my sins of this guilty land index is up 35% year-to-date
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Call me a vain self-flatterer, but perhaps it could be done without much blood?
You're thinking piano wire or something?
The White House is expected to announce this week that it is rescinding the federal government’s finding that those emissions are driving global warming, which underpins U.S. climate regulation.
Not a bail out! Not a bail out!
In NEO, I've noticed a lot more coal trailers on the trains locally. I was wondering if it was part of a larger trend.
The white snow over black coal is beautiful.
I'm conflicted on the issue. I have family in West Virginia. A reactionary part of my brain thinks that increased reliance on coal is good for me and my family, at least in the short term.
But those days are gone. Coal doesn't provide jobs anymore. One guy running an excavator is doing the work of 100 artisanal miners 50 yrs ago. It's just funneling money to the guy who owns the excavator, the guy who owns the mine, even the truck drivers are being squeezed so much these days.
I think there's a lot of people in my region who think "if only they let coal come back, we'd be rich again!". But that's just not in the cards anymore. Automation has come too far. I understand why people think a pivot back to coal is an easy, short-term solution to economic degradation, but it isn't.
Excuse me for ranting, I'm a lil drunk rn.
West Virginians were never rich from coal. The mine owners were. The workers were abused and destroyed their bodies.
WVa doesn't need coal it needs redistribution
I appreciate the point but I think this is a bit of an ultraleftist position - the basis of any economy is production. Even if the mine owners are taking the surplus value of labor, hundreds of workers were still making a wage, and spending those wages at local shops, supplied by local light industry. Even if they're just barely scraping by, the wealth created by a single miner sustains an entire community of clerks, porters, drivers, engineers, bureaucrats. The issue today is that the Appalachian economy has no productive base. Capitalists extract the surplus value of labor from every industry.
The difference between then and today is that artisanal mining is no longer profitable. Like with many industries, automation has reduced the number of jobs provided by mining at the expense of the environment. I'm not a Luddite - automation isn't bad, per se - but it does put Capitalism into an overproduction crisis, and without distributive justice it is now impossible to base an economy on coal extraction in Appalachia.
I wasn't trying to say that coal mining in West Virginia was some kind of golden age, but what it was was a functional economy.
NEO
Northeast Oklahoma?
Northeast Ohio