Source: Charleston Gazette-Mail

April 25, 2021

 

“The pain hasn’t let up.”

The United Mine Workers of America summed up the plight of coal miners and their communities midway through a plan released last week for what the union called a “true energy transition,” acknowledging U.S. coal industry employment had dropped 52% from 2011 to December 2020.

“Change is coming,” the plan said, “whether we seek it or not.”

Predictably, supporters of an energy transition applauded the UMWA for its proposals.

“We’re thrilled that the United Mine Workers support the necessary transition from reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy,” the Washington, Pennsylvania-based environmental nonprofit Center for Coalfield Justice said in a statement.

“We can’t move forward with a clean energy economy without coal miners and coal communities,” said Ted Boettner, senior researcher for the Ohio River Valley Institute, a climate-focused think tank. “The UMWA knows that better than anyone. Their plan to preserve coal country is a huge step forward to ensuring that no worker is left behind and that smart federal investments and policies can provide a solid foundation for working families and coal impacted areas.”

But the UMWA soon realized its top goal was being overlooked.

“There’s some misinformation floating around, particularly in the southern coalfields of West Virginia and some other places with respect to our position on coal miners’ jobs,” UMWA International President Cecil E. Roberts said in a video the union posted Thursday on YouTube. “Rule number one … was that current coal miners would keep their jobs and we would actually create additional jobs by bringing back the steel industry.”

 

 

In a National Press Club discussion Monday that also featured Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Roberts suggested metallurgical coal mining could fuel renewed U.S. steel production in support of infrastructure upgrades across the country.

The UMWA, Roberts said, does not support the Green New Deal, a climate proposal championed by progressives aiming to create jobs by transforming the country’s infrastructure and energy systems while moving away from fossil fuels.

The plan adopts some of clean energy advocates’ positions, including expanding tax credits for a buildout of renewable supply chain manufacturing in coalfield areas, constructing facilities on former coal mine properties and fully funding reclamation needs for all anticipated abandoned mine lands.

Five Senate Republicans, including Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., released their framework for an infrastructure bill dramatically scaled back from the Biden administration proposal. The GOP plan would stick to more traditional infrastructure targets such as roads and bridges, public transit systems, rail and airports and broadband, totaling $568 billion — a fraction of President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion plan.

Biden initiatives include vehicle electrification, cleaning up abandoned mines, plugging orphan oil and gas wells and upgrading child care facilities.

“What do people think of in our states when they think of infrastructure? Roads and bridges; public transit systems; rail — which could be cargo, passenger rail; water and wastewater … ports and inland waterways; airports; broadband … and lastly water storage and safety,” Capito said in introducing the Republican proposal Thursday.

Manchin opposes the Biden plan because it relies on a corporate tax hike from 21% to 28%, which Manchin has said is 3% too high.

“The bill as we have it right now is a pretty expanding, what we call omnibus bill, and we’re trying to get it in different quadrants that we can do it,” Manchin said during the National Press Club discussion.

 

Limits to common ground

Clean energy advocates looking for a clean sweep through the legislative process to an infrastructure package transformative enough to address the climate crisis are bound to be disappointed.

“To me, it’s politics that clouds the future,” former Wood County Commissioner Wayne Dunn said in response to the GOP’s substantially narrower infrastructure framework.

“I think the question is, infrastructure in service to what?” Morgantown Mayor Ron Dulaney Jr. said. “If the idea of an interstate system or highway system is the transportation of goods and of people, then at what point does looking at hydrogen fuel of bus systems or electrical vehicle fleets or mass transit in general, at what point does that not become part of the infrastructure?”

The UMWA energy transition initiative is limited in its embrace of renewable energy, not including any renewables-based provisions beyond tax incentives for renewable supply-chain manufacturing in coalfield areas.

The backbone of the plan is carbon capture and storage research, development and buildout, goals that West Virginia’s congressional delegation and the Biden administration both support.

Carbon capture infrastructure would transport carbon dioxide from sites of capture to locations where it can be either used in manufacturing or sequestered safely underground.

Capturing, removing and storing carbon is seen as critical in the struggle to slow climate change. Politicians representing constituencies such as West Virginia have embraced developing technologies to make those processes easier as a way to keep coal in the energy mix.

In September, the International Energy Agency said carbon capture, use and storage technologies alone contribute both to reducing emissions in key sectors directly and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to balance the emissions that are hardest to prevent. That, the agency noted, is a critical part of reaching the net-zero emissions goals that a growing number of governments and businesses have set for themselves.

