large minority of working people, custodians of a heroic labor history, are ready to support radical alternatives but only if they simultaneously address the economic and cultural crises of the region.

The struggles to maintain traditional kinship networks and community social fabrics in Appalachia or, for that matter, in the embattled Black-majority counties of the former cotton South, should be every bit as important to socialists as defending individual rights to make free reproductive and gender choices. They’re usually not.

...

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28092018/aep-solar-energy-appalachia-ohio-coal-just-transition-utility-regulatory-battle

Appalachian Ohio, a region hurt by the decline of coal, may become home to one of the largest solar projects east of the Rockies.

American Electric Power submitted a plan Thursday evening to work with two developers to build 400 megawatts of solar in Highland County, Ohio. It would more than triple the state's current solar capacity and be a big step forward for solar energy in a part of the country where renewable energy has been slow to develop.

AEP says the plan would save consumers $218 million over 20 years because solar power from the project would be less expensive than conventional energy sources.

"This is something that Appalachia needs," said Dan Sawmiller, Ohio energy policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The jobs of this renewable energy economy are going to go somewhere and I think it's important that they go where they're needed."

But the project's structure would break the established regulatory mold in Ohio, a state where utilities don't own power plants and generators compete with each other to supply the cheapest power to the grid.

The savings and the jobs promised are a turnaround from the arguments state officials listened to when they rejected clean energy proposals in recent years. If the new plan is approved by Ohio regulators, it could serve as a template for other new projects in Ohio and in other states.

'Just Transition' in Appalachia

The decision to put the project in Appalachian Ohio, which covers the southern and eastern parts of the state, is part of an attempt to bring economic development to an economically depressed region.

"It's a really hopeful move," said John Quigley, director of the Center for Environment, Energy and Economy at Harrisburg University, who has written about so-called "just transition" for poor communities affected by the shift from fossil fuels to the new green economy.

"It's an eye-opener for policymakers that there's a huge economic development opportunity for solar, especially in communities negatively affected by the energy transition," he said.

Another recent example is Xcel Energy's plan to close its coal-fired power plant in Pueblo, Colorado, and build renewable energy projects there.

Highland County, Ohio, where AEP and its solar developers chose to build, has an unemployment rate higher than the state average, and nearby counties have some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. AEP says its plan would bring 3,900 new jobs, most of them in construction, plus 113 full-time jobs in solar manufacturing. Details on the manufacturing jobs were not immediately disclosed.

The plan is part of a boom in solar development that is happening across the country. Some other big solar projects have also been announced in the region but not yet built, including a 150 megawatt solar farm being developed by Invenergy in Hardin County, Ohio. The AEP project would go into service in 2021 if approved.

Challenging Ohio's Regulatory System

This project is unusual for Ohio because a utility, AEP Ohio, would benefit financially from an electricity generation project. That would be normal in much of the country, but Ohio has a separation between utility companies and the owners of power plants.

AEP's proposal is seeking to make an exception to this rule by having solar developers operate the solar farms on behalf of AEP Ohio. The costs would be passed on to the utility's consumers, which AEP says is justified because of benefits to the environment and the local economy.

Opponents likely will argue that this violates Ohio's open market for electricity generation. In the market, owners of power plants compete to offer the lowest prices and utility companies do not own power plants. More than a dozen states similarly have open markets for electricity generation, including much of New England and the Great Lakes region, and Texas, among others.

Ned Hill, an economist at Ohio State University, says that having a utility pay for certain power plants could stifle investment in competing projects—including other renewable energy projects. He has opposed previous proposals by energy companies and utilities to subsidize coal and nuclear plants, and says this plan is bad for some of the same reasons.

The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio will decide whether to approve the plan in a process that will unfold over the next few months and that likely will focus on the types of questions Hill is raising.

Sawmiller, from NRDC, said he can understand why there are concerns about what this project means for the competitive market, but he thinks the market is structured in a way that has held back renewable energy development.

"If you rely exclusively on the market you lose some of the innovative economic development that's laid out in this filing," he said.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

CLEAN ENERGY

COAL

NERN - MIDWEST

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Everett Corley, the 2018 Republican nominee to represent a state House district in Kentucky, appeared on a white nationalist show during a run for office in 2014 and complained about minorities supposedly conspiring against whites A significant part of the conversation between Corley and the host regarded their complaints about interracial dating and marriage. At one point in the conversation, the host alleged that "our society is dying in part because of interracial marriage."

Corley absurdly argued that his remarks on the show were "provocative but not racist" and that he did not know what the host meant when he called himself a white nationalist. The state GOP has since distanced itself from Corley, calling him a "perennial candidate with a history of offensive statements and behavior."

An interesting footnote: During that 2014 run for office, Corley received a donation from then-Papa John's Pizza CEO John Schnatter. Schnatter resigned from the company this year after he used the n-word in a conference call

Also: The GOP nominee for attorney general, George Brauchler, in Colorado used to be a guest host of a radio show. He defended the use an anti-LGBTQ slur by Ann Coulter, likened being a gay man in the Navy to "putting a kid in a candy shop," said the Navy was "the light-in-the-loafers service," called for banning LGBTQ people from serving in the military, and compared climate change education to Al Qaeda propaganda.

Finally: Maine GOP Senate candidate Eric Brakey sponsored a "special message" to the email list of Roger Stone. Stone is desperate for money amid reports that he is being looked at by special counsel Robert Mueller.

-===

===

8/22 rally

https://www.alternet.org/parallel-universe-trump-fans-chant-lock-her-west-virginia-rally-two-former-aides-become-felons

Like a Parallel Universe': Trump Fans Chant 'Lock Her Up' at West Virginia Rally As Two Former Aides Become Felons

"Trump's campaign manager and personal lawyer both became felons today. And Trump supporters still thought it made sense to chant 'Lock Her Up.'"

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams August 22, 2018, 5:25 AM GMT

President Donald Trump on Tuesday was directly implicated in a criminal conspiracy by his former personal attorney Michael Cohen and—almost simultaneously—a federal jury found his former campaign manager guilty on eight counts of financial crimes, but you wouldn't know it by watching Trump's inane campaign-style rally in West Virginia Tuesday night, where his frenzied supporters belted out chants of "lock her up" and "drain the swamp" while the president bragged about his luxury apartments and deadly new coal rules.

"It's like a parallel universe," historian Kevin Kruse noted on Twitter as the Charleston rally kicked off late Tuesday.

While Tuesday's event featured plenty of ranting and raving about the "Russia witch hunt," the president didn't once mention the fact that his former fixer admitted under oath that he was directed by then-candidate Trump to violate campaign finance laws by paying hush money to a former model and an adult film actress.

The fact that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort was just found guilty of a slew of crimes—including tax and bank fraud—also didn't come up during the hour-long rally.

Trump supporters in attendance Tuesday night—wielding signs that ranged from "Trump Digs Coal" to "Keep America Great"—didn't seem to mind these glaring omissions, nor did they seem to appreciate the irony of chanting "lock her up" after the first mention of Hillary Clinton while two men previously very close to the president are likely headed to jail.,...

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14082018/coal-energy-prices-appalachia-mining-electric-bill-kentucky-economy-aep-rates

WHITESBURG, Kentucky — Buddy Sexton opened a community meeting about the financial troubles of local volunteer fire departments with his head bowed: "Let people understand what a need we have in this county, in the mighty name of Jesus, we pray."

Sexton then delivered some grim news to the gathering of about two dozen eastern Kentucky residents sitting in folding chairs set up in the engine bays of the Mayking Fire Department.

Just like the townspeople, his tiny department is facing crushing electric bills. They have gone up by several hundred dollars a month during the winter. That's a lot in a local budget that is already strained as revenues from taxes on mining go steadily down.

"I've got financial reports here that I am afraid to look at anymore," said Sexton, the department's treasurer. "We're in danger of shutting down." As coal mining has collapsed across Appalachia, residents in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia have been socked with a double whammy—crippling electric bills to go along with a declining economy.

The pain in a region once known for cheap power has been felt in homes, businesses, schools and even at volunteer fire departments.

The problem of rising power bills has many causes.

Mines and other businesses have shut down and people have moved away—mining jobs are off 70 percent since 2010—so utilities are selling less power and spreading their fixed costs across fewer customers.
Electricity customers are shouldering the costs of shuttering old coal-burning power plants and cleaning up the toxic messes they leave behind.
And experts say it hasn't helped that utilities in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia have continued to invest in burning coal.

"They're doubling down on coal at a time when coal is not competitive," said James M. Van Nostrand, a professor at the West Virginia University College of Law with decades of experience in the energy field. "It's really tragic."

AEP's Rising Rates and Surcharges

The common denominator is American Electric Power, one of the nation's largest utilities. It owns Kentucky Power, along with two subsidiaries in neighboring West Virginia, Wheeling Power and Appalachian Power.

In May, Wheeling Power and Appalachian Power requested permission from the Public Service Commission of West Virginia to boost their monthly residential bill 11 percent because of declining sales. That was on top of a 29 percent increase between 2014 and 2018.

Customers in both states are furious that the regulators are going along.

"Our jobs available in this state are not a living wage, and many are working two, three jobs just to make it," wrote Elizabeth Bland of Beckley, West Virginia, in her protest letter to the commission. "Please turn down this request from Appalachian Power for the sake of all West Virginians."

Rising rates are just part of the problem.

Kentucky Power's monthly bill also includes surcharges, and a line for each customer's share of the utility's fixed costs. These add up in precious dollars.

Kentucky Power's customers received a bit of a break in January after vigorous protests. State regulators rejected most of the utility's proposed rate increases and they reduced some surcharges. That will save an average residential customer about $7 a month. Even so, that bill has nearly doubled in the past decade and is now about $151 plus local government fees and taxes, state regulators said.

The average bill per customer at Kentucky Power has been among the highest in the nation for an investor-owned utility, according to 2016 numbers from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, the most recent comparisons available.

"We're hit hard," Alice Craft, a Whitesburg-area resident, told InsideClimate News. "The power companies, they are just greedy, greedy, greedy."

Surcharges that pay for retiring a coal plant are especially irritating, said state Rep. Angie Hatton, a lawyer and Democrat from Whitesburg.

"They are charging us for shutting down our coal-fired plants that were keeping us all employed," she said.

Hatton, who is the daughter of one coal miner and wife of another, also sees the value of solar power as an option for businesses and residents with high power bills. She helped defeat legislation in Kentucky his spring that would have devalued rooftop solar power. Utilities backed it, but it was rejected by lawmakers driven by constituents' rage about power bills.

