Why Coal Is Personal to West Virginia

To outsiders, coal is a commodity—tons measured, emissions debated, markets speculated. But to us, here in the hollows and hills of West Virginia, coal is not just what we dig. It’s who we are. It’s family. It’s history. It’s sacrifice layered in shale and blood and black dust, packed into every crevice of our mountains and every line on our fathers’ hands.

You can’t understand West Virginia if you don’t understand coal. And you can’t understand coal unless you’ve seen the porch light flicker as your father returns home from the mine, clothes blackened, face streaked, eyes tired but proud. Coal isn’t an industry here. It’s inheritance. It’s what our grandfathers died for, our fathers lived by, and what still feeds the dreams of sons and daughters hoping to make a life on the land their kin bled to hold.

This is not nostalgia. This is reality. This is personal.

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The Soil Beneath Our Feet

In Logan County, where my roots run deep, the coal seams are as much part of the local family tree as any surname carved into the courthouse stone. My own grandfather died from black lung. He wasn’t the first, and Lord knows he won’t be the last. Men like him didn’t ask for pity. They asked for purpose. And coal gave them that.

The coalfields were carved not by corporate boardrooms, but by men and women who came to these hills with nothing but calloused hands and steel wills. They built towns from scratch—Company houses, schoolhouses, union halls, and sanctuaries. And through flood and fire, picket line and profit bust, they stayed. We stayed. Because coal wasn’t just the paycheck. It was the promise.

Even now, with the world mocking and maligning what we do here, that promise holds. It whispers through the mist at dawn as another shift clock ticks in. It hums in the hymns sung at the little churches on the ridge. It echoes in the empty eyes of the boarded-up barber shop when the last mine in town closes.

You don’t forget that. Not if you’ve lived it.

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More Than Energy—It’s Identity

We’re told—by think tanks, by billionaires with solar panels the size of football fields—that coal is “obsolete.” That it’s dirty, outdated, unworthy of modern America.

To which I say: come walk with me down Route 10. Come to Pineville, to Welch, to Wharncliffe. Walk the rows of homes patched with tar paper, where the heat still comes from coal stoves in winter. Come shake hands with a miner who didn’t get an Ivy League degree, but built a life of quiet dignity, whose fingers were broken not by war but by work.

Coal taught us resilience. It taught us rhythm—the rhythm of shift whistles, of boots stomping mud, of paychecks counted in rough fingertips. It taught us to care for each other, because no man survives the mine alone. It taught us that labor has worth—not just in what it produces, but in the way it shapes a man’s soul.

No government grant, no green subsidy, no TED Talk can recreate that.

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The Political Betrayal

What makes it even harder to swallow is how quickly our country turned on us.

One generation ago, coal was hailed as the hero of American progress. It won wars. It lit up the night sky. It powered the steel mills and the victory ships. But today? It’s treated like a national embarrassment. The men who risked everything underground to keep America running are now told they’re the problem. That their very existence is a liability.

Let me be blunt: West Virginia has not been left behind—we’ve been pushed behind. Pushed behind by bureaucrats in D.C. who wouldn’t last ten minutes in a mine. Pushed behind by Wall Street execs who talk ESG while profiting off cheap foreign labor. Pushed behind by activists who wouldn’t know a coal auger from a clothesline.

And we’ve had enough.

This state, this proud people, has sacrificed more than its share. And still we get called backward, bitter, or worse. All because we’ve dared to hold onto the one thing that gave us a future—coal.

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Coal Is Still the Backbone

Let’s be clear about something else: coal isn’t dead. Not globally. Not nationally. And sure as hell not in West Virginia.

The United States still relies on coal for more than 16% of its electricity—and far more during peak winter months when wind fails and gas chokes. The world demand for metallurgical coal—used to make steel—has never been higher. And when disaster strikes, when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind won’t blow, it’s the coal plants that keep the lights on.

Coal is baseload. It’s insurance. It is, in the end, reliability incarnate.

But more than that, it is the one industry that can’t be outsourced. We can’t mine coal from China and call it West Virginian. We can’t build our grid on wishful thinking and overseas minerals and pretend we’re self-sufficient. If America is to be strong, it must have a strong energy backbone—and that backbone runs through the coal seams of Appalachia.

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It’s Also a Moral Issue

To me, coal isn’t just personal. It’s moral.

Because what’s happening now—the intentional dismantling of the coal industry—isn’t just a policy decision. It’s a slow-motion cultural erasure. It’s a declaration that our way of life is unworthy. That our homes, our histories, our hands—all are expendable in the name of someone else’s “sustainability.”

But true sustainability means taking care of people, not just climate models. It means lifting families out of poverty, not replacing miners with job training brochures and green PR campaigns. It means preserving traditions, not bulldozing them for federal pilot programs.

And coal miners? They don’t want handouts. They want to work. They want to matter. They want to provide for their families in the land their ancestors cleared by hand. And that, in my eyes, is righteous.

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The Road Forward

West Virginia doesn’t need sympathy. We don’t need saviors. What we need is respect—and the freedom to chart our own path forward.

That path includes coal. Not as a relic, but as a cornerstone. We can mine responsibly. We can invest in cleaner technology. But we cannot and will not abandon the industry that built us, that feeds our families, and that anchors our soul.

We don’t need to be told who we are. We already know.

We are the sons and daughters of mountain men and coal miners, of Baptist preachers and one-room schoolteachers. We are the ones who stayed when the rest left. Who dug in when the jobs dried up. Who bowed their heads in prayer when the checks bounced, and still sang hymns the next Sunday.

We are West Virginia.

And coal? Coal is our story. Our fight. Our fire.

So no, it’s not just business.

It’s personal.

And we don’t quit.