CO2 Pipelines Are Big Oil’s New Mode of Destruction / by Emily Sanders

_{^{A sign against a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline outside a home in New Liberty, Iowa, on June 4, 2023. (Miriam Alarcon Avila / Bloomberg via Getty Images)}}

Big Oil has launched a lobbying blitz to scale back safety regulations for its build-out of experimental carbon dioxide pipelines, endangering nearby communities in the event of a leak.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Acarbon dioxide pipeline rupture in the small village of Satartia, Mississippi, sent nearly fifty people to the hospital with “zombie”-like conditions in 2020, and now another major leak from a pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, has once again exposed the risks carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities in their path.

Soon, pipelines like this could be coming to cities and towns throughout the country. Spurred by federal tax incentives from the Biden administration, the fossil fuel industry is planning to build tens of thousands of miles of carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines across the United States for experimental carbon capture and storage — a process aimed at sequestering carbon emissions from power plants, sending it through pipelines, and injecting it underground.

While regulators are working to craft updated safety rules for these pipelines, major fossil fuel companies and their trade groups — including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association — have launched a lobbying blitz to scale back regulations and target the regulators themselves so they can construct new pipelines as quickly as possible.

Carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant. Upon entering the atmosphere during a pipeline leak or rupture, it can travel long distances, shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate, or even kill people and wildlife.

Only about five hundred miles of carbon dioxide pipelines currently exist across the country, largely operating in states across the Midwest and Gulf Coast. Many communities, landowners, and environmental and public health groups have staunchly opposed and, in some cases, successfully prevented their build-out, such as eliminating the proposed 1,300-mile Navigator pipeline that would have crossed through five Midwestern states.

But now, this pipeline network could be greatly expanded. According to the US Department of Energy and financial industry estimates, it could take up to ninety-six thousand miles of new carbon dioxide pipelines — enough to wrap around the earth four times — to transport just 15 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the federal agency tasked with pipeline safety, announced in 2022 that it would update rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.

The agency, which is overseen by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and was implicated in the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, is itself up for reauthorization, meaning Congress will reconsider its lawmaking mandates and funding. Now the pipeline industry, represented by its main lobbying group, the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, is using both the rulemaking and reauthorization processes to push its agenda forward.

“There is no need for adding a host of punitive provisions on the pipeline industry,” reads written January testimony from Andrew Black, the lobbying group’s president and CEO, to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has proposed a bill on the pipeline safety agency’s reauthorization. “The data just does not support those who wish to impose harsh new mandates or penalties on pipeline operators.”

On March 6, the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association arranged a meeting with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is currently reviewing the draft carbon dioxide safety rules. Also present at the meeting were representatives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Marathon, TC Energy, Kinder Morgan, Phillips 66, and Valero, along with representatives from the Department of Transportation.

“THE ADMINSTRATION [sic] SHOULD AVOID AN OVERLY BROAD OR UNSUBSTANTIATED CO2 PIPELINES RULEMAKING THAT RISKS DELAY AND IMPERILS FINALIZATION,” reads the all-caps intro to the lobbying group’s talking points for that meeting.

In response to a request for comment, president and CEO Black offered several reasons “why we think a measured approach to pipeline safety legislation is appropriate.” According to Black, federal data shows “the number of CO2 pipeline incidents is flat over the last 5 years,” and “Federal regulation imposes dozens of safety requirements on interstate CO2 pipelines on everything from design and construction to inspection, maintenance, and emergency response.”

Robin Rorick, one of the American Petroleum Institute’s vice presidents, said in an email,

The safe use and development of CO2 pipelines will be critical as our industry and the nation as a whole advances its emissions reduction efforts. API will continue to work with [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] and industry experts to safely accelerate the widescale, responsible deployment of CO2 pipelines while protecting the environment and communities where we live and work.

An Invisible Menace

The urgency of this issue reemerged this month after a carbon dioxide leak from a pipeline in Sulphur co-owned by ExxonMobil and Denbury, a carbon capture developer that owns the country’s largest carbon dioxide pipeline network.

