Coal and Climate Change in Kentucky

The small front office of Trimble County High School is crowded. Eleven people stand in the doorway, letting in the cool morning air. The Lady Raiders are the district and regional basketball champions, and now they’re going for the state title. The people in line are waiting to buy the last five available tickets to tomorrow’s game, and some will be leaving unsatisfied. 

Just down the road, the tellers at Bedford Loan and Deposit Bank welcome their first clients of the day. Of those with bank accounts in Bedford, Kentucky, at least 80 percent bank here, according to its vice president Deanna Ralston. “But a lot of people here are on fixed incomes,” Ralston says with a frown. “And they don’t bank with anyone.”

At the town community center, Bedford City Clerk Rita Davis sits on the far side of a welcome window. She has a “Pennies for Puppies” can set out with a pixelated photo of a dog taped on. Her gray-and-white shirt matches her hair.  

“The kids used to come down to the community center all the time,” Davis says, flipping through a phone book and rolling her eyes. “But now they’ve got those computers and phones. I don’t know what they do anymore. But they don’t come down here.” The kids get older and they move, she says. They’re not coming back.

The door behind Davis reads, “Todd Pollock, Mayor.” She describes him as a politician. She says “politician” like it’s a dirty word.

Out of every county in the nation, Trimble County, Kentucky, has the lowest percentage of people—43 percent—who believe in climate change, according to a 2015 Yale study. About 73 percent voted for Donald Trump. 

Pollock, the town’s mayor since 2014, is a sturdy-looking man with a large forehead. He backed Trump for President and tweets using the hashtag #SmallTownMayorSupportsTrump. He describes local residents as genuine, caring, and family oriented. It doesn’t surprise him that most don’t believe in climate change. 

“Global warming?” he says from a round table in the community center’s gathering room. “I don’t believe it’s settled. There is a change, but is it manmade or is it just the natural evolution of things? That I don’t think is quite determined.”

At Pollock’s side sits Hilda Parrish, president of the Trimble County Historical Society. She isn’t originally from Trimble and says that makes her an outsider, despite having lived here for a decade. While working to be accepted, Parrish learned all about the county’s history. 

She tells how Bedford residents once rolled a church through town using logs. She solemnly recounts the Great Flood of 1937, which devastated the northern half of the county and had residents paddling rowboats to escape their rooftops. Scientists say climate change will lead to the Ohio River flooding worse and more often, but Hilda doesn’t believe the climate is changing.

“I have farming journals from a farmer that lived here in the county,” she says. “I have them from 1909 through 1943. I’ve looked at those, I’ve looked at the day temperatures and looked at the overall temperatures. There is no global warming.”

About 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is happening and is extremely likely due to human activity. They say looking at local temperatures and finding similar highs and lows over time is not scientifically valid. But it is valid enough for Parrish.

“If there is global warming, it is creeping up very slowly,” she says. “And we can’t change what God wants done.”

“If there is global warming, it is creeping up very slowly,” she says. “And we can’t change what God wants done.”

An hour west of Bedford, in Louisville, Dr. Keith Mountain clutches a paperback book. He is a formidable-looking man with a heavy build and thin, graying hair. And he’s gripping the book as though he wants to tear it in half.

The book is Steve Goreham’s The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania, which takes a gleefully skeptical view of climate science. The cover depicts polar bears driving around in a convertible with the roof down. The book has been lambasted for Goreham’s falsified sourcing and scientific ignorance. Mountain says he threw it across the room the first time he began reading it, after a copy arrived in his mailbox.

“These groups do not do any firsthand research,” he says in his Australian accent. “They will just take whatever information is out there and twist it into their own light. They are very good at creating doubt out of facts.”

Mountain got into climate science long before it was a hot-button topic. In the 1970s, he joined drilling expeditions to glaciers all over the world, carving through miles of ice to unlock a history of climate information. This kind of research was what first tipped off scientists that the climate was changing.

“Hell, I don’t even have to do this,” he says, laughing. “I make my money from teaching, not from my research.”