The UMWA proposal dismisses what it calls the “‘just transition’ wishful thinking so common in the environmental community.”

“There must be a set of specific, concrete actions that are fully-funded and long-term,” the plan insists.

 

Tripping on wires

The easiest and most efficient way to fund a true coalfield worker transition, the UMWA argues, is through a “wires” charge on retail electric power sales, paid by utility customers, which the union said would add less than $3 a month to an average residential electric bill.

The union says a wires charge would incentivize and expedite carbon capture and storage technology and provide needed resources to coal communities.

But Emmett Pepper, policy director for Energy Efficient West Virginia, thinks a wires charge for carbon capture and storage wouldn’t be a good use of taxpayer resources.

“I think that, generally, if the goal is to provide long-term funding for economic transition in coal-impacted communities, the plan seems pretty decent,” Pepper said. “Should [carbon capture and storage] be part of an economic transition plan? Maybe, but it should not be the main part of it.”

The biggest gap in the UMWA plan is business development, said Brandon Dennison, CEO of Coalfield Development, a Wayne County-based economic revitalization nonprofit group. The plan calls for a national training program for dislocated miners and their spouses.

Dennison argued for a more localized approach.

“More specifically, we have to be honest about the fact that the best job training in the world won’t matter if a community doesn’t offer very many good jobs to be trained for in the first place,” Dennison said. “So simultaneous to retraining coal workers, we need to be launching and expanding the new businesses that can employ these folks long term.”

Dennison said the federal government needs to “get in the billions” to make that happen in places like West Virginia’s southern coalfields, where the private market needs jump-started.

“Some of these new entities will work out well, some won’t. That’s the point of R and D [research and development],” Dennison said. “When a large corporation funds R and D or a university funds R and D, it’s assumed not every project will succeed.”

 

Framing the game

Perry Bryant of the West Virginia Climate Alliance said the group is “not that far away” from the UMWA regarding its coal job preservation plan.

“I’d like to have a discussion with them,” Bryant said. “There were some items in their proposal that we had questions about, but there was nothing that jumped out where we said, ‘Oh no, this is something we can’t do.’”

Even as the UMWA and clean energy advocates move toward a less uneasy embrace over transition, the nation’s energy landscape still will hinge on Congress.

With Democrats and Republicans still nearly $2 trillion apart in infrastructure package proposals, coal and clean energy advocates can’t help but recall the rocky roads on which Congress has left them stranded.

“The communities that have been hit hard by the drop in coal production and employment have received little help from Washington, even though policies developed in the Nation’s Capital are to a large degree responsible for coal’s depression,” the UMWA said in its plan.

“It’s the game that’s played, and they feel obligated at a certain point to play the game as they’re playing it,” Dunn said. “That’s why we have to overcome it.”

Written by: Mike Tony

Reach Mike Tony at mtony@hdmediallc.com, 304-348-1236 or follow @Mike__Tony on Twitter.

Source: Ohio Valley Resource 

April 20, 2021

 

United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts said he’s been hearing the term “just transition” tossed around for more than 20 years as part of the long-running, nearly Sisyphean discussion about climate change, clean energy, and coal country.

Simply put: he’s not a fan.

“I ask anybody who has been uttering those two words over the last 30 years — point to one, one ‘just transition’ in this country,” Roberts challenged. “And you can’t.”

The West Virginia native is the UMWA’s second-longest serving leader, behind only the legendary John L. Lewis. But unlike Lewis, who served during the coal industry and union’s height of power and influence, Roberts’ tenure coincides with an epic decline in coal production and employment in the U.S., and now, what could be the closing chapter for coal.

Coal employment has dropped by more than half in the past decade. More than 60 mining companies have declared bankruptcy, coal-fired power power plants are closing ahead of schedule, and the number of hourly coal workers is now at the lowest point since the government began tracking such numbers.

Now, a Democratic president who has organized labor’s support is pressing ahead with an ambitious clean energy agenda to combat climate change. At a “climate change summit” this week, timed to coincide with Earth Day, President Joe Biden is expected to announce a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Roberts fears that could bring an end to the remaining 44,100 or so coal mining jobs.

The administration has pledged to invest in coal communities as it reduces fossil fuel dependence. “We have to act on climate change,” White House Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy pledged in a March interview with the Ohio Valley ReSource, “but we also have to act to make sure that there’s no worker and no community left behind.”