Residents within a quarter mile of the leak received a phone notification to shelter in place. But others only received the news from a Facebook post by local officials, citing a “bust” in Exxon’s high-pressure carbon dioxide pipeline and warning residents to shut their doors and windows, turn off any ventilation, and wait.

While the proper procedure is to evacuate, local fire chief Todd Parker said changing winds near the leak made that impossible. “For the homes that were affected, they had to drive through the release to be able to get out, so we couldn’t evacuate them,” Parker explained. He said it took more than two hours for pipeline operators to stop the leak, which was called in by a resident who reported seeing “white clouds” coming from the pipeline.

In the meantime, Roishetta Ozane, a Sulphur resident and local environmental justice organizer, began fielding calls from panicked residents.

“People were reaching out asking me about what CO2 is,” Ozane said. But as a mom of six children, she was also scared and confused. “We know that this is colorless and odorless, so I just kept my children inside and made sure they were OK,” said Ozane. “Pipelines leak, CO2 leaks, and you don’t know it’s happened until tragedy has struck.”

She remembered the incident in Satartia, where another Denbury carbon dioxide pipeline rupture caused mass asphyxiation, turning people into dazed and unresponsive “zombies,” with some losing consciousness. As hundreds rushed to evacuate, vehicles became paralyzed, since cars need oxygen to burn fuel. Some residents still face serious health issues years later.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration slapped Denbury with the second-largest fine in its history after the Satartia disaster for neglecting to address hazards to its pipeline system and notify emergency responders of the leak or train them to address such an accident before it happened.

The leak in Sulphur is “a very sobering introduction to how the companies will probably try to handle similar incidents,” said journalist Dan Zegart, who reported in depth on the Satartia disaster. “I say ‘similar incidents’ not even really knowing what [kind of leak] we’re talking about here, which is a perfect example of what we’re worried about in the future.”

An ExxonMobil spokesperson told the Lever in an email that they are “conducting a thorough investigation into the cause of the release and will use any findings to improve future operations. Our priority is to help maintain the safety of the community, our personnel, and the environment.”

No injuries have been reported so far in Sulphur — regulators are still investigating the leak and the local municipality said it did not have records to provide — but the bewildering incident highlights the uncertain future for residents in the path of the carbon dioxide pipeline build-out.

“It is alarming that we have been organizing, educating the community, educating ourselves, and trying to get answers from the government on [carbon capture and storage] in Louisiana for three years now, and we still did not have the information or frankly relationships necessary to get real-time information on what was happening [in Sulphur],” said Jane Patton, a campaign manager at the nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for International Environmental Law.

“[The Liquid Energy Pipeline Association] supports Congress mandating and [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] imposing new safety requirements on CO2 pipelines reflecting the lessons learned from the Satartia, MS pipeline incident,” said Black, the lobbying group’s president, in his email to the Lever. He added that the organization “looks forward to the results of Sulphur, LA pipeline incident review and any recommendations it produces for how to improve CO2 pipeline safety further.”

A Carbon Capture Future?

ExxonMobil — which purchased Denbury last year — is planning to build carbon capture infrastructure throughout Louisiana, where about a third of the nation’s carbon capture projects have been proposed.

Exxon did not respond to requests for comment.

“We’ve got plans to grow our carbon capture business and really focus on emitters all along that Denbury pipeline,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods told Louisiana newspaper the Advocate in February. “What we’re doing is taking advantage of the ability to pump carbon dioxide back into the ground and store it very safely. It’s isolated from the rest of the community.”

Patton says that such statements are just “another lie that we’re being sold” by the fossil fuel industry.

“Louisiana is magic, and I want to be able to pass this magic on to the next generation behind me,” she said. “We deserve a future here and that future is not in carbon capture.”