Mountain co-chairs the department of geography and geosciences at the University of Louisville. His expertise is in climatology and climate change. There is, he says, no ambiguity: Humans are a major cause of climate change, and “this is an issue that is not going to go away.”

At the Louisville National Weather Service forecast office, senior forecaster Tom Reaugh works surrounded by monitors displaying colorful weather maps. In his cubicle is a photograph of the Kentucky Derby, with a raging tornado that Reaugh drew in using Microsoft Paint.

“That’s kind of my nightmare scenario there,” he says about the altered photo. “Having that many people together in an emergency like that.”

Reaugh is a tall, skinny man who identifies as a conservative. He regrets that his political allies reject much of what he believes about climate change. He is a weatherman, not a climatologist, and stresses the difference. But he knows enough about the issue to cite facts and figures with confidence.

Scientists at Oregon State University have tracked global temperatures from the past 11,300 years. Reaugh shows me a web page graphic with a line curving up and down for centuries before suddenly plunging upward, as the last century has brought unprecedented warming.

NASA scientists have found that nine of the ten warmest years of the last 136 have occurred since 2000.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts deadly heat waves, catastrophic flooding, acidic oceans, and disappearing coasts. “There is just overwhelming evidence that something is going on,” Reaugh says.

But many people in Kentucky remain unpersuaded. What, exactly, will it take?

Two men trudge onto the parking lot. They are dressed in camouflage. Each carries five trout on a string, the daily limit for fishers at Wolf Creek National Fish Hatchery. They drop the fish in a truck bed cooler and dump a bag of ice over the top.

Inside the visitor center, an aquarium houses the species of fish that lost their homes when the dam was finished in 1951. They still live south of the dam in Lake Cumberland, but the northern side has trout waters now.

Kentucky’s entire trout population is grown here, but these trout aren’t native to Kentucky. The hatchery was built to make amends for environmental damage dealt by the dam. Once the fish are around nine inches long, workers deliver them into streams all over the state.

Trout are a cold-water fish. When temperatures at the deepest levels of Kentucky’s rivers and streams start to rise in late summer, the ones still around die off. Then, in the spring, these waters are restocked.

But climate change may threaten this cycle, according to a report from the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. Climate change means water temperatures will shift. And huge numbers of fish will die.

The hatchery’s deputy project leader, Sheila Kirk, stands at the end of a long, narrow raceway filled with trophy trout. Two boys are tossing in pellets of fish food. Kirk watches as the trout jump.

“The warmer the water gets, the less survival we’re going to have,” she says. “These fish just can’t take it. Their ideal temperature is fifty to fifty-five degrees. That’s where you get the best growth, the best survival and the best disease resistance. So what are we going to do when the water is twenty degrees warmer?” 

And it’s not just trout that will be affected. The department also predicts perilous futures for the state’s bats, lizards, and even bald eagles. And that’s just the animals.

A 2015 report by Risky Business, a research group founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, and liberal billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, says Kentucky will experience the nation’s third largest crop yield loss. Corn, soybean, grain, and oilseed crops will take dramatic hits. The report also says heat deaths in Kentucky will increase by hundreds. The economic impact, it predicts, will be devastating.

“Rising temperatures will also indirectly impact Kentucky’s economy and its residents,” the study says. “Even seemingly small temperature increases can have profound effects on crop yields, labor productivity, and energy costs.”

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson stopped in Martin County, Kentucky, while traveling along his “Poverty Tour” of America. His message was clear: These people need help.

But there is a resentment in Appalachian Kentucky toward those who look to the mountain communities and see nothing but poverty. The mountain folk who live under poverty levels and ignore modern science are firmly attached to the exploitative and land-destroying coal industry. The end of coal, propelled in part by the threat of global warming, means the end of a way of life. 

In 2016, Kentucky coal jobs hit their lowest level in 118 years, according to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. Coal production in the state is the lowest that it’s been since 1935, and in 2016’s third quarter, just over 6,000 people were still working in Kentucky coal mines. That’s down from more than 70,000 in the late 1940s.