With Poverty High, Something Has to Give

Allison Barker, a spokeswoman for Kentucky Power, blamed last winter's unusually cold weather for part of the high electric bills and suggested customers could turn their thermostats down.

"Keeping the thermostat the same during extreme weather can significantly increase usage and bills," she said.

But the underlying problem, she acknowledged, was the loss of hundreds of industrial and commercial customers and thousands of residential customers since 2014. During that time, she said, energy use has dropped 15 percent, and the company has faced new costs to comply with environmental protections.

AEP's West Virginia utility, Appalachian Power, said in May that its electricity demand had dropped 14 percent since 2013 and it had lost 11,000 customers.

Poverty also comes into play.

Kentucky Power's service area includes 10 of the 100 poorest counties in the United States, with poverty rates as high as three times the national average. The region has a lot of substandard housing with poor insulation, adding to the expense of electric heat.

Something has to give when people on small, fixed incomes are hit with higher power bills, said Roger McCann, executive director of Community Action Kentucky, an umbrella group for poverty-fighting agencies with services including home-energy assistance.

"Seniors will cut their medicine in half, or they will go without food," he said. "If you don't pay the bill, the lights go out."

McCann said he knew of one woman in a mobile home who had a $600 monthly electric bill while living on a Social Security benefit of just $660 a month.

"Some mobile homes are not insulated and the heat just goes through them," he said.

Shifting Coal Costs to Consumers

Kentucky State Rep. Rocky Adkins, the Democratic minority floor leader and a potential candidate for governor, says high bills and the region's economic woes both stem from a 2012 decision by Kentucky Power as Adkins and others were trying to salvage the utility industry.

Together, AEP and the Kentucky Public Service Commission reached a decision to pull the plug on nearly $1 billion in environmental upgrades at the utility's Big Sandy power plant. It stopped burning coal three years later. One unit was converted to natural gas.

Meanwhile the Kentucky regulators steered the company to invest more than $500 million in the nearby coal-fired Mitchell plant, which had already been upgraded. That solution, the commission argued, would save customers money.

At the time, Adkins railed that this was waving the "white flag" of surrender to natural gas, environmentalists and regulators.

But the rout was already under way.

In the years that followed, the Mitchell plant's coal boilers have been undercut on the regional grid by cheaper natural gas. Kentucky Power found itself with an unneeded mountain of 400,000 tons of coal there. In June, Kentucky regulators gave the utility permission to sell the surplus, raising $17.6 million.

"We lost the power plant and the rates have gone through the roof," Adkins told ICN. "It has happened in a region of Kentucky that is more challenged than any other region of the country because of the downturn in the coal economy."

But there's another way of looking at the outcome, said Cathy Kunkel, a West Virginia-based analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

She explained how the maneuver supported coal-fired power while shifting its costs from shareholders to consumers.

There are two main business models for selling electricity. In deregulated wholesale markets, merchant vendors compete to sell power to the grid, and high-cost generators lose out. In regulated markets, the rates are set by the state and utilities are guaranteed a profit.

Before 2012, the Mitchell plant had been owned by a deregulated AEP company which sold its power in the open marketplace. The 2012 deal put half of Mitchell under a regulated AEP subsidiary, and that gave it economic protection, at least for a time. Two years later, West Virginia regulators allowed Wheeling Power, also regulated, to buy the other half.

Acting together, Kunkel said, AEP and its regulators had shielded the struggling coal fired plant from the pressures of the marketplace and shifted the costs onto customers. "The problem when the plant is uncompetitive is that it ends up not running very much, and not producing much revenue for customers, who end up losing out because they're still stuck paying for all of the fixed costs and operating costs of the plant," she said.

It's a method the company has used elsewhere.

"Those plants are not competitive in the wholesale market," said Van Nostrand, the law professor. "We are buying them and sticking them on the backs of the ratepayers," he said.

A spokesman for the Kentucky regulatory agency defended its 2012 actions, saying that exhaustive analysis showed that it diversified AEP's fuel mix and avoided an even more costly debacle at the Big Sandy plant.

A spokesman for West Virginia's regulators provided ICN a recent staff report to lawmakers. The state's electric prices are still competitive compared to elsewhere, it asserted, but they are rising, "because of our nearly 100 percent reliance on coal."

'These People Have Been Sold a Bill of Goods'

The solution, Kunkel said, should include more federal help for an economic transition away from coal.

"If you were to do that in a smart way it would include money for energy efficiency and money for rooftop solar," she said.

Some eastern Kentucky residents blame coal's slide on environmental regulations in general, and former President Barack Obama in particular. Van Nostrand said that's just not the case.

"These people have been sold a bill of goods for the last 10 years that everything in the coal industry would have been fine if the (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) had just left us alone," Van Nostrand said. "It's been cheap natural gas and it's been cheap renewables." The EPA is further down on the list of the decline in the coal industry, he added.

At the Mayking Fire Department community meeting, residents were told that coal severance taxes—payments to their county from taxes collected on coal as it leaves the ground—had fallen from about $2 million a year to about $180,000 a year, and that the county budget had been slashed from $11 million to $6 million—all in the last five years. That left little money to help keep local volunteer fire departments afloat.

Wintertime power bills at the station just outside Whitesburg have risen from as low as about $800 a month to about $1,400 a month in recent years, Fire Chief Tony Fugate told ICN.

By the time the Mayking department, with its approximately $25,000-a-year budget, pays its bills for insurance and equipment, "there's nothing left for the power bill, unless you have fundraisers," he said.

But cookouts and other fundraisers, even asking drivers at intersections to drop money in a fireman's boot, can only go so far, he said.

"You can only have so many roadblocks and hot dog dinners," Fugate said.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

COAL

NATIONAL ENVIRONMENT REPORTING NETWORK - SOUTHEAST

http://appvoices.org/2016/02/18/corporate-land-ownership-appalachia/

...

ase Study: Wyoming County, W.Va.

The 2013 West Virginia study identified Wyoming County as the state’s most corporately owned county. It determined that the top 10 landowners hold 75.8 percent of the county’s private land, and “just two companies — Heartwood Forestland Company and Norfolk Southern— own over 50 percent of the county’s privately held land.”

The most recent available property records for Wyoming County uphold the findings of the 2013 study. For example, Pocahontas Land Company, a subsidiary of Norfolk Southern, is still listed as owning more than 77,000 acres in the county, or roughly 25 percent of the privately owned land, with an average assessed property value of less than $350 per acre for 2016.

For Dewey Houck, president and founder of the Rural Appalachian Improvement League in Mullens, W.Va., these large land-holding companies have their own personalities and policies, and each should be considered individually.

According to Houck, Pocahontas Land Company has cooperated with his organization — a nonprofit community group working to bring opportunities to southern West Virginia — even leasing them several properties for agricultural and recreational purposes.

But another large landowner, Western Pocahontas Properties, has been harder to work with. The company’s parcels of land that were once accessible to the public are now locked behind gates with “no trespassing” signs. “For years,” Houck says, “the land was used by the public. Especially hunters could go on their property and hunt, and use the land same as public land, and what they’ve done is started leasing their land to whoever can pay the fee that they charge.”...

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25072018/appalachia-mountaintop-removal-coal-strip-mining-satellite-maps-environmental-impacts-data

Strip mining across the mountaintops of Appalachia is scarring as much as three times more land to get a ton of coal than just three decades ago, new research shows.

The data and a series of new maps that track the spread of surface mining across the region suggest that even as the industry has declined, what continues likely has an oversized impact on people and the environment.

If mining companies have to do more blasting and digging for the same amount of coal, that means more dust in the air and more pollution in streams, said Appalachian Voices Programs Director Matt Wasson, who worked on the study with researchers from Duke University, West Virginia University, Google and SkyTruth. ""This was really the first step in a larger process of digging deeper into the impacts that surface mining has," said Christian Thomas, a geospatial analyst with SkyTruth, a nonprofit that uses satellite imagery to understand human impacts on the environment.

The study, published online in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed journal, also provided what Duke researcher Andrew Pericak described as the first year-by-year mapping showing the spread of mountaintop mining across the region.

The team is making the data publicly available for other researchers, including those looking into the health and environmental effects of mining.

Thousands of Square Miles Blasted and Chewed

For decades, surface mining in the mountains of Appalachia has been among the most destructive forms of extracting coal. Mining companies blast away the tops and sides of mountains to get at underground coal seams, then shove the waste rock into valleys and streams.

Between 1985 and 2015, explosives and mining equipment chewed up more than 1,100 square miles in pursuit of coal buried in the mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. The animation below shows how quickly it spread.

This 1985 satellite image shows mountaintop mining across a section of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. The animation below shows how mining spread across that area over the following 30 years.

Satellite images from 1985 to 2015 show how mountaintop removal mining spread across this 12,000-square-mile area of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. Credit: Christian Thomas/SkyTruth

Combining their work with a previous analysis covering the mid-1970s through 1984, the researchers determined that more than 2,300 square miles—about 7 percent of the area studied—had been cleared in connection with surface mining. That's roughly three times the size of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Geologists have predicted that as coal companies mine the thickest and shallowest layers of coal, what's left will produce more waste rock, making surface mining more expensive, the authors wrote.

They identified 1998 as a point of inflection. Before then, it took about 10 square meters to produce a metric ton of coal. By 2015, it was up to about 30 square meters.

"It may simply be becoming harder for mining company to extract the coal," Pericak said.

Concerns About Human Health and Climate

Coal production across the United States slid in recent years as aging coal-fired plants were shut down and replaced by new ones burning cheaper natural gas and as state and federal policies promoted cleaner power sources.

The Trump administration, vowing to revive the coal industry, has repealed an Obama-era rule that sought to protect streams from damage due to mining, and it has been considering ways to increase coal burning, but there has been little change in production in Appalachia.

Coal burning is a major source of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, a primary driver of climate change, and cutting down Appalachian forests for mountaintop mining releases more stored carbon to the atmosphere.

Researchers also have been studying the impact of mountaintop removal operations on the health of people living nearby.

Last August, the Trump administration, halted a health study on the impacts of mountaintop mining that was already underway by the National Academy of Sciences. A Department of Interior Inspector General's review found in June that the study had been canceled for no clear reason.

The study has not resumed, though, and the committee was disbanded earlier this year, Jennifer Walsh, spokeswoman for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, told InsideClimate News on Tuesday.

"The National Academies still believe this is an important study of the potential health risks for people living near surface coal mine sites in Central Appalachia," she said.