Scientists have been sounding the alarm that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is not an effective way to reduce emissions and is most often used for enhanced oil recovery, which means accessing more fossil fuels to be burned. The Department of Energy just announced it would invest $23 million in two projects to evaluate the potential for enhanced oil recovery using captured carbon dioxide.

In internal company documents, the oil and gas industry has privately admitted that though CCS is “complex, costly, and will require additional power,” it will “enable the use of petroleum and natural gas” well into the future.

But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which ratcheted up tax credits available for carbon capture technology, the race is on to build out carbon dioxide pipelines.

Meanwhile, advocates say their concerns are being ignored. “You’ve got communities, NGOs on pipeline safety, governmental experts on pipeline safety all raising alarm about the hazards of what is being planned,” said Monique Harden, director of law and policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. “What you don’t have is the response of protection or response that validates those concerns. Instead, what you have is silence.”

Last week, US Department of Energy assistant secretary Brad Crabtree told the Illinois newspaper the Springfield State Journal-Register, “I would argue that our electric transmission and distribution infrastructure, it’s essential to modern life, but it also results in injuries and fatalities. . . . But as a result of those risks, we do not have people saying we shouldn’t have electric transmission and distribution. . . . CO2 pipelines are no different in that regard.”

Many of the proposed pipeline projects would run through communities like Sulphur — low-income communities of color already burdened by polluting petrochemical and fossil fuel facilities. These communities often have minimal resources to respond to worsening extreme weather events, like a tornado that destroyed the office of Ozane’s disaster-relief and environmental justice nonprofit not far from Sulphur just days after the leak.

“On top of the fact that this is taking public money, it is essentially a program where the federal government pays the oil and gas industry to deal with its own waste product in a way that burdens communities and makes us demonstrably less safe,” said Patton. “Accidents that happen along CO2 pipeline routes are going to become more common and much more dangerous if this program is allowed to move forward.”

While significant public resources are being deployed to develop this technology, understanding of carbon dioxide pipeline leaks — how they happen, the extent of their damage, and how they should be addressed — lags far behind.

“Often you need the knowledge gaps to be filled before you can fully fill the regulatory gaps,” said Bill Caram, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, an organization that advocates for stronger regulations on pipeline safety. “Right now, CO2 pipelines are relatively rare and relatively rural, and we’re moving toward building a lot more CO2 pipelines closer to communities. I don’t think we are ready to do that safely.”

Current carbon dioxide pipelines are largely located in small communities with underpaid or volunteer fire departments, many of which lack equipment to respond to and monitor for carbon dioxide leaks. In Sulphur’s case, the fire chief said he had not seen an emergency response protocol from the company until after the leak occurred.

Environmental and public health groups are pushing federal regulators for additional pipeline safety provisions, including updated “dispersion modeling” requirements, which show how carbon dioxide moves and would help emergency personnel respond to accidents, and adding odorants to the carbon dioxide to warn community members of a leak.

Groups are also advocating for new limits on contaminants in the pipelines that can lead to corrosion; mandates for training and coordination between pipeline operators and first responders; and additional rules for transporting gaseous and liquid carbon dioxide, which are currently unregulated.

Pipeline Pushback

But companies, and the lobbying groups that represent them, are pushing back. Since the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced its intention to make new rules on carbon dioxide pipelines in 2022, records show that Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Enbridge, Marathon, Shell, and Targa, along with trade associations like Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, have been lobbying the agency on pipeline infrastructure, rulemaking, and safety, and/or lobbying on the agency’s reauthorization, among other issues.

During their March meeting at the White House Office of Management and Budget, fossil fuel interests appeared to push for rulemaking that prioritizes secrecy and expediency over safety and transparency.

“Any emergency response requirements should ensure the protection of sensitive information and be aligned with industry current best practices,” reads API’s talking points from the meeting. “The rule must be technically feasible and set realistic timelines for implementation to ensure it supports rather than hinders the build-out of this additional CO2 pipeline infrastructure.”

