Hellenic Shipping News 7/30/2021 Source: Reuters (Reporting by Dane Rhys)
Cosam Mullins mined coal in the western hills of Virginia for much of his working life. Now, with mining jobs hard to find, he’s cleaning up the mess the industry left behind.
The 68-year-old operates a bucket loader scraping away red, rocky waste dumped years ago by failed coal mine operators in a valley in the town of Clinchco, Virginia.
The $17.50 an hour before overtime he makes cleaning up massive “gob piles,” as the locals call them, is less than what he earned in decades as a miner. But it’s a paycheck.
“If this work goes away, I don’t know what I would do,” Mullins said.
Appalachia, long the heart of the U.S. coal-mining industry, may be set for a surge in jobs like Mullins’ if President Joe Biden is successful in his ambitions to transition the United States to a cleaner energy economy to fight climate change.
As part of that effort, the Biden administration wants to spend around $16 billion to help begin to clean up orphaned oil and gas wells and abandoned mine sites, many of which have been leaching toxins into the soil and spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for decades. There are up to millions of abandoned wells and tens of thousands of mine sites.
The proposal, which is included in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package being debated in Congress, could help transform regions scarred environmentally and economically by the boom-and-bust cycles of drilling and mining.
While the cleanup jobs won’t last forever, they will buy precious time for fossil fuel-producing regions like Appalachia and parts of the West to diversify their economies to something new, the administration says.
The White House sees the proposal as bolstering a more comprehensive program to invest in energy communities that includes providing essential infrastructure like broadband internet, which is also in the bipartisan bill.
The U.S. Department of Commerce last week also announced an additional $300 million in funds for hard-hit coal, oil and gas, and power plant communities – intended to be used for boosting new industries or scaling existing ones, infrastructure development, and workforce training.
More:
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/coal-country-cleanup-biden-plan-sketches-out-possible-future-for-former-miners/