===

https://wamu.org/story/18/04/01/kentucky-lawmakers-limit-black-lung-claims-reviews-despite-epidemic/

NEWSER) – Kentucky miners with possible black lung disease, bad news—you may have less chance of getting state compensation, NPR reports. That's because Kentucky lawmakers just passed House Bill 2, which keeps federally approved radiologists from diagnosing the disease and leaves it mostly to doctors often employed by coal companies. "Throughout the United States, I know of nowhere where radiologists are taken completely out of the evaluation for potential black lung disease," says Brandon Crum, a radiologist who's being excluded. "That's what we're primarily trained in." Kentucky will only allow its federally certified pulmonologists to read those X-rays; the state has six, four of whom are typically hired by coal companies, and one is partly retired.

Apparently radiologists tend to side with coal miners and diagnose them with black lung, while Kentucky's pulmonologists diagnose more conservatively. "Obviously we do not have a standardized process so we are trying to standardize it," says Rep. Adam Koenig, a Republican. But critics say House Bill 2 simply sides with coal companies as black lung is becoming more common. A recent study found that Central Appalachia is suffering from a historic cluster of the disease,which is caused by dust inhalation while coal mining, the :{Lexington Herald Leader:(style="padding:0px;margin:0px;font-style:oblique"):}: reports. New rules are designed to limit permissible mine dust, but many miners worked in the bad old days and are getting sick now. "It's shocking and it shouldn’t be happening," says an author of the study.

ref

HB2

18RS

WWW Version

The hyperlink to a bill draft that precedes a summary contains the most recent version (Introduced/GA/Enacted) of the bill. If the session has ended, the hyperlink contains the latest version of the bill at the time of sine die adjournment. Note that the summary pertains to the bill as introduced, which is often different from the most recent version.

HB 2 /LM (BR 244) - A. Koenig, B. Rowland, M. Castlen, J. DeCesare, T. Herald, R. Mills, D. Osborne, D. St. Onge, S. Wells, A. Wuchner

AN ACT relating to workers' compensation.

Amend KRS 342.020 to limit the time period of payment of medical expenses for certain permanent partial disabilities to 780 weeksbut provide a mechanism to apply for extended benefits; limit the number of drug screens for which the employer will be liable; amend KRS 342.035 to specify circumstances upon which utilization review can be waived; mandate promulgation of treatment guidelines and a pharmaceutical formulary; clarify that a fee shall not be charged when an injured worker requests the initial copy of medical records; amend KRS 342.040 to indicate that interest will not accrue when the delay in payment of benefits was caused by the employee; amend KRS 342.125 to clarify that the four-year period in which to reopen a claim begins on the date of the original order granting or denying benefits and that subsequent orders granting or denying benefits shall not be considered an original order; amend KRS 342.185 to indicate that an application for adjustment of claim for compensation for a cumulative trauma injury must be made within five years of the last injurious exposure to the cumulative trauma; amend KRS 342.270 to require commissioner of Department of Workers' Claims to promulgate regulations establishing procedures for resolution of claims; amend KRS 342.315 to include pulmonary specialist as an examiner; amend KRS 342.316 to change procedure for filing occupational disease claims; amend KRS 342.320 to change calculation of attorney fees and increase limitation on amount of fees; amend KRS 342.610 to indicate that the employee must show that the voluntary introduction of a substance into his or her body that causes a disturbance of mental or physical capacities was not the proximate cause of his or her injury; amend KRS 342.700 to allow the recovery in subrogation of indemnity and medical expenses paid to or on behalf of the employee, less a pro rata share of the employee's legal expenses; amend KRS 342.730 to increase average weekly wage caps; set time limits for total disability benefits paid to certain professional athletes; allow payment of temporary total disability benefits to be offset by gross income minus applicable taxes paid to an employee during a period of light-duty work or work in an alternative job position; provide an offset against temporary total disability benefits for salary continuation or wholly employer-funded disability retirement plans; indicate that benefits shall terminate when a plaintiff reaches age 67 or two years after the date of injury, whichever shall last occur; amend KRS 342.7305 to require employment for a minimum of one year in order to be the responsible employer in a hearing loss claim; amend KRS 342.732 to set forth parameters for retraining; delete provisions of KRS 342.792 requiring the commissioner of Department of Workers' Claims to adopt regulations regarding the "B" reader process; amend KRS 342.794 to require commissioner of Department of Workers' Claims to maintain a list of "B" readers who are pulmonary specialists; amend KRS 342.990 to conform; specify the applicability of substantive changes to claims arising on or after effective date of Act and remedial changes to all claims irrespective of injury date.

ref off bs

Representative Adam Koenig (R)

House District 69

Boone (Part)

Kenton (Part)

Home City

Erlanger

Mailing Address

170 Herrington Ct, #12

Erlanger KY 41018

Frankfort Address(es)

702 Capitol Ave

Annex Room 329E

Frankfort KY 40601

Phone Number(s)

Home: 859-653-5312

Annex: 502-564-8100 Ext. 689

Email Address(es)

Annex: Adam.Koenig@lrc.ky.gov

Twitter Handle

@repkoenig

Service

House 2007 - Present

Bio

Realtor, Coldwell Banker West Shell. Catholic. Miami Univ, BA Political Science. Covington Salvation Army. Telecommunications Bd of Northern KY 1994-2006. Northern KY Area Planning Council, past Pres. Legacy. Vision 2015.

Interim Committees

Banking and Insurance; BR Sub. on Gen. Govt., Finance, Personnel & Public Ret. [Liaison Member]; Economic Development and Workforce Investment; Licensing, Occupations, and Administrative Regulations [Co-Chair]; Local Government

Session Committees

Banking & Insurance (H); BR Sub. on Personnel, Public Retirement, & Finance (H) [Liaison Member]; Economic Development & Workforce Investment (H); Licensing, Occupations, & Admin Regs (H) [Chair]; Local Government (H)

Statutory Committees

Program Review and Investigations Comm.

Caucus Membership : kentucky Sportsmen's Caucus; Northern Kentucky Caucus; Pro-Life Caucus

solar'

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17052018/kentucky-fuel-coal-mining-solar-power-bent-mountain-jim-justice-edf-renewables-berkeley-energy-group

===

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/map-shows-huge-differences-in-educational-attainment-across-us

District of Columbia is the best-educated part of the country: 56.8% of its residents have at least a Bachelor's degree.
Second is Massachusetts, with 42.7%. While a lot of dark blue clusters on the East Coast, the third-highest score is for Colorado, way out west: 39.9%.
Worst-scoring state isWest Virginia,where just 20.8% of the residents 25 and older have at least a Bachelor's degree. That's just over a third of the share of Bachelor's degree holders in DC.
The Mountain State is marginally outperformed by Mississippi, where 21.8% have completed a college or university education.

Educational attainment is linked to income. In 2016, the average median income as divided per highest attained degree was as follows:

$27,800 – didn't finish high school
$36,700 – high school or equivalent
$67,300 – Bachelor's degree
$95,200 – advanced degree

Map found here at Overflow Data, via Simon Kuestenmacher. Additional information here at Marketing Charts.

===

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/06/fracking-appalachian-storage-hub-china

no many link

China Is Financing a Petrochemical Hub in Appalachia. Meet its Powerful Backers.

By Steve Horn • Tuesday, February 6, 2018 - 11:42

U.S. President Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and West Virginia Commerce Sec. Thrasher join in the Great Hall in Beijing for MOU signing for the Appalachian Development Hub in November 2017

Over the past year, oil and gas industry plans to build a petrochemical refining and storage hub along the Ohio River have steadily gained traction. Proponents hope this potential hub, which would straddle Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky, could someday rival the industrial corridor found along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana.

Those plans center around creating what is known as the Appalachian Storage Hub, which received a major boost on November 9 during a trade mission to China attended by President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. At that trade mission, also attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the China Energy Investment Corp. announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to invest $83.7 billion into the planned storage hub over 20 years. For comparison, West Virginia's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2016 was $72.9 billion.

Though called the Appalachian Storage Hub as a broad-sweeping term, in practice the hub could encompass natural gas liquids storage, a market trading index center, a key pipeline feeding epicenter, and a petrochemical refinery row. Its prospective development has been spurred by the current construction of a $6 billion petrochemical refining facility in Pennsylvania owned by Shell Oil.

The proposed hub has come under fire from grassroots groups. But this proposal also has a powerful set of backers, including West Virginia's five-member congressional delegation, the state's Governor and Secretary of Commerce, West Virginia University, the chemical industry's trade association, Shell Oil, and the Trump administration, among others.

Detractors of the planned petrochemical hub believe that its construction would buoy the oil and gas industry in its efforts to further develop drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) projects in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale and Ohio's Utica Shale basins.

A “major concern we have about the whole complex is that it will encourage a second or third wave of gas fracking in our region, from the Marcellus, the Utica, and the Rogersville field, which is a much deeper layer of shale gas and oil and has been recently tested and a few commercial wells have been built into it,” Robin Blakeman, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, recently told the radio show Between the Lines. “It’s not commercially viable yet, but we think this complex will make it commercially viable.”

However, those backing the plan say the hub could lead to much-needed job creation, positioning the multi-state region as the oil and gas industry's version of Silicon Valley and as a potential “field of dreams.”

“This project will not only transform the region, it will impact the entire country by enhancing America’s energy dominance,” said U.S. Rep. David McKinley (R-WV). “The storage hub has the potential to create thousands of jobs, attract billions in investment, invigorate Appalachia’s economy, and establish our area as a force in the petrochemical industry.”

Appalachia Development Group

While the hub itself, when fully developed, would likely involve a whole host of companies, its concept and initial marketing phase has been led by a corporation named the Appalachia Development Group (ADG), which is owned by the Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research and Innovation Center (MATRIC) and the West Virginia University Innovation Corporation. The joint venture registered its website on November 10, one day after West Virginia signed the MOU with the China Energy Investment Corp.

On January 3, ADG received an invitation from the U.S. Department of Energy to apply for a $1.9 billion loan guarantee created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. (That law is perhaps best recognized for creating what is known as the “Halliburton Loophole,” which exempts the oil and gas industry from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act during horizontal drilling and fracking operations.)

In a press release announcing the DOE invite, ADG also said the hub could lead to the creation of 100,000 jobs, and received praise from U.S. Rep. McKinley, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), and U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV).

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Credit: United States Senate, public domain

“I am very excited that the Department of Energy is moving forward with the Appalachia Development Group in its efforts to secure a loan to develop the Appalachian Storage Hub. I have long said that the Appalachian Storage Hub is a vital project that will help us capitalize on our state and region's abundant natural resources, growing infrastructure, and innovative spirit,” Sen. Manchin said in the statement. “I look forward to working with the Department of Energy and the Appalachian Development Group to make the Appalachian Storage Hub a reality.”

