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I'm guessing bluecarebear, along with many others, doesn't see fossil fuels and extraction industry practices as anywhere near progressive.
The Upper Ohio Valley was once our Nation's industrial heartland. The "Progressives" progressed to move all that wealth and influence to cheap labor countries, leaving the area virtually devastated economically, then they went on to attack the area's coal industries because they found investing in oil and gas more profitable. "Progressive" is one of those misnomers used when somebody wants to sell you a pig in a poke, and the pig is riddled with disease, but oil and gas are giving the area somewhat of a new lease on life with the new money floating around from it. Still, there are forces (mostly folks who are insulated from the insanity of their own positions in ivory towers or public jobs) who will criticize anything benefitting the ordinary person in terms of productive employment and insist that he should be content with having he and his neighbors selling each other pizza to make ends meet.
I want to be clear here that I am not using the term "Progressive" in a political sense. The term can be used by those of either political party when they want something to fit their own particular agendas, and when those agendas don't necessarily sound logical to the person losing out in the process. What is progressive to the well insulated and protected person is regressive to the worker needing to put bread on his family's table.
Coal production in the Northern Panhandle and North Central West Virginia, primarily used in power plants, has been growing and is expected to continue to experience growth while production in southern West Virginia, with the exceptions of Kanawha and Logan counties, is expected to continue to decline. The mines are going full tilt here in Mon County...
Gee, we're propping up an outdated, dying industry fraught with destruction and corruption. Definitely something that needs celebrated!
We'll just have to agree to disagree there. My opinion is that the industry has been unjustly under attack by proponents of a seriously flawed theory based on faulty science, and that existing and developing technology result in relatively clean burning of coal for electricity production. I also believe that these flawed policies actually result in worse "pollution" of the atmosphere because they encourage investors to shift production to cheap labor countries where they have absolutely no regulations in place, putting American workers out of work, plunging American families into poverty with resulting net losses rather than net gains.
What is dying is production based on mountaintop removal, because that is becoming increasingly economically unfeasible, and coal used to produce steel (there is no other way to make steel), is reducing production in our country due to the shifting of jobs to foreign lands, and increased competition from abroad in this sector. That is having negative impacts on production from the southern part of our state. Demand for northern (power plant) coal is actually quite high due, in part, to increased demand from Germany which is switching from nuclear to coal fired plants as a safety measure. We can celebrate that because it means American jobs and a measure of reason applied into an otherwise insane scenario where scientists, proven wrong in their assumptions, stay wedded to faulty theories rather than risk loss of all credibility.
Here's the thing... coal produced in the southern tier of our state is, for the most part, of the type used in steel making, not the type used for electricity production. That means traditionally prosperity in the southern coal fields has been inexorably tied to prosperity in the Northern Panhandle and in Pittsburgh steel plants. As industries in those locations fell on hard times due to ridiculous government policies that benefitted, and continue to benefit only the super rich in their quest for ever cheaper sources of labor and "open" borders, so too did the counties in the southern part of the state fall on hard times because the market for their coal dried up and gradually disappeared. It is no coincidence that populations in Wheeling and McDowell have fallen off simultaneously. One is directly related to the other, it's just with the tribal traditions in place in our state we often fail to realize the interconnectivity.
New Power Plant Approved for Construction in Marshall County
A new gas fired power plant that will provide up to 40 permanent jobs and generate many construction jobs being built has been approved for south of Moundsville...
An announcement today that a new pipeline to transport brine and other materials through western PA and the Northern Panhandle indicates that a destination for the project will be barge loading facilities on the Ohio River in Benwood. ...
Monroe County OH (across from New Martinsville) Might Get a Cracker
The New Martinsville area (on the Ohio Side in Monroe County) could see yet another cracker facility to process the Marcellus/Utica gas and oil developments. This would be located about midway between Wheeling and Parkersburg on the Ohio Side, and would be huge for the areas concerned.
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Northern WV Gas and Oil Development Continues