Roberts is not persuaded.

“It’s one thing to want these things to happen, but it’s another thing for those things to materialize,” he said. “People in Appalachia believe that there’ll be the second coming of the Lord before they see a ‘just transition,’” he said.

So Roberts is using the leverage he has — including a close relationship with his fellow West Virginian, Sen. Joe Manchin — in order to sway Biden’s policies to allow room for coal and win support for coal communities.

In a joint appearance with Manchin on Monday, Roberts laid out broad principles that he thinks should be included in the administration’s climate and energy policy, including robust support for the controversial technology known as carbon capture and sequestration, targeted tax credits and loans for coal country jobs, and additional support for displaced miners.

In a broad-ranging interview with the ReSource, Roberts made clear that he is not a climate change denier or skeptic, and he supports many of Biden’s plans for infrastructure and renewable energy. But Roberts also made clear that coal communities in Appalachia have sacrificed enough.

“I think it would be a travesty, and we won’t support the elimination of the jobs that we still have,” he said.

His union’s stance, coupled with Manchin’s position as the potentially decisive vote in the evenly divided Senate, could become a challenge for the Biden administration’s attempt to act on the climate crisis.

 

Technological Gamble

“People might say, well, the UMWA is being awfully bold here proposing ideas to the president of the United States,” Roberts said. “But I don’t think it’s all that bold given the fact that there’s a long record here of sacrifice from coal miners in this nation, whether it’s the number of miners that’ve been killed, or the number of miners that have died from black lung, just to make this country great. There’s just no other group of workers that have contributed that much to this nation’s economy.”

Roberts is resting his argument, in part, on the historic price that miners, their communities, land, and water have paid in order to power the country. He matches that regional history with a global argument about the nature of climate change: ending coal use and its carbon emissions in the U.S. will mean little if international appetite for coal and its emissions continue apace.

While the coal industry is collapsing in the U.S., coal shows little signs of slowing in other parts of the world, especially China. A recent projection from the International Energy Agency, for example, shows a 4% increase in China’s coal consumption is likely this year, pushing CO2 emissions upward as the pandemic pause in electricity demand lifts.

This is where Roberts makes a pitch for a technology that many people in the climate change debate have given up on: carbon capture and storage, or CCS.

CCS uses advanced chemistry to strip the CO2 from the smokestacks of a power plant or manufacturing facility, then stores it in the earth — at least, theoretically. The technology, sometimes called “clean coal” by industry boosters, has been a talking point for decades, and the federal government has put hundreds of millions into its research and development. But there have been very few commercial scale applications, largely due to the prohibitive costs.

Roberts cites United Nations reports that encourage further development of CCS, and the past support for the technology from President Biden’s former boss.

“I can shut my eyes and still see Senator Barack Obama, campaigning for the presidency of the United States in Lebanon, Virginia,” Roberts said. He recalled speaking to a packed house just before Obama, who badly wanted to win over enough voters in the western coal counties of Virginia to win the swing state.

“So he knows he’s in coal country, and he knows that people are worried about their future. And he makes a great speech. And he says, ‘if we can find a way to put a man on the moon, we can find a way to burn coal cleanly,’” Roberts recalled. “And here’s the reality of the situation. Does anybody really believe that it’s impossible to find a way to burn coal cleanly? We can, we just haven’t decided that it’s worth the investment.”

The UMWA’s position paper asks to “significantly enhance” funding for CCS with a goal of a “utility-scale coal-fired” project by 2030. It also recommends 5-year waivers from any zero-carbon mandates for “coal-fired utility units that commit to installing CCS.”

 

Coal Community Support

The UMWA is also calling for more support for miners who have lost jobs and more ways to grow new jobs in coal-dependent communities.

That includes full funding of the federal Abandoned Mine Lands reclamation program, something the Biden administration has identified as a potential jobs generator, and provisions that the associated jobs will have a prevailing wage standard.

The union also wants a “significant” expansion of tax incentives for “renewable supply-chain manufacturing” in coal areas, with hiring preference given to dislocated miners and their families.

Roberts said he’s not against renewable energy, but he is bothered by the low wages and imported goods often associated with wind and solar power.

“Right now, almost all these renewable energy jobs don’t pay enough to support a family,” he said. “They are nowhere near the wages that a coal miner makes.”