According to corporate registration forms reviewed by DeSmog, ADG incorporated several businesses in West Virginia covering many facets of the gas supply chain just two weeks after the Energy Department's loan guarantee announcement. The incorporations serve as something of a roadmap for what the visionaries behind the hub have planned in the area.

Names of the companies include Appalachia Development Group Chemical LLC, Appalachia Development Group Pipeline LLC, Appalachia Development Group Trading LLC, and Appalachia Development Group Storage LLC. All of those LLCs are incorporated in Delaware, a state which serves as a corporate tax haven in the U.S.

Credit: West Virginia Secretary of State

The trading business appears to be an attempt to create an industry hub rivaling Mont Belvieu in Texas and akin to the oil industry's hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, which serve as a pricing index for natural gas liquids and oil market traders, respectively. The Appalachian trading post would be focused on the natural gas liquids trade, according to congressional testimony given at a hearing by West Virginia University Professor Brian Anderson in August 2016 and a presentation he gave in October 2017.

The Appalachia Development Group told the outlet Natural Gas Intelligence that it hopes to raise $3.3 billion in capital for the project, or an additional $1.4 billion if it successfully lands the loan guarantee from the Energy Department.

West Virginia University Incubator

At the center of pushing the ball forward on the hub has been West Virginia University (WVU), which has served as a key incubator for the Appalachia Development Group and its plans to create a major petrochemical hub in the region. Professor Anderson, listed as one of the principals on the ADG website, has led that charge at WVU.

Professor Brian Anderson. Credit: West Virginia University

While the WVU Innovation Corporation is part of the Appalachia Development Group joint venture, Anderson's university research has also helped boost the project's profile in the media. Anderson, who serves as the General Electric Plastics Materials Engineering Professor in chemical engineering at WVU, also directs the WVU Energy Institute.

After the announcement that the Appalachia Development Group had entered into an $83.7 billion MOU with the China Energy Investment Corp., WVU put out a press release quoting Anderson and boasting about its role in making such an investment possible.

“This is a game-changer for the state of West Virginia,” Anderson stated in the release. “By collaborating with global companies like China Energy to invest in our state through joint research, business development, and demonstration opportunities, we begin to move West Virginia forward by expanding and diversifying our state into newfound prosperity and success.”

Anderson has also spoken at a slew of industry events, making the case for the natural gas liquids storage hub. He spoke in front of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission at its annual meeting in October, at a June 2017 Appalachian Storage Hub Conference event held in Pennsylvania, and at the January 2018 winter meeting of the West Virginia Independent Oil and Gas Association (WVIOGA). At this latest event, Anderson spoke about the hub alongside Rep. McKinley and ADG CEO Steve Hedrick.

In turn, the petrochemical industry has shown its appreciation for Anderson's involvement.

In a May 2017 report titled “The Potential Economic Benefits of an Appalachian Petrochemical Industry,” the American Chemistry Council thanked Anderson for his support in preparing the paper. Its May 18 release came just nine days after the May 9 introduction of the Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act of 2017, a bill supported by every member of West Virginia's congressional delegation.

American Chemistry Council members include Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and other major corporations.

WVU also houses the Appalachian Oil and Natural Gas Research Consortium, which in July 2017 released a report on the geologic potential for creating a storage hub in West Virginia. According to its acknowledgments section, that report was funded by companies such as Chevron, Dominion Energy, EQT Resources, Noble Energy, ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy, and the West Virginia Oil & Natural Gas Association (WVONGA).

Though Anderson did not travel to China to sign the MOU, he did speak at a press event convened by West Virginia's Republican Governor Jim Justice just days later to discuss the deal and its implications for the state. Anderson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Thrasher's Dual Role

Another key actor in implementing the West Virginia and China Energy MOU was the state's Secretary of Commerce Woody Thrasher, who served as the state's official representative at the signing in China.

But before Governor Justice named Thrasher as commerce secretary, he was president of his family business, The Thrasher Group. Co-founded by Woody and his father Henry, the firm provides architectural, engineering, and construction services for oil and gas field and pipeline projects, with offices in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky — all hub states.

“The Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. offers a wealth of resources important to America’s energy independence: natural gas, coal, and wind energy,” The Thrasher Group details on its website. “The development of these resources, including the emerging Marcellus Shale play, is particularly important. With five offices located in the heart of this area, we’re ready to mobilize our various energy development services to meet your needs throughout this major production area.”

The Thrasher Group has repeatedly shown interest in the business side of the Appalachian Storage Hub. For example, Andy Kincell, Thrasher's head of business development and construction services, also attended the June 2017 Appalachian Storage Hub conference where WVU's Brian Anderson gave a presentation, according to both his Twitter account and Thrasher's. Kincell also attended another event about the hub, hosted by WVU in August 2017, again according to both of their Twitter accounts.

In addition, The Thrasher Group will play host to the Emerging Opportunities Ohio River Valley Conference held in Wheeling, West Virginia.

“The Emerging Opportunities Ohio River Valley Conference will provide a comprehensive view of the once-in-a-generation industrial and commercial development,” details the conference's website. “In addition to development of cracker and petrochemical plants, experts predict the overall development will change the economic landscape.”

Appalachia Development Group CEO Steve Hedrick will present at the conference, as will WVU's Anderson and representatives from both the American Chemistry Council and the American Petroleum Institute. Thrasher Group CEO Chad Riley will offer both introductory and closing remarks for the day.

Riley and Kincell did not respond to a request for comment. Hedrick and Appalachia Development Group's CFO and COO, Joe Bozada, also did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

To date, the exact details of the MOU signed between the China Energy Investment Corp. and West Virginia have yet to be made public and DeSmog could not track down a copy of the MOU online. Thrasher told the West Virginia Senate and House of Delegates’ Joint Committees on Natural Gas Development and Energy on January 9 that he expects construction of some assets within the petrochemical storage hub to begin as soon as this year.

Though Woody Thrasher has signed a blind trust legal agreement handing over day-to-day financial management of Thrasher Group and its subsidiaries, West Virginia's commerce secretary has not foregone his ownership stake in the company. According to West Virginia MetroNews, Thrasher still retains a 70 percent stake in The Thrasher Group and the blind trust agreement does not apply to any of his family or his legal dependents.

“Handing over day-to-day operations of a company that is directly affected by the official’s role or decision making isn’t effective,” Brendan Fischer, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center, recently told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. “If a public official maintains a financial stake in a company, the potential for a conflict remains.”

In addition, one of the blind trustees for the agreement, Marcia Broughton, is an attorney for Jackson Kelly, a firm which often represents oil and gas industry clients. Broughton is listed as one of the firm's oil and gas industry attorneys on the Jackson Kelly website and the firm is listed as a financial supporter on the website of MATRIC, one of ADG's owners.

Appalachian Development Group attorney and principal Kathy Beckett is also a former Jackson Kelly attorney, where she worked from 1997-2013, before moving to the law firm Steptoe & Johnson. Beckett, who also sits on the Board of Directors for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Thrasher also decided to remain chairman of the board of directors for the WVU Alumni Association for the first half of 2017, while simultaneously serving as Secretary of Commerce, even as WVU has served as a key vehicle behind the hub's creation. He now serves as “Immediate Past Chairman,” a one-year ex-officio and non-voting role which allows him to sit on both the executive and governance committees of the alumni associaton, according to the association's constitution and bylaws.

Woody Thrasher Credit: West Virginia University Alumni Association

In discussing the trust agreement with the press, Governor Justice actually referred to Thrasher's agreement not as a blind trust, but as one put “under the control of trusted colleagues.” Spokespersons for both Thrasher and Justice did not respond to requests for comment from DeSmog.

Congressional Bills, Lobbying Revolving Door

The West Virginia congressional delegation, particularly Sens. Manchin and Capito and Rep. McKinley, has led the push for the Appalachian Storage Hub on Capitol Hill. Beyond the Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act of 2017, members of the delegation introduced other bills to usher in the hub in 2017, including the Appalachian Energy and Manufacturing Infrastructure Revitalization Act and the Capitalizing on American Storage Potential Act.

The Infrastructure Revitalization Act calls for “an expedited permitting process for critical energy infrastructure projects relating to the establishment of a regional energy hub in Appalachia, and for other purposes.” Meanwhile, the Capitalizing on American Storage Potential Act would make sure the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program would also apply to projects such as the Appalachian Storage Hub.

Various industry players, such as the American Chemistry Council, the National Propane Gas Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, and Shell Oil have all lobbied for some or all of these bills. All of the entities lobbying for the hub's creation have benefitted in some way from government-industry revolving door relationships, according to a review by Desmog.

As a case in point, the American Chemistry Council deployed a team of lobbyists to advocate for all three of the bills, according to its federal lobbying disclosure forms. Those lobbyists included Bryan Zumwalt, who formerly served as chief legal counsel for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under the chairmanship of U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) and Calvin Dooley, formerly a Democratic U.S. Representative from California who now serves as president and CEO of the chemistry council.

Calvin Dooley Credit: United States Congress, public domain

Shell Oil, which lobbied for the Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act, also has notable revolving-door connections on its lobbying team. Patricia Villarreal Tamez, prior to landing the lobbying job with Shell, worked as executive director of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, according to her LinkedIn profile. Further, Marnie Funk — a lobbyist on Shell's team pushing for the Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act — formerly served as communications director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee when it was run by U.S. Rep. Pete Domenici (R-NM).

The revolving door and campaign finance contributions may have buttressed prospects for the hub on the congressional side of things as well.

For example, the American Chemistry Council has donated $10,000 to Sen. Manchin for his 2018 re-election campaign, one of its largest 2018 election cycle contributions to-date. The council cut Manchin a $5,000 campaign contribution check on May 10, the day after he co-sponsored the Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act, according to U.S. Federal Elections Commission filings reviewed by DeSmog.

Joe Manchin $5,000 American Chemistry Council Donation

Credit: U.S. Federal Elections Commission

According to the research database Legistorm, Manchin's senior adviser Sarah Venuto Perez formerly served as director of federal affairs for America's Natural Gas Alliance, which has since merged with the American Petroleum Institute.

In September of last year, according to comments made by Manchin on the sidelines of a forum hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the senator had dinner with President Trump and his chief-of-staff John Kelly. At that dinner, Manchin pitched the idea of the Appalachian petrochemical hub to Trump and Kelly, according to EnergyWire.

“He was delighted to hear about it,” Manchin told EnergyWire. “I gave it to [chief of staff] Gen. [John] Kelly. He's going to look at it and see if he can get this thing moving,”

Manchin's office did not respond to a request for comment about whether the $10,000 donation from the American Chemistry Council and Venuto Perez's past industry affiliation have influenced the senator's policy stance on the hub.

