Reckoning Comes to Western Coal Country

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http://www.thenation.com/article/176807/reckoning-comes-western-coal-country


The Black Thunder coal mine in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, 2012. (Jeremy Buckingham)

It’s Friday night in the “energy capital of the nation,” a sprawled-out strip mall in Campbell County, Wyoming, called Gillette. In a bar on Highway 59, the liquor bottles are backlit in neon green, and a bartender covered in glitter slings Budweiser Selects to small groups of big men. Various iterations of dudes beating the daylights out of each other occupy the television screens. The man feeding the jukebox chooses rock, never country. In Gillette, coal is king, and the cattle boom is long over.

The man at the end of the bar, I’ll call him Mike, has worked in one of the mines south of Gillette for twenty-one years. He told me he makes $90,000 a year operating machinery in the pit. Mike doesn’t really want to talk to me because I “look like a liberal,” but he buys me a beer and lights up when I ask him about the “war on coal,” a staple of right-wing media. “Everyone in this bar gets up, goes to work, and we pay our taxes,” he says. “Why doesn’t Obama come down here and see what he’s declaring a war on? He wants to take away our way of life.”

If the war on coal exists, this should be its front. Running from the Big Horn Mountains east to the Black Hills and up into southeastern Montana, the Powder River Basin (PRB), as the region is known, produces nearly half the nation’s coal, some 400 million tons a year. Most of the mineral rights in the basin are federally owned, giving the government a near monopoly on Western coal stocks and significant influence in the market. Once burned, coal mined on federal land in the PRB accounts for 13 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, making it the country’s largest single-source contributor to climate change.

If anything, the government is on Mike’s side. Federal policy—specifically, the way the Department of the Interior leases land to coal companies in the Powder River Basin—has propped up the industry for more than four decades, at great cost to taxpayers and the climate. Little has changed during Obama’s tenure. Since 2011, as a result of the DoI’s leases, more than 2 billion tons of coal have been extracted from the basin. Eyeing coal markets in Asia, companies are lobbying for three export terminals in Oregon and Washington, with the capacity to more than double the tonnage of US coal sold overseas.

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1. They can't be allowed to send that coal to China