Trump Promised a Coal Comeback But America’s Miners Need an Energy Revolution
A year ago, Blackjewel abruptly shuttered and left hundreds of miners out of work in Harlan County, Ky. Federal green stimulus investment could transform the region.
Solar panels at the closed coal plant across from the Portal No. 31 Underground Coal Mine exhibit in Lynch, Kentucky.
Photographer: Dane Rhys for Bloomberg GreenBobby Stevens’s backup plan for his backup plan encountered an obstacle a few months ago. In March the coronavirus pandemic closed the Kentucky government building where he was set to take his commercial driver’s license test, which he started studying for after he got dismissed by his second coal company in a year, where he’d started working after the first one went bankrupt.
The bankruptcy of coal giant Blackjewel LLC, which terminated Stevens and about 1,700 other workers in four states, made international news last summer when some of them blocked railroad tracks in Harlan County, Ky., over unpaid wages. It didn’t take long for Stevens’s next employer, Perry County Coal LLC, to start making its own cuts. “I guess we’re going to be like a dying breed,” says Stevens. The son of a coal worker, he got his first mining job when he was 18 years old. Now, at 30, he’s leaving the industry.