Capito serves as another case study, with her former senior legislative assistant on oil, gas, and coal policy issues, Virginia Hamisevicz, now working as vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Manufacturers.

During her successful first attempt at running for the U.S. Senate, Capito received $162,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry in 2014. In addition, according to forms reviewed by DeSmog, Capito's husband has $15,000-$50,000 worth of stock investments in Shell Oil, which already has a major petrochemical investment in the area.

Beyond campaign contributions, the petrochemical industry has also heaped praise on Manchin and Capito for their policy efforts.

“We applaud Senators Capito and Manchin for their commitment to realizing the exciting opportunities afforded by an energy storage hub,” said the American Chemistry Council in a June 2017 press release. “The Capitalizing American Storage Potential (CASP) Act will help expedite the development of new infrastructure in hydrocarbon-rich areas of the country and, in turn, spur new manufacturing investment and jobs.”

'Nightmare Waiting to Happen'

In a January 4 blog post, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition spelled out how the Appalachian Storage Hub will likely incentivize more fracking in the region.

“More fracking for methane leads to more gas liquids used by the petrochemical companies, the more gas liquids petrochemical companies use, the more fracking will happen,” wrote the group. “What that means is our region would face the combined threats of more fracking and the petrochemical industries.”

In addition to the public health and pollution battles being fought in the Gulf's existing petrochemical corridor (also known as “Cancer Alley”), the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition also pointed to Appalachia's past experiences with the coal industry and decried a potential repeat of history.

“Haven’t we learned any lesson from what the coal industry has done, where the majority of what is produced here is exported elsewhere, and the profits made by companies from outside the region?” the group asked. “This hub of horrors is a nightmare waiting to happen … The people deserve better than false economic hope and toxic neighbors.”

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https://www.ecowatch.com/black-lung-epidemic-2538494787.html

New Black Lung Epidemic Emerging in Coal Country

In a study released this month by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), federal researchers identified more than 400 cases of complicated black lung in three clinics in southwestern Virginia between 2013 and 2017—the largest cluster ever reported.

However, the actual number of cases is likely much, much higher as the government analysis relied on self-reporting. An ongoing investigation from NPR has counted nearly 2,000 cases diagnosed since 2010 across Appalachia.

NPR investigative reporter Howard Berkes, who has been closely following the epidemic explained to Pittsburgh's NPR news station:

"In the study that NIOSH just produced, they looked at three clinics in southwestern Virginia which serves coal miners from Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia. And they identified and confirmed 416 cases of the disease in the previous few years. The study ended about a year ago. That's an astonishing number. NIOSH itself in its own accounting of that disease, found less than 100 cases in the same timeframe nationwide. And here in just three clinics in southwestern Virginia, there are four times as many cases. NPR has been surveying black lung clinics across Appalachia, and our count is up close to two thousand cases in the same timeframe that NIOSH had previously identified only 99. NIOSH itself now recognizes that this as the worst cluster of this disease ever documented. NIOSH has referred to it as one of the worst industrial workplace disasters in American history. It also marks what is a sharp increase in the disease from the 1990s, when researchers believed that it might actually become extinct."

Black lung disease, also known as coal workers' pneumoconiosis, comes from exposure to coal mine dust. Ever since the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which was passed in response to the deaths of 78 miners in West Virginia and implemented stricter safety standards, cases had been declining and virtually eradicated by the 1990s....

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/what-everyone-gets-embarrassingly-wrong-about-appalachia

salon

As Donald Trump is fond of pointing out, he won 306 Electoral College votes, claiming states as different from each other as Wisconsin is from Texas, Idaho from Florida. But one red region of the map has become a living symbol of his victories since the contentious 2016 presidential primary season. When you see headlines that begin "In the heart of Trump Country . . . " chances are, you're reading a story about Appalachia written by a writer who doesn't live there. When you see a headline like "No Sympathy for the Hillbilly" on a New York magazine column, you get a glimpse of the mainstream media attitudes that help shape the narrative that Appalachia is, at best, a good place to be from.

The Trump Country narrative — to put it very reductively, one of poor uneducated racists with no ambition lashing out in anger against coastal elites with their gourmet lunch meats — is, as Elizabeth Catte wrote for Salon last fall, "a bad-faith sleight of hand that displaces the reality that the average Trump voter is a college-educated white individual of some means, not a 'hillbilly.'"

"It's an incredibly durable genre that doesn’t change much and hasn’t changed much," Catte told me last week. "It’s still going to the same places talking to the same kinds of people. It’s time to consider why that is and why that’s occurring."

Catte's new book "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia" (Belt Publishing, out Tuesday) is an attempt to push back against destructive myths about the region, its people, and its future.

I spoke with Catte by phone last week about media portrayals of Appalachia, the pitfalls of economic development initiatives like Silicon Holler, how the left could win the region back, and, of course, J.D. Vance. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

As a historian, I assume the amount of attention that’s been put on Appalachia during the 2016 election and its aftermath has been frustrating, since much of it is in the form of diagnosing “what’s wrong with Appalachia” when knowledge of the region’s history is not as robust as it could be.

I think the first thing to understand about this fascination is we’re not talking about one or two problematic pieces. Appalachia, just like any other part of the country, gets a kind of artificial, perhaps skewed focus during election years and election cycles. So we should expect to see some weird ideas about every part of the country during those peak moments. But what I key into in my book is not just the genre and what it says, but the sheer ratio of it, and the fact that it started almost a year and a half ago and it’s still going strong. We still have reporters who are parachuting into small towns in Kentucky and Tennessee and West Virginia to extract these profiles of Trump supporters, and I think that if you are a person who is media savvy or media literate, or just reads a lot of news and keeps up with current events, you feel really fatigued and really saturated by these pieces and what they say.

And what they say is important, because what they’re saying is that Appalachia is a very monolithic region, that it had a unique kind of power to make and create the president of the United States, that it collectedly decided to use its power for bad; and that the people here share a type of conservative and reactionary politics, and we all got together and decided that we were really going to stick it to the coastal elites for ignoring our plight for the last eight years.

These are the reoccurring themes of these pieces: retribution, revenge, desperation, hopelessness, reactionary politics. They’re, in a lot of ways, narratives by omission. Because what you don’t see in these pieces is people of color, people with progressive politics, people who are plugged into environmental issues, people who are fighting the good fight that have different beliefs and attitudes and ideas about what Appalachia needs to do to move forward. All the people that the press are interested in talking to are people that want to move the country and the nation backwards.

What is it about Appalachia that serves the purpose of illustrating "this is who Trump voters are, and this is how they feel, and let's study them and understand them in order to . . ." what? The dot-dot-dot is rarely really filled in. Why is a county in West Virginia more likely to get portrayed as "Trump Country" than, say, Staten Island?

Appalachia has this history of serving as whatever the counterpoint is to our contemporary definitions of progress. For example, right after the Civil War, when progress was built into ideas about modernization and the development of industry, Appalachia emerged as this really backward place that could throw a wrench into the entire system by remaining backwards and primitive, even savage. And what that argument does is help industrialists bring people living in the mountains into this exploitative labor system. But there’s a precedent in the history of the region of people who are powerful — people who have the power to shape narratives and shape economic systems and politics — looking at Appalachia not as a place but as a problem to be solved. And I think that is an enduring element of Appalachian history that appeared with force during the 2016 election.

But this is an election and a phenomenon that needs to be laid at the feet of every white person in this country, regardless of their specific politics or specific voting preferences. Even if it’s through the engagement of asking and answering hard questions about other white people who voted [for Trump].

There is also a history of people who are comfortable, people who are middle-class, projecting their angst onto people of different colors, but also on people who look like them, because it’s a way to engage in escapism and say, “well, I wasn't the one that brought us to this point. It doesn’t have anything to do with me, it has to do with the people who live in this far-off place who are making very poor choices and have even a deficiency in their culture that has compelled them to act in the way that they act.”

So we have to talk about J.D. Vance, because of the role “Hillbilly Elegy” played in setting up and giving a kind of permission for these stories to flourish into a whole subgenre. He says he’s not running for office now. I was surprised — I thought that’s what his book was setting him up for.And one of the hallmarks of the Trump Country backlash after Trump won the election, which continued after the inauguration when things really started moving, is a really ugly kind of schadenfreude. Watch them get what they deserve: ha ha, you voted for this, there goes your water protection, say goodbye to your health insurance. Not only were they going to project angst, but also helplessness and anger, without delving into the reasons why water protections in the region weren’t great to begin with.

I’m a little bit surprised, too.

It does feel like it’s become, for every Appalachian writer, activist, scholar that I’m aware of, a whole part-time second job to respond to Vance’s narrative. “Hillbilly Elegy” has been adopted by universities as a book-in-common, it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list. There was a point in time when I would meet people and they’d hear that I’m from Kentucky and they’d just be really excited to talk to me about it. That was the book about Kentucky — kind of — that they'd read, or heard of.

That is exactly my experience, too. And that’s how I got started formulating the ideas for this book. My partner and I had just moved to Texas because he was taking an academic job as an assistant professor. And I made so much small talk and had painful, awkward conversations with people I was just getting to know, people who didn’t know what my story was — ["Hillbilly Elegy"] is what they wanted to talk to me about. This is how they wanted to connect with me, in this really superficial way.

And it wasn’t like, “What do you think about this book?” It was sort of like making me answer for the ideas that are in the book about the culture in Appalachia, why the economic decline is persistent, and issues with addiction. There was this really accusatory way that people would talk to me about this book, like, “What do you have to say about this?” And it was really, really bizarre to me, because I was in places that had obviously, like anywhere else in the country, their share of social problems. Some are very similar to Appalachia. In Texas, the oil industry has an impact similar to the coal industry. And people were just like, “Tell me, why do you think people don’t behave?” That’s basically what they were asking me.

They really thought that they had learned a deep truth from this book, and that they could now deploy this truth out in the world to understand these really complex things that were happening around them that authentically are extremely disturbing. It’s understandable that people would want a navigator out of these complex conversations that we’re having.

I’m going to ask you to generalize a little bit here. One class of people who really bought into this book and his ideas seem to be educated, media savvy, serious people. It’s a memoir with cultural generalizations painted around personal anecdotes and shaped by his own specific family story. What was it about this narrative that made people drop their skepticism?