Maggie Coulter, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said advocacy groups are particularly concerned about the industry’s attempts to keep data about potential pipeline leaks hidden from the public. One of the bills being considered for Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s safety reauthorization, which has received broad support from industry trade groups, contains a provision for the “protection of sensitive information in responding to a public request for information regarding carbon dioxide dispersion modeling.”

“There’s an additional cost in doing things safely and increased public scrutiny when you’re affirmatively tasked with informing first responders and members of the public,” said Coulter. “Right now we just have to trust the company.”

Black, president of the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, said in his comment to the Lever that his organization “supports operators sharing the results of pipeline modeling with state and local emergency planning officials and first responders,” but advocates for “limiting general public sharing of security sensitive information, as is the current approach for crude oil pipelines, to prevent bad actors from misusing this information to harm surrounding communities.”

Black did not respond directly to questions about evidence showing that pipeline operators have failed to communicate with first responders ahead of and properly respond to CO2 pipeline disasters in the past.

Caram of Pipeline Safety Trust said that given the risks that carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities across the country, the companies involved shouldn’t be allowed to dictate their own safety standards.

“It’s like the difference between a speed limit of 55 mph as opposed to a sign saying, ‘Please drive safely,’” Caram said. “We need something specific to hold them to.”

_{Emily Sanders is climate journalist based in Queens, New York.}

King Coal Is a Powerful Requiem for an Appalachian Myth / by Chandler Dandridge

_{^{Miners checking in at the lamp house at completion of a morning shift. Koppers Coal Division, Kopperston Mines, Kopperston, Wyoming County, West Virginia, August 22, 1946. (Russell Lee / US National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons)}}

_{Originally posted in Jacobin on August 11, 2023}

Appalachians built their identities around an industry that’s nearly dead. Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s new documentary film King Coal asks: What happens when the king dies and there’s no heir apparent?

A few hundred million years ago, when rocks and water ruled the world, the Appalachian Mountains rose out of a shallow sea. Humans came much later, the first appearing in the region just twelve thousand years ago, and have always had to creatively accommodate its ancient geology. Today the roads of Appalachia snake and coil, making mystifying designs through the stubborn mountains. Appalachia and its people are governed by a turbulent history.

Documentary filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s family has been in Nicholas County, West Virginia for eight generations, living in the same hollow on Fenwick Mountain since the turn of the twentieth century. The story goes that their ancestors arrived on foot from Wise County, Virginia, about 150 miles southwest as the crow flies. But the crow can fly over mountains, and Central Appalachia is an almost impassable area on land. As for how they made the journey, Sheldon says, “Aunt Ola reckons they just followed a river.”

_{Fog and mountains surrounding the Coal River in Boone County, West Virginia.}

Sheldon has made two films about the opioid crisis in her native state: Heroin(e), which garnered her an Academy Award nomination, and Recovery Boys. She’s also worked with PBS Frontline a few times, and been nominated for half a dozen Emmys, winning two. Hollow, her first film out of film school, picked up a Peabody Award in 2013, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. That same year she released Tutwiler, documenting how America’s prison system handles pregnant incarcerated women and their newborns.

I meet Sheldon at a Walmart parking lot in Summersville, the Nicholas County seat. She is pregnant with her second child, and has kindly offered to show me around the region and talk about her new film, King Coal, an intimate and philosophical look at Appalachia’s socioeconomic relationship to its central resource.

Sheldon is, like Loretta sings, a coal miner’s daughter. “By the time my dad came around,” she says, “coal had started becoming dominated by conglomerates. We moved a lot. Coal’s not ever been strong since I’ve been alive. Just a lot of boom and bust. . . . Mines would open, mines would close.” Sheldon represents a generation of Central Appalachians that has simultaneously witnessed the decline of the coal industry while still breathing in its mythic dust.