In their (virtual) joint appearance Monday at the National Press Club both Roberts and Manchin said renewable energy incentives should be targeted to coal states and other fossil fuel producing regions to make up for the anticipated losses from an aggressive clean energy policy. And both criticized the renewable industry’s dependence on importing cheaper parts from China.

“We’re propping up their economy with some of the things that we have done here,” Roberts said. “So let’s produce those wind turbines here. Let’s produce those solar panels here. Let’s make them good union jobs while we’re at it. By the way, that’s not too outrageous, because it’s a part of Biden’s plan.”

Written by: Jeff Young

Source: MetroNews

April 19, 2021

Senator Joe Manchin and United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts together endorsed legislation to strengthen labor unions, pushed for federal investments in carbon capture technology, advocated for using coal to make steel in the United States and called for building up coal-producing communities that have languished in recent years.

“We’re very much interested in protecting existing coalfield jobs,” Roberts said. “I would say to our friends in government and high places that we’ve just about had all we can take of layoffs and people losing their jobs in the coalfields. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Manchin and Roberts, both prominent West Virginians, appeared together at a livestreamed National Press Club event called “Energy Transition and the Next Steps for Coal Country.”

Manchin, a Democrat, is chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

He has assumed that prominent role during overlapping debates over how to deal with climate change, how to mitigate economic hard times in communities that traditionally relied upon mining for employment and the appropriate focus of a broad-ranging infrastructure package that could provide a boost.

Manchin generated a headline today through his endorsement of the “Protect the Right to Organize Act” — often called the PRO Act — in the Senate. The bill is a priority for labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO.

The bill would enhance collective bargaining rights, strengthen workers’ right to strike and override state “right-to-work” laws.

“Fifty percent of unions fail in their first year of organizing. This legislation will level the playing field,” Manchin said, announcing he would co-sponsor the bill.

Manchin’s endorsement is significant with a 50-5o split in the U.S. Senate. But his backing is not decisive because the Senate’s filibuster rules would require 60 votes.

“Allowing people who want to join a union to have that opportunity — that’s one of the basic freedoms that we have,” Roberts said, thanking Manchin for his support.

Roberts’ appearance coincided with a release of the United Mine Workers’ set of goals called “Preserving Coal Country.”

“Change is coming, whether we seek it or not. Too many inside and outside the coalfields have looked the other way when it comes to recognizing and addressing specifically what that change must be, but we can look away no longer,” the United Mineworkers stated. “We must act, while acting in a way that has real, positive impact on the people who are most affected by this change.

Roberts noted that coal jobs fell by another 7,000 last year. That leaves about 34,000 active coal miners in the United States, he said.

“We have to think about the people who have already lost their jobs,” Roberts said. “I’m for any jobs that we can create that would be good-paying jobs for our brothers and sisters who have lost them in the UMWA.”

Roberts urged a greater embrace of metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel. The context of that point is the infrastructure proposal being debated at the federal level.

“Start making steel again,” Roberts said. “Let’s have a policy in this country — if we’re going to have infrastructure, let’s make the steel in the United States. Let’s mine metallurgical coal. Let’s have those steel mills in this country. Let’s create thousands of jobs.”

Both Manchin and Roberts urged more use of carbon capture technology to retain coal’s role in energy production. The process captures carbon dioxide emissions from sources like coal-fired power plants and either reuses it or stores it. Much research has gone into the process, but it’s been widely viewed as a high financial hurdle.

“We know we can do it commercially,” Manchin said. “We just haven’t found how we have a downstream or a value for the carbon we’re extracting.”

The UMW’s proposal released today wants the federal government to significantly enhance carbon capture and storage research and development funding with a goal of demonstrating commercial use for coal-fired utilities by 2030. It also calls for building out carbon capture infrastructure such as pipelines and injection wells.

“Someone’s going to develop this technology and it ought to be the United States of America,” Roberts said.

At a separate event, Congressman David McKinley spotlighted the possibilities of carbon capture technology. McKinley, a Republican, spoke on video with a coal miner from the Tunnel Ridge Mine outside Wheeling.

The one-minute conversation was part of the House GOP caucus’s three-day “Energy Innovation Agenda,” a virtual forum that describes conservative solutions for a better climate.

McKinley was pushing legislation to promote development of innovative carbon capture, utilization, and storage projects through the Department of Energy loan guarantee program.

Written by: Brad McElhinny