Apparently feeling that owning a governor, two US Senators, and countless other public officials isn’t enough, West Virginia’s coal industry wants the state government to do more to promote the sooty black fossil fuel’s extraction, proposing an office to promote coal’s future and recruit a new generation of wage slaves to do the lethal work mining it, Mountain State Spotlight reports.
“We think we [the coal industry] will continue to be a major part of the state’s industrial job base and economy for many decades to come, but frankly we need a little help from our government,” West Virginia Coal Association President Chris Hamilton told members of the state Senate’s Energy, Industry and Mining Committee last week as he pushed them to pass a bill his organization wrote.
The bill’s main goal is to repurpose the state’s Office of Coalfield Community Development – an agency tasked with figuring out what the fuck to do with all the ravaged land and mothballed infrastructure left behind by the industry’s ongoing and irreversible decline and to transition West Virginia’s economy to one centered on almost literally anything else – into more of a coal-centric one-stop shop for keeping the black stuff cranking. West Virginia state Senate Republicans were receptive to the bill, with one calling it “not bad” before voting yes to move it to the floor.