She’s also a coal miner’s granddaughter. We ride from Summersville to nearby Nettie to see her grandfather Doy Russell, one of the on-screen stars of King Coal, whom she calls Paw Paw. Russell retired from the mines in ’86. Today, at eighty-eight years old, he digs graves for five funeral homes in Nicholas County, as well as for family and friends. He’s dug four generations of his family’s graves, from his mother to his wives to his great niece. There is an exquisite symbolism in Russell’s transition from miner to gravedigger, for in many ways the film feels like a requiem for coal. It asks: What exactly do we do when the king dies and there is no clear heir apparent?

“I’d been influenced by these historical records of grieving and mourning,” Sheldon says. “The film is not trying to prescribe a solution to post-coal. It’s more: What is the next step that allows a new mindset to enter? We haven’t faced the fact that we are standing on the other side of decline with no real direction. So grieving felt like the first natural step in that.”

As we pull into Russell’s, we see him on his front porch with his wife, Nancy, wearing the work blues that he still dons every day. He sits back in his rocking chair and starts telling us stories from his mining days with a clear memory of and reverence for the past. His career spanned coal’s critical transition from “hand-loading” to the more automated methods that have transformed the industry and its workforce. We listen to him talk about the union, the company, and his complex, often contradictory feelings about them both.

Then he shows me the simple records he keeps of the graves he digs: name, date, and price, all handwritten on the back of old union ballots and mining guidelines.

Sheldon looks sincerely across the porch and says, “Paw Paw, one of the reasons I made the film was because you once told me everything that’s gone the way it’s gone didn’t have to go this way. That part of the reason these communities have been hollowed out and people have had to leave and there’s nothing left for people here is because of greed.”

Russell rocks and nods in agreement. “Everything in Nicholas County that should be for the people here they ship off and make big bucks off it. I’m a full believer in the man up above and when they started hollering about the rights to the minerals and everything I prayed about it. And He let me to know that we had everything we need as long as the earth stood, but it’s who was in charge of it.”

He walks us into the yard to show off a big pile of coal that to this day he shovels into a stove to heat his home. Then we inspect his heavy gravedigging machinery in a shed close by. “Some people charge as much as nine hundred dollars to dig a grave. I won’t do that. I don’t think it’s fair to the people,” he says.

After we leave Russell’s house, Sheldon and I stop for lunch at Lora’s Family Restaurant, where our waitress is another coal miner’s daughter. Over white beans and cornbread, we talk about the mine as a kind of embodied monster. “Even the mine has been named like a giant,” Sheldon says. “You enter the mouth. You mine the face. It has ribs that you hold up.” The colossal mine has the power to make people smaller or bigger, to swallow them up or to blow them out of proportion. “The early ballads about coal are full of myths and coal miners being larger than life.”

_{^{Fred Powers talks to kids at White Hall Elementary in West Virginia about his time in the mines. (Courtesy of the filmmaker)}}

But King Coal is not a nostalgic film about sitting on a porch with an old miner listening to stories. In fact, Paw Paw Doy doesn’t even speak when he’s on screen. Sheldon is conscious that the myths of her grandfather’s generation are not resonating in the same way with younger people. Part of her aim with the film is to focus on the kids, the intergenerational aspect of Appalachian mythmaking.

“When you center a kid rather than a bunch of elders you start thinking about what is left for them. Kids were immediately relevant to the film because there’s miners going in classrooms telling them stories. Kids are being indoctrinated so early but they are given a story they don’t own. The kids in the film break down the level of importance that adults here put on coal.”

Ancient forests canopy our drive up the mountain, until suddenly sunshine blights the scenery. The earth stands scorched-looking and bare — a huge swath of land has been clearcut, an unsustainable logging practice that is common despite local protests.

“I don’t think that healthy people can live on unhealthy land,” Sheldon says. “For my Paw Paw’s generation, before coal companies owned all the land, the commons was a very important idea. There’s land that we all hunt on, that we all care for.”

