West Virginia

Speak now against the rape of Coal River Mountain

Dear Al Gore, Two months ago at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, you declared that, "If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience […]

Coal miners in West Virginia stay home in protest of anti-Obama NRA tactics

Coal production at the Blacksville No. 2 Mine in Monongalia County, W.Va., came to a halt for one day last week when all the miners stayed home in protest after a National Rifle Association camera crew tried to get them to bad-mouth Barack Obama on film. The United Mineworkers of America has endorsed the Democratic […]

CNN reports on the battle for Coal River Mountain in W.Va.

In August, we brought you the story of Coal River Mountain, one of the last mountains in West Virginia’s Coal River Valley that hasn’t been destroyed by mountaintop-removal coal mining. Residents are lobbying to build a wind farm on the mountain, but Massey Energy is moving ahead on plans to strip-mine a 10-square-mile area of […]

West Virginian advocates push to build a wind farm on a proposed mountaintop removal site

Coal River Mountain is one of the last mountains in West Virginia’s Coal River Valley that hasn’t been destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining. Massey Energy is planning to mine a 10-square-mile area of the mountain, but activists in the area are hoping to intercede with a plan to instead harvest the mountain’s wind potential. […]

W. Va. governor Manchin subsidizes his own state’s economic irrelevance with liquid coal subsidies

I’ve written before about the economic and environmental nightmare that is liquid coal. If I were a governor and an energy company proposed opening a liquid coal plant in my state, I would marshal every resource available to fight it off. You get a few dozen jobs in the short-term; in the long-term, you get […]

When taking pride in your roots means breathing local coal dust

May I suggest that literally sharing a part of your local history can, in fact, be taken too far? Snipped from The New York Times: “Coal is part of us,” said William Liptok, director of the county’s public works department. Not only does nearly every family in town have roots in mining, Mr. Liptok said, […]

Cause and effect

Here’s a sentence from a new story in the WSJ: The second-poorest state in the nation based on household income, West Virginia counts on coal to support its economy. May I suggest a rewrite? West Virginia counts on coal to support its economy; as a consequence, it is the second-poorest state in the nation based […]

Race mattered in the W.Va. primary, but will it keep mattering?

This is the second in a series of dispatches from Melinda Henneberger, who's talking to voters around the U.S. about their views on the election.

Charleston, W.Va. -- According to the exit polls, I was hanging out with a bunch of racially challenged Hillary supporters at last night's victory party here.

One in five West Virginia voters fessed up that race was an important factor in their choice of a candidate –- and they didn't mean they saw Obama's diverse heritage as a positive. How do we know that? Because of those who walked right up to pollsters and said out loud that race was the elephant in their donkey-party living room, 81 percent voted for Clinton. Not only that, but 7 percent of West Virginia voters went for John Edwards –- who ended his run decades ago, as measured in political time –- but was the only white dude still on the ballot. What does that tell us? Nothing we want to hear.

WV Supreme Court chief justice and friend to dirty coal loses reelection bid

Remember Spike Maynard? He was the chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court, the one caught canoodling around the Caribbean with mountaintop mining executive Don Blankenship — and some young women to whom, suffice to say, they were not betrothed — while Blankenship’s company, Massey Energy, had a case before the court. Maynard said […]