I think it speaks with a very rare sense of authority about a region that can be misunderstood, and that’s part of the attraction. There have been authors who have also assumed this yoke of being seen as interpreters of their culture. One that always springs to my mind is Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Ta-Nehisi Coates, to my mind, has been really reflective about what it felt like when white liberals seized on “Between the World and Me” and his other writing as sort of the blueprint for understanding African-American culture. Beyond the obvious differences between them, J.D. Vance has not, he seems thrilled to assume this role in public life and has not been reflective about it. He caps it off a bit with this humility thing that he does, but he’s really embraced the role of the explainer-in-chief of the Appalachian region, and the Rust Belt as well. He’s there, a talking head that will explain to you what the problems are. I don’t think J.D. Vance is clairvoyant. When he was setting this book in motion, there’s no way that he could predict that this political moment would develop in the way that it did specifically. But at the same time it’s a niche that’s presented itself to him that he’s enthusiastically assumed.

I think it is aligned with his eagerness to deploy certain conservative politics and certain conservative outlooks. It kills me that this is a book that liberals, in particular, and college-educated people think, “Well, he set his politics aside just to write from the heart.” They don’t understand, or perhaps they do and they dismiss it, but blaming poverty on poor people is a political opinion. These are people that would be mortified if they had to teach something out of Charles Murray’s bibliography, but they really love “Hillbilly Elegy” and what it says about the poor.

I wonder if there’s some permission being given to the upper-middle class here — from someone who, voting record aside, looks like them, travels in the same circles — to buy into a very conservative, simplistic narrative about poverty and bootstraps and discipline.

It doesn’t require anything of them, of the readers of the book. They don’t have to do anything, right? Because the problems are all in the individuals that he’s describing, they’re moral and cultural flaws. So if you’re reading this book, you’re not thinking, “what kind of work do I have to do on myself or within my community to help these problems?” You’re going to be relieved as hell when you feel, “I do not have to do anything. These people need to fix themselves.”

I think that’s a big part of the attraction to this book: this mercy that you can just read about problems and not feel obligated or guilty about [not] doing anything about them. You hear, especially from white liberals [the sentiment of], “Well, there’s only so much white guilt I can take.” So this is a book that makes them feel like they can be engaged with social problems without that sense of guilt that they are taught to carry out into the world and use as the basis for social action or social justice.

One of the more upbeat media narratives that’s been coming out from the region lately is around Silicon Holler and the push for coding bootcamps to teach out-of-work coal miners how to be qualified for digital economy jobs. This is a narrative that everyone loves, because everyone wins, right? There’s a political undercurrent to it, too, like maybe we can turn you into people we understand by giving you jobs that we understand.

The article you wrote for Belt magazine, where you describe some of the companies as “new-collar grifters,” shows a whole other side to that narrative. Can you talk a bit about how that industry is working right now in Appalachia? Is the willingness to throw money and exposure to these programs creating bigger problems?

In Appalachia, a lot of us are operating under the assumption that the coal industry is on life support right now. Someone is pulling the plug. The functional end of coal will happen within our lifetime.

The idea is this is a time when we can retake control of our economic fortune. And how do we do that? Because we have lingering environmental issues because of the coal industry, we have depopulation — we have lots of young people leaving — we don’t have a robust economic transition plan in place. So when people try to brainstorm economic boosterism to the region, they are really attaching to ideas about exactly what you just said — "modernity" is the key word. There’s lots of things going on like drone usage, and virtual reality technology, all that stuff is a specific form of Appalachian economic boosterism in which we are going to crash, like the Kool-Aid Man, out of the past like, “Boom! We’re here. We’re modern. This is Appalachia!”

And the problem is that workforce development is not a substitution for buying into this idea that there’s a common good for us, and that we’re all in this together. I think this is a case made really beautifully by Tressie McMillan Cottom in [her book] “Lower Ed” — over time we’ve [come to rely on] piecemeal training that puts the burden on the worker to always level up and bone up and get new skills and make themselves relevant in the workplace market. The reality is the workplace market is fickle, it’s hyperlocal and there’s really very little agency that some people have to navigate that system without assuming great risk. So coding camps are a high-risk — and can be low-reward — solution to economic diversification.

There are great coding companies and coding bootcamp operators in Appalachia, but there are also those like the ones that I wrote about that seem to be absorbing a lot of federal aid that’s coming into the region to do workforce development and not really giving people who enter the program anything of value in return.

That has a long history, not only with blue collar industries but also during moments like, for example, when the GI Bill first came into being and there was lots of money for education. People opened shoeshine training academies and things like that to siphon federal money away for programs that [are supposed to] serve poor and vulnerable people. We have to be super cautious about that. I want the Silicon Holler folks to win. I want them to win and I want them to do good in the world. But I know and I believe that they’re only a piece of the puzzle that we have to work on together. That includes raising the minimum wage for all workers regardless of what industry they’re in and separating health insurance from employment. Also maybe considering a basic income for people who are facing long-term unemployment who do have the potential to benefit from retraining. There are lots of ways I think we can compromise on economic development, but moving full steam ahead with this very optimistic spirit that everything that Silicon Valley does can be done here and it will save us is really flawed.

The flipside is that the unsexy economic development plan for a long time has been build more prisons. In your book you write: "after the mines close, the prisons open." The prison industry is a major player in Appalachia. Whenever there’s a politician being asked how to bring jobs to the area, one of the answers has been, “we're going to open a prison.” But that prison density has not transformed the economy. What is the disconnect there? And why don’t we talk about the prison reform activism that’s happening in Appalachia?

Central Appalachia is still one of the most concentrated areas for prison growth in the country. To me it’s a continuation of a logic that’s very common in our country: Economic development comes with certain acceptable risks, and it’s acceptable to harm certain people for the greater good. In Appalachia, the more recognizable story is through the coal industry — the idea that we have to unfortunately hurt the environment to be able to continue our way of life, and some people unfortunately will get very ill, and that’s just the way things go. The prison story has become that, too. It’s rooted in white supremacy, and in the idea that white people have to hurt African-Americans, or be complicit in the suffering of African-Americans, by doing the only work that is available to them and becoming part of the prison industrial complex. It’s really deeply disturbing.

People in Appalachia do incredible things through their activism in terms of prison. And I think everyone should know about this. Because a lot of what they do, they don’t have a lot of tools at their disposal, right? We’re talking about people who work in radio stations and who are very talented, don’t have a tremendous amount of money, and don’t have super powerful platforms. So they do it in the old-school ways that are really familiar to us: broadcasting radio signals into prison, fundraising in the community to actually go to people’s houses and pick them up and take them to visit their loved ones in prison, building power across borders in the region and borders within communities. It’s really profound when people learn about all the ways that activism takes shape, and all the connections between historic anti-capitalist activism in Appalachia and the very modern problem that we’re facing in our current moment.

“Anti-capitalist activism in Appalachia” is not a phrase you see in the “What’s the matter with Trump Country?” stories. And prison reform is anti-racism activism, which is also not something that you see attached to the regional identity of Appalachia.For real.

So what are some other myths about Appalachia that you find yourself pushing back against?

One thing that is really important to the book is this myth — and you’ll recognize it — that Appalachia is a region of takers and that we have, over time, come to be complacent on federal assistance, and that we absorb far much more in vital resources than we deserve. Because there’s always this question of who deserves what in these conversations that people like to have in the mainstream about Appalachia. That obscures the historic function of Appalachia, which has been for the past hundred years to provide energy for the rest of the country.

People today look at the region and they say, “Oh, coal is dead.” But that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t had a cost that we’re still contending with. It doesn’t mean that it hasn’t shaped land ownership patterns in Appalachia beyond what people even within the region can comprehend. It’s affected wealth distribution in the region, health, environment, everything like that.

So when you say, “People in Appalachia, they just like suck up food stamps and things like that,” I get really defensive and angry about that. And it’s a hard position to have, because you do risk sounding like, if you’re a progressive person speaking back about this, one of those crazy war-on-coal people the media like to use. “Coal keeps the lights on!” It’s a really hard position to articulate and I have much respect for people like [journalist and former coal miner] Nick Mullins who work specifically on changing the media narrative about the coal industry.

But Appalachia gives and Appalachia takes, and this is the way that the country is supposed to function, in terms of its common good. We give energy, land, labor, and take things back in the form of federal assistance and things of that nature. It’s not anymore predatory than, for example, Californians getting federal assistance to convert their businesses into solar energy, for example. This is just the way that the country has been built to function: We have an economic purpose and it’s fair to demand certain benefits back in exchange for our labor, which is the kind of labor that is particularly dangerous and hazardous and has reshaped our world completely.

So the myth I really, really hate — and this is a failing among liberals and conservatives — is that Appalachia is a drain on the country's resources. Because even after the functional end of coal, there are plans in place to harness fracked gas and other forms of petrochemical energy within the region.

Can the Left win back Appalachia? What do you think they would have to do in order to do that?

It’s probably the question that I spend the most time in my personal life thinking about. A friend of mine told me that Appalachia feels like one of the few places in America where people organically understand the difference between a leftist and a liberal, without you jumping in and making those connections for them. They understand that there are Democrats, and that there is a separate category of people on the left, and that often their agendas and priorities don’t align.

I hate to sound like somebody who’s stuck in the past but I think there are lessons that we can take in Appalachia from the success of Bernie Sanders in the [2016 Democratic] primary. Primarily, for me, that’s thinking about ways that health insurance connects people across broad spectrums. That tells me that there’s potential to work towards health care reform as a common good. I think that there are other examples where people can come together regardless of their politics. A big one that’s particular to my part of the region is fighting natural gas pipelines. This is something where people find common ground — conservatives, liberals and leftists alike. It might not be sustainable, but that’s at least something that we have in common.

The word “neoliberal” is really complicated, but I think that lots of people in Appalachia do understand that there has been this gradual change in politics that demands that the market fix what’s wrong with various pockets of our country. And so long in Appalachia we’ve been told that we’re going to invest in businesses, we’re going to give businesses tax breaks, it’s going to revitalize the region. We’re going to get you some workforce training, we’re going to send you to community college, and that is going to help you out of the system. And I think that there’s great potential for a type of politician or a type of politics to come into Appalachia that will reject that, and try to focus on labor protections, and things of that nature, to give people a boost.

It would be more realistic, for me, if I was a politician, to come into a community and say, “I want to challenge the hell out of right-to-work laws” than me saying “I’m going to send your kids to community college so things will be better for them than they are for you.” That’s really the difference in left and liberal-leaning politics in Appalachia. People with neoliberal politics ask us to adopt certain solutions so things can be better for our kids, it seems, and leftist politics has the hope that we can make things better here and now instead. I think [the leftist message] would resonate to more people than outside audiences might imagine in Appalachia.

What aren’t people getting wrong about Appalachia? Do you see anything in the wider, national conversation that is right on the money?