Yet even as the industry vanishes, Kentucky’s love of coal seems undiminished. In the 2016 U.S. Senate race, both Republican Rand Paul and Democrat competitor Jim Gray vowed to revitalize coal jobs. And Trump, who billed himself as the “last shot” for coal miners, won Kentucky with about 63 percent of the vote. 

The U.S. coal industry may get a boost but is unlikely to thrive under Trump, given the competition it faces from natural gas and other alternatives. But the new President certainly could axe environmental regulations, perhaps hastening the climate change he has claimed does not exist.

Fulbright scholar Jarred Johnson, a native of Somerset, Kentucky, is now working as an assistant English teacher in Saarbrücken, Germany. His father was a coal miner, as was his father’s father. His family saw it as the backbone of Kentucky’s economy.

“When coal was big, it was the closest thing to an economic boom that Kentucky has had,” Johnson says. “These little tiny towns had population boosts that gave life to whole communities. They just want that [back].”

Johnson took his Fulbright to Saarbrücken because it was once Germany’s highest coal-producing region, before it toughened environmental regulations. Now he hopes to apply what he’s learned by working with nonprofits to flip old coal economies into something new. 

Last summer, Johnson toured Appalachian communities. He heard “Obama’s War on Coal” and “Coal keeps the lights on” everywhere he went. But he still has hope, even in Trump’s America, for a solution that comes “from the people themselves.”

Joshua Bills, a program coordinator for the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, likens what the people of Appalachia are going through to the stages of grief: “I don’t think we’re hearing denial anymore. We’re more in sorrow. It’s not going to be anything like it was, and more people are seeing that.”

But much of the region’s largely Republican political class remains wedded to coal and is dismissive of those with other ideas. In 2014, Kentucky state Senator Brandon Smith opined that climate change isn’t caused by coal plants because Mars is warming, too. Kentucky U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell has attacked President Obama’s international efforts to curb climate change. As one of his first orders of business after being elected in 2015, Governor Matt Bevin appointed coal executive Charles Snavely to head the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet.

“If I’ve got to pick climate change or feeding my family, then I’m going to pick feeding my family,” Snavely said in an interview.

It is a rainy April afternoon in Bowling Green, Kentucky, as people begin showing up for a dinner event called “A Seat at the Table,” sponsored by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. They’re here to discuss alternatives to Snavely’s energy vision for Kentucky. 

Guests find seats at large, communal tables. A three-piece bluegrass band stops playing as the speaking starts. Hardin County resident Justin Druen, thirty-five, passes a platter of vegan tamales around the table. Druen has a wiry beard and a fishhook strung through the rim of his baseball cap. He hasn’t made his mind up yet on Kentucky’s energy situation. “This country was built on coal,” he says. “Why do we need to change?”

Other tables host professors, farmers, and business owners. Lisa Abbott, one of the organizers, begins by presenting some facts. Ninety-two percent of Kentucky’s electricity comes from coal, she says, compared to 39 percent for the rest of the country. Snavely said his Energy and Environment Cabinet wants the state’s number to drop to 65 percent by 2020. But it’s planning on filling the gap with natural gas plants and virtually no solar or hydro power. 

Abbott argues that clean energy is the cheapest and healthiest option for Kentuckians. The commonwealth, she says, must either start changing now or face the economic consequences soon. Then the discussion starts. 

Billy Ray, the superintendent of the nearby town of Glasgow’s Electric Plant Board, shows his table an energy usage chart. “This is science,” he says. “This is not and should not be politics.” A man named Tim Taylor says his dad set a record time for shoveling 2,000 pounds of coal. But today, he believes, “it’s time that we move to a more sustainable future.” Druen announces that he’s changed his mind, and now agrees that Kentucky needs a new plan.

“I don’t know what, but I think that’s what we’re all here for,” he says. “If we had an easy solution to clean energy, we wouldn’t need this conversation.”