The Matter of Ownership

We veer off of Fenwick Mountain and down into her family’s hollow. Houses of various shapes and sizes are scattered across the green grass. We park in front of one to find Aunt Ola and Uncle Fred sitting on the front porch. They greet their grandniece with pleasure and usher us inside to see Great Uncle Roy. At ninety-six, Roy’s vision is poor, but he smiles wide at the sight of Sheldon approaching. Sheldon takes after Roy’s creativity. Rarely seen at family functions without a camera around his neck, Roy is a photographer, painter, and family chronicler, and was the only artist in the family while Sheldon was growing up.

I ask about the family’s journey on foot from Wise, Virginia down into this hollow. As Aunt Ola tells it, Roy and Doy’s uncles were sent by their mother to Nicholas County because she heard that there was work in logging. Mining was taking off around Wise, and she didn’t want her boys working in the mines. The uncles did manage to find work in timber, but before long the allure of the coalfields was unavoidable. Sheldon recounts how Doy’s decision to enter the mines had been influenced by the look of the loggers’ missing fingers.

Outside, a teenager rides around on a four-wheeler chased by a huge German shepherd. A pile of coal sits in front of a shed. A goat and pony mingle about a pasture. The land is pristine, homely, and theirs.

But beneath the ground is another story. The rights to the minerals of much of West Virginia were separated long ago from surface rights to the land. The deeds to these deals were done a hundred years ago and passed down through the generations, making it hard to tell who owns what. Sheldon’s family has never owned the mineral rights in the hollow. Around the middle of the twentieth century Crichton Mines, the employer of several of her uncles, got underneath the family property and took the coal.

“My great grandma couldn’t use her well,” Sheldon says. “The underground mine sunk it. They had to buy water fifty cents a gallon to have it to drink, but they used the spring for everything else. Eventually city water came on the mountain in 1978.”

We ride to Richwood, the nearby town where most of Sheldon’s family was schooled. On the way a hitchhiker stands smiling, sure to be picked up, maybe even recognized, by a local traveler. Richwood is nestled deep in a small valley. You get the feeling that standing smack in the middle of it you can reach your arms out in either direction and touch the sides of the mountains. Its geography left it vulnerable to catastrophic flooding in 2016. The plot of land where the high school once stood is now vacant, razed to the ground after the flood.

On Main Street we enter Rosewood Florist, a local shop run by Sheldon’s cousin Jeromy Rose and his wife Christy. Beyond flowers the shop sells a variety of goods and houses a café with locally roasted coffee beans. We sit at the counter and Rose, a coal miner’s son and sometime location scout for Sheldon’s work, talks about the political fight that went down when it was decided that the Richwood schools damaged in the flood would be demolished and not rebuilt, in favor of an educational amalgamation in Summersville half an hour away. The community fought back, and the case went to West Virginia’s Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Richwood.

_{Lanie Marsh and Gabby Wilson in Kanawha County, West Virginia. (Courtesy of the filmmaker)}

I ask Rose about the political energy within the community to organize against the Summersville school plans and whether that same energy exists around other issues, such as mining. “I hate politics,” he says, before proceeding to speak politically and passionately for fifteen minutes. “But coal companies own the mines. And people view the schools as theirs. They’re community assets paid for by our tax dollars. We were outraged. All you had to do was post something on the Richwood Facebook page and people would show up in droves.”

When he was twenty-six, Rose ran for mayor of Richwood and won. Having gone to art school, he decided to commission a series of massive murals, which now stretch across the sides of buildings on Main Street and showcase the vivid history of Richwood. The public art withstood the flood, reminding the residents of their collective past as they organized themselves to fight the school closure.

“You cannot recover from something like a natural disaster if your schools are taken from you,” Rose says. “Over time we’ve lost our hospital, our armory. We were tired of losing things.”

New Myths

From Richwood we cross the county line and make toward Fayetteville. The town is seeing a bit of a tourism boom due to the adjacent New River Gorge National Park, the country’s newest national park signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020. We ride over what once was the longest single arch bridge in the world, now trailing four in China. Nine hundred feet above the New River, we look down on the dense trees, competing for space and sunlight as the Appalachian spring turns to summer.

Dinner is at the home of Dina Hornbaker, a musician and activist