One of the things that I don’t talk a lot about in my book is the opioid crisis, which is obviously a big part of the narrative of Appalachia and also the Rust Belt. The reason I don’t spend too much time talking about it is because my book is about debunking misconceptions, and there’s not a lot of misconceptions about how tremendously world-shattering the opioid crisis is here. I have individual quibbles with the way that narrative is shaped, but the reality is that the opioid crisis is tremendously awful in Appalachia, and I think that overall, the narrative is true to life, shall we say. Of course part of the coverage that you have to examine is why it is that white opioid addiction, or white addiction, is being presented in different ways than for example African-American addictions, but that’s beyond the scope of the information that I set out to talk about in the book. But I can confirm that the way that the media generally has covered the opioid crisis in Appalachia has been very strong.

Are there any lessons to be learned from how those stories have been told and how that treatment can be applied to other topics that concern the region?

One thing that happens when people are covering the opioid crisis in Appalachia or elsewhere is that national and local media partners have to work more closely together. Because [national media] want access to sources and subjects and people to talk to, and you have to have a certain sense of trust when you’re talking about people who are very vulnerable. That’s just my perception as someone who doesn’t work too deeply in the media. My understanding is there have been more of those national and local partnerships for opioid crisis coverage than, say, in political coverage.

I also think that some of the national narratives — again, shaped by voices in local media — reflect a narrative about Appalachia that is authentically true: Pharmaceutical companies have used Appalachia as a laboratory, essentially, to experiment, and a lot of important people in this chain of command, like the DEA or local physicians, have really looked the other way. That is a narrative that has a lot resonance in Appalachia — not just about opioids, but about coal and anything having to do with the environment, too.

===

https://www.alternet.org/economy/citizens-begin-reclaiming-coal-country-after-decades-corporate-land-grabs

Across central Appalachia, once-thriving mining communities have been ravaged by the collapse of the coal industry and the flight of jobs from the region. For a region that remains rich in natural resources, Appalachia’s local governments continue to struggle to fund basic services such as housing, education and roads.

One significant factor in the region’s decline is the land. Since the coal industry began its decline, and even beforehand, millions of acres have essentially been removed from the region’s economic production and tax rolls, and nothing has replaced them.

“Land is the most important thing to us, yet it’s not clear at all who owns it,” says Karen Rignall, assistant professor of community and leadership development at the University of Kentucky. “Without broad-scale knowledge of the patterns of land ownership this region cannot work together to move forward. But who owns it on paper is not always who owns it in actuality. That takes time and money to find out.”

The coal industry of central Appalachia has been on the decline for more than 30 years, with West Virginia and Kentucky losing more than 38,000 coal jobs in that time. As coal companies pulled out, they took with them the dollars that small towns used to use to fund their schools and infrastructure, and left behind abandoned mines, polluted rivers and vast swaths of vacant land.

All over Appalachia, communities and organizations are working around the clock to come up with a way to “justly transition” the Appalachian economy to whatever comes next.

Rignall and postdoctoral researcher Lindsay Shade are collaborating with a growing group of citizens that think a part of the answer to a post-coal economy may lie with an old land ownership study—and have been inspired by it to do a new one.

Who Owns What

In 1978, a group of citizens from the central Appalachians came together in frustration over what they felt were unjust practices of land ownership and distribution. Strip mining operations used mineral rights to displace people from their homes, and local business were unable to develop the land because it was owned by corporations based in other states. But in those discussions one common theme emerged: not knowing who owned what land and why was a major obstacle when it came to creating a stronger and more diverse Appalachian economy.

“Land is a means for distributing and exercising power,” Gene Wunderlich, an economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, said at the time.

But finding good information about local land ownership was much harder than it seemed. Details about who held title to a piece of land often was obscured by opaque or incomplete record-keeping.

In many cases, coal companies may deliberately obscure their names and records. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, the records in Knott County, Kentucky, are so complicated that the county has no system to find out the truth; they simply must accept coal companies’ tallies of their holdings and debt.

Without better data about land ownership, the coalition formed in the late 1970s realized it would never be able to argue for the kinds of deep changes necessary when it came to resources and power in Appalachia.

Researchers at the Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, assembled a team of more than 60 volunteers to study the land ownership patterns of 80 mountain counties in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. The investigators were activists, researchers, scholars, and citizens who received training in how to examine county property tax records to determine land ownership, the location and value of property owned, and property tax amounts. The Appalachian Regional Commission funded the publication of the results of the survey in 1981.

The report found that nearly 75 percent of the surface acres surveyed were owned by entities based outside the Appalachian region; 80 percent of the mineral rights also had out-of-state owners.Though the value of both the land and the minerals below it had increased rapidly over the years, local governments had not experienced a corresponding increase in property tax money—more than 75 percent of mineral rights owners in the region still pay less than 25 cents per acre in property tax, thanks to large tax breaks or lower rate structures that absentee corporate owners are able to take advantage of.The report, “Land Ownership Patterns and Their Impacts on Appalachian Communities,” found “ownership of land and minerals to be highly concentrated among a few absentee and corporate owners, resulting in little land actually being available or accessible to local people.”

Without those cuts, landowners would likely pay taxes more in line with the land’s actual assessed value—at least 75 cents per acre, which is comparable to what local people paid. As a result, local communities were disadvantaged by “the failure of the property tax system to tax the region’s wealth adequately and equitably,” the report said.

Mixed Results

In terms of concrete effects, the old study was used for grassroots political action all six participating states. It led to the formation of the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition (now Kentuckians for the Commonwealth), which eliminated a law that had previously allowed coal companies to strip-mine over the objections of locals who owned the surface right to the land. The Western North Carolina Alliancepushed for passage of the Mountain Resources Planning Act, a state law that required coordination between energy projects and environmental protections. (The law, passed with broad bipartisan support in 2009, was repealed in 2013 after Republicans won control of both houses of the state General Assembly.) In West Virginia, the study was used as evidence in court, leading to a judge finding that rural counties were unconstitutionally discriminated against because of the tax system that was used to fund local schools.

However, the study failed to inspire the systemic changes many were hoping for, possibly because the coal industry was still a major economic force in many rural communities. That’s no longer the case.

“This is a moment when everybody understands the necessity for thinking about political and economic issues in really different ways,” Rignall says. “Tax structures always favored coal companies and other forms of extraction. But now the big power brokers are losing some of their power. People are coming to the table who wouldn’t normally be willing.”

The Appalachian Citizen’s Law Center recently found it will cost more than $9.6 billion to reclaim the 6.2 million acres of lands and waters of abandoned and polluted mine sites.

President Obama also pushed hard to create the Reclaim Act and the Power Initiative, two federal programs designed to reinvest money into coal communities and fund the reclamation of abandoned mine sites.

But, as many communities are finding, even if they have money for redevelopment, getting control of the land is another challenge. Once again, communities and activists have been coming up against the barriers of multilayered leases and rights structures.

Building on the Past

Rignall and Shade found popular support for another land study. West Virginia did one of its own in 2012 and 2013, and the idea began to spread to other Appalachian activist communities. In September 2016, Rignall and Shade and other scholars convened a preliminary gathering of about 60 people at the University of Kentucky to decide on whether to do a new land study, and if so, what the group hoped it would accomplish.

They found overwhelming interest in working together to find answers about land ownership across Appalachia. People from old community organizers to undergraduate college students invested in their futures showed up to create an intergenerational movement.

Rignall and Shade hope to mobilize citizens across Appalachia to become volunteer researchers to find out who owns the land in their communities, just as the previous group did. The group is seeking financial support from many sources including grants and funding to pay the researchers for their time, but as of right now, it’s being conducted do-it-yourself-style on a very small budget.

“The long term big vision is reclaiming control over the land in a way that benefits local Appalachian people directly,” Shade says.

The new land study is in its early phases of development. Rignall and Shade want to make sure it is a collaborative and grassroots project that responds to the needs of diverse local communities.

One challenge is that different communities need different strategies to get the most out of their land resources. In southwest Virginia, for example, the biggest problem is how counties can get more tax money.

“Real estate taxes are based on fair market value, determined by comparable sales within the last five years,” David Rouse writes in an email.

Rouse, a professor at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise who has been volunteering on the land study project, said that when company-owned land is transferred to another division or sold as part of a corporate merger, those parcels tend to be appraised at lower values than those sold through conventional real estate transactions.

“With the loss of coal severance tax, this has caused a serious strain on county revenues affecting both school budgets and infrastructure,” he says.

In Pike County, Kentucky for example, the local government has pushed for more adequate assessments and enforcement of delinquent taxes as a tool to get absentee owners to sell the land back to the county. That process depends on the cooperation of local officials who might not adequately enforce tax collection for a variety of political reasons, Shade says.

“You have this amount of time to sell or we’re going to tax the hell out of you,” she summarizes. “They got a lot of land for development that way.” But for this to work for any given county depends on the support of the local government. Other communities are turning instead to forming land trusts to reacquire the land: In northeastern Tennessee, the Clearfork Community Institute and Woodland Community Land Trust have acquired 450 acres of former mine property since 1997.

An Organic Approach

Rignall and Shade see this diversity of potential approaches as an asset.

“Everyone who’s involved is doing something different, which is fantastic,” Shade says. “We hope it continues to evolve in an organic fashion. We want this to help transform power dynamics broadly across the region, so our approach has to be varied and dynamic.”

Terran Young, an Appalachian Transition Fellow hired through the Highlander Center to work on the new land study, also has been reaching out to the community in southwestern Virginia to evaluate their concerns and needs. She hopes to attract more people interested in contributing to a renewed land study.

“The community is very willing to listen to the presentations but now we are at the point where we want to get real community involvement,” Young says. “We hope to gather a group of community researchers and get them trained in the methodology that can not only help with the land study but also be a skill they can have for life.”

The land study leaders also are trying to balance are the needs of local people and the larger-scale issues affecting the region as a whole.

“This really isn’t about an academic study,” Rignall says. “This is about a grassroots effort to reimagine a movement and about who gets the power, and it will develop organically and messily. This movement has an energy that’s really different from anything I’ve ever been a part of.”

She hopes that the process of conducting the new study will be just as transformative as the results.

“In bringing people to ask these questions, you are also bringing people together to ask much bigger questions,” Rignall says. “And in coming together, people gain skills and knowledge. There’s much to be hopeful for here. It’s already happening.”

(This story was funded in part by a grant from the One Foundation.)

Emma Eisenberg has written for YES! Magazine, Vice, Catapult, The New Republic, Salon, and other publications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Kentucky,_2016

Although Kentucky was won twice by southern Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Donald Trump easily carried Kentucky with 62.54% of the vote, to 32.69% of the vote for Hillary Clinton. Trump won Kentucky by the largest margin of any Republican since Richard Nixon in 1972, and swept counties across the state.^[1] Clinton only carried the state's two most urban and populous counties, Jefferson County, home to Louisville, and Fayette County, home to Lexington, both of which traditionally vote Democratic.

Trump made history when he won Elliott County. In the nearly 150-year history of the county, it had voted Democratic in every presidential election, never Republican. Trump ended that tradition and won Elliott County handily with 2,000 votes to Clinton's 740, or 70%-26%.

hmmn

https://mcdonaldhopkins.com/Insights/Blog/Energy-Insights/2016/11/09/How-Appalachian-Shale-delivered-the-presidency-to-Trump

http://www.alternet.org/human-rights/root-problem-american-health-care

M:{ountain Dew, the carbonated fluorescent-green soda that Willy the Hillbilly declared “will tickle your innards” in a 1966 }:{, has long been a staple of Appalachia. It was officially developed in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1900s, but it has ties to the wheat and rye distilled by Irish immigrants who settled in the region as coal miners during the previous century. Today, coal has left Appalachia, as have a host of other industries that brought economic opportunity. Mountain Dew, however, remains culturally significant. Sarah Baird, a writer who grew up in Eastern Kentucky, recently }:wrote:{ about the importance of the drink to her sense of identity, saying, “It’s not just a beverage—it’s a portable sense of home.”}:

In a region long undergoing a cultural and economic crisis, Appalachia’s thirst for Mountain Dew is perhaps the lesser of many evils. Opioid addiction, smoking, chewing tobacco, lack of access to municipal water systems, and the necessary preoccupation with getting food on the table over worrying about nutritional value are also having an enormous effect on people’s teeth. The soda is ruining teeth, in an epidemic known as “Mountain Dew-mouth.” The acid causes erosion and the sugar abets decay.

“I would see a lot of kids who had a mouth full of rotting teeth,” Dr. Edwin Smith, a traveling dentist who drove his mobile dental truck for 12 years throughout Kentucky, told CNN last September. “They were in pain, and they’d be hurting at school.”

In Kentucky, the state with highest proportion of adults under 65 without teeth, Smith has witnessed the extremes of Mountain Dew-mouth—toddlers with baby teeth filled with cavities, kids who won't brush their teeth because of inflamed gums, and teenagers who have pulled out their own rotting teeth with pliers.

Other forces are at play. Hundreds of prescription medications, as well as chewing tobacco and cigarettes, cause dry mouth, preventing the natural flow of saliva and making teeth more susceptible to decay. Use of these substances is rampant in Appalachia; a single Kentucky county filled prescriptions for over 2 million doses of painkillers last year, which is about 150 doses for every man, woman and child. Kentucky is also the state with the most smokers, followed closely by West Virginia, according to a Gallup study. On top of that, without municipal water systems, people rely on well water, which is unfluoridated—or they drink more Mountain Dew to quench their thirst. Nearly half of the people in Kentucky, and 25 percent of the national population, depend exclusively on well water, posing a threat to natural resources as well as people’s teeth.

With 26 percent of preschool-age kids suffering from tooth decay and 15 percent of young adults extracting a tooth because of erosion, Mountain Dew-mouth in Appalachia has created one of the worst dental health problems in the United States according to a legal brief by Priscilla Harris, an associate professor at the Appalachian College of Law. Nonetheless, the factors that contribute to poor dental health are not simply Mountain Dew; they are not even specifically linked to Appalachia. Noxious substances merely exacerbate a national problem that is affecting every region of the United States. Bad oral hygiene could be significantly remedied through the American health care system; that is, if the United States adopted a holistic approach to health care. However, as it stands now, dental care is treated separate from health care, launching an epidemic that weighs heaviest on those who need it most—the rural poor.

Dental health is essential to overall health, and serious and sometimes fatal illness can result from untreated oral conditions. A problem as common as gingivitis (excess plaque) can result in serious health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Yet throughout the United States, from remote areas of Alaska and across the contiguous 48, poor people struggle to get access to regular dental care, relying on charity clinics and hospital emergency rooms. According to the federal government, more than 50 million Americans live in areas officially designated as Dental Health Professional Shortage Areas, and must travel hundreds of miles to get help. A suburb of Washington, D.C., could have one dentist for 350 residents, while Dickenson County, Virginia, has one dentist for every 15,468 residents.

The distinction between dental care and health care extends to insurance. Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program that provides health coverage for 72 million people, reckons dental benefits as optional for adults, leaving it up to states to decide. It was not until the Affordable Care Act passed under President Obama in 2010 when Medicaid gave dental care to children under 19. Medicare, the federal health care program that covers 55 million seniors and disabled people, has never included insurance for routine dental services.

While Medicaid, as the medical safety net for the poor, should provide help for those with dental needs who cannot afford to pay, only 15 states offer full dental benefits and five states offer nothing at all, as reported in a study by Pew. However, even in the states that do offer dental benefits, poor patients have difficulty getting appointments. As an isolated industry, dentistry has remained private and unencumbered by the brunt of market forces. Dentists cannot turn away patients based on “race, creed, color, sex, or national origin” according to the American Dental Association's Principles of Ethics and Code of Conduct; however, dentists can turn away patients based on their ability to pay. In order to cover high overhead costs, pay back dental school bills and earn an income, many dentists refuse to treat people on Medicaid. In 2013, only 34 percent of general dentists accepted Medicaid patients, according to Pew.

With limited benefits through Medicaid and no benefits through Medicare, in order to receive insurance, people must purchase private plans or employer-provided plans. Most dental insurance limits annual benefits to between $1,000 and $1,500 per person—this cap has hardly changed since the mid-'80s, despite inflation. Employer-provided plans—assuming the patient has a job and the job offers a plan—can exceed $500 a year or more and do little to ease the burden when other concerns take priority. So millions of Americans go without dental insurance.

More than a third of Americans do not have dental coverage, according to a Washington Post article. Appalling already, the state of dental care in America faces even greater challenges with the threat of the Trump-backed American Health Care Act currently being debated in the Senate after passing in the House at the beginning of May. The ADA has reported that Obamacare's requirement to provide dental care for children under 19 will be rolled back, and the 5.4 million adults who gained coverage under the Medicaid expansion will lose all dental benefits.

Without insurance, people often go years without seeing a dentist. Toothaches are the most common problem, causing lack of sleep and difficulty eating. With time, a toothache can become another entity entirely. Germs collect, white blood cells accumulate, pus escalates, and suddenly a swelling, debilitating dental carbuncle has taken residence in one’s mouth.

Dee Matello, a small business owner and mother of three in Laurel, Maryland, had not been to a dentist in nine years. To compensate for the cracked molar on the left side of her mouth, she had simply learned to chew on the right side. Like many Americans without dental insurance, it was not until Matello heard a free dental clinic would be held in the town of Salisbury, just 20 minutes away from her home, that fixing the cracked tooth seemed like a possibility.

[img]“It’s always bothering me,” Matello told the Washington Post as she waited outside the Wicomico Civic Center in Salisbury. Over the course of two days, among the reclining chairs and portable dental equipment that had been erected on the civic center floor, 116 dentists provided $1 million worth of care to 1,165 patients, many of whom had traveled across state lines to endure long lines and the bitter cold as they waited for treatment. After getting an x-ray and having the tooth extracted—a procedure that would have cost from $600 to $800 in a regular dentist's office—Matello left the clinic, wondering why people who work hard and put faith in their government for help are obligated to endure such demeaning treatment.

At the University of Maryland dental school, a team of researchers explored the effect of toothaches in poor Maryland adults like Matello: 44.3 percent of their respondents reported having experienced more than five toothaches in the past 10 years. Nearly half said that their most recent toothache had caused them the worst pain possible and interfered with many aspects of their daily lives. When initial strategies to remedy their pain, such as nonprescription medicines, failed, many resorted to seeing a dentist.

For Americans who do not have health insurance and need dental treatment immediately, the emergency room remains the only option. However, this poses a significant problem because, in the eyes of the American health care system, the mouth is separate from the rest of the body. So even though hospital visits for dental problems cost an enormous amount to the health care system as a whole—an estimated $2.7 billion over a three-year period according to one major study—people rarely receive the treatment they need.

Dr. George Kushner, the director of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, explained that he sees ER patients with dental pain on a daily basis. “I take out teeth every week that could have been saved with restorative work,” he told a reporter for USA Today. The vast majority of doctors lack the knowledge and tools to treat dental ailments. They offer the services they can, provide prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics, and recommend a dental clinic for a follow-up. However, clinics are often too crowded to meet the demand. Thus, patients leave the ER with no long-term solution for treatment.

Though pain and discomfort are unfortunate enough, lack of dental care presents other, more enduring problems. While millions of Americans suffer because of their teeth, another portion of America supports a $110 billion-a-year dental industry, investing in procedures such as gum contouring and spending up to $2,000 on a single veneer. As the wealth gap continues to increase, teeth represent the dividing line between the classes.

Glimmering pearly whites have long been a symbol of social and financial success in America. Consider what every movie star, news anchor and television personality has in common: not height, weight or ethnicity (though there is certainly an enormous amount of room for more diversity). All share an enviable smile—gleaming, bright white, smooth, ovular teeth.

In a country where significant value is placed on a perfect smile, bad teeth prevent economic mobility. The predominant jobs of the working class—waitressing, housekeeping, nursing, etc.—are in the service sector, yet these jobs are hard to come by without a certain degree of oral health. A study published in the Nation Bureau of Economic Research found that a missing tooth can result in a loss of $720 of earnings (and 178 million people are missing at least one tooth).

As she waited to have teeth removed at a free clinic in Jonesville, Virginia, Emma Marsee told Mary Otto, the author of Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, that people only want “a healthy-looking individual” taking care of them. In areas where jobs are scarce, a person’s financial security depends on her teeth. For 10 years, Otto researched and conducted interviews about oral health in America, traveling across the country attending beauty pageants and clinics, talking to dentists and patients alike. In her book, she writes:

"In the way that they disfigure the face, bad teeth depersonalize the sufferer. They confer the stigma of economic and even moral failure. People are held personally accountable for the state of their teeth in ways that they are not held accountable for many other health conditions."

Regardless of cultural influences—Mountain Dew-mouth or not—the dental health epidemic in America is rooted in the historical and political legacy of an unequal system. Without access to preventative measure like regular oral checkups and teeth cleanings, as well as comprehensive care, America’s poor fight an uphill battle, involving increased health risk, social stigma and reinforced economic disadvantage.

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