Similar discussions are taking place all over the state. 

“I don’t know what, but I think that’s what we’re all here for,” he says. “If we had an easy solution to clean energy, we wouldn’t need this conversation.”

On Earth Day 2016, students gather outside of the administration building at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. They are part of a group known as the Greenthumb Environmental Club. They are wearing matching green shirts, and their thumbs are painted green. One is also wearing a pair of pajama pants. “Hi, would you like to sign our petition?” he asks.

Tyler Worthington, twenty-five, is among those who sign. “There are students here who do care,” he says, gesturing toward a banner with “Listen to your students!” printed across it. “But there is an administration that has other motives.”

Caroline Engle, who studies natural resources and environmental science, economic policy, and sustainable agriculture at the university, heads the protest. She and other group members have worked for years to get their university to adopt a climate action plan and switch its energy sourcing away from coal. A silver ring on her right hand has a tree engraved on it. 

“Coal in Kentucky has always been destructive,” she says. “It’s always been polluting. The industry has never really genuinely cared about the state of Kentucky. When you look at the top coal-producing mines, the towns around them are incredibly impoverished. There are food deserts. There are drug problems. There are poor education systems. To say that those communities are being built up by the coal industry is a complete lie.”  

Engle has attended two United Nations summits as a delegate for Kentucky’s Sierra Club. Her family is full of coal miners, and she’s seen firsthand its effect on communities and the environment. She thinks Kentucky can become a clean energy leader; the evidence is out there. In 2012, the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development published a clean energy plan that it said would create 28,000 jobs in ten years. 

“Kentucky is uniquely positioned to really send serious changes across the United States and world,” Engle says.  

The sun is starting to set on Berea, Kentucky. Some students at Berea College are outside, basking in the last light of the afternoon.

Gina Dittmeier, of Louisville, sits cross-legged under a tree outside the campus library. She’s painting watercolor pictures of the trees around her. Dittmeier believes in climate change, and she believes that it’s caused by people.

“Maybe some people just like to stay ignorant,” she says. “Some people just don’t like change. They don’t want to stop waving their confederate flags around.”

Berea College is a progressive private college that offers generous scholarships for underprivileged arts students. There is a disconnect, but not a wall, between it and the surrounding town.

In the 1850s, abolitionist Cassius Clay wanted to develop a new community that would demonstrate how beautiful Kentucky could be without slavery. He sold Berea land for extremely low prices. Berea College was developed primarily to educate newly emancipated slaves. The college’s second bylaw declared its opposition to “sectarianism, slaveholding, caste, and every other wrong institution or practice.” Be it slavery or climate change, progressivism is an important part of Berea’s history.

If Trimble County is a glimpse into a Kentucky that looks backward instead of forward, Berea could be a vision of a sustainable alternative. There is a dorm on Berea College’s campus called the Deep Green Residence Hall. The building has solar-paneled roofs, recycled bricks, and student-built furniture.

And Berea is known for its artisans, including Gerald Price. A subsistence farmer, Price is a metalsmith who specializes in bronze. He’s one of the last artists around this afternoon in the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen space in Berea. He stands in the lobby near a display of his pieces, showing potential customers his little fish keychains. He uses the misshapen ones as sinkers when he goes fishing, he says with a chuckle.

Price, who describes himself as politically neutral, lives on his farm with no electricity or running water. He has two goats, seven guinea fowl, two cats, ten chickens, and three ducks. It is difficult to distinguish where his brown hair ends and his scruffy beard begins. He wears a camouflage hat and wide-lensed glasses.

And this man, who lives off the grid, drives an old Ford F-150, and usually comes to town only to work in this art studio, believes in climate change.

“Sure, we have to have power,” Price says. “You can’t just shut down the coal plants. But climate change is pretty scary. We are going to have to deal with it eventually.” 

Tanner Cole, a former editorial intern at The Progressive, is a community and rural news reporter at The Hawk Eye newspaper in Burlington, Iowa. He graduated from Western Kentucky University’s journalism program in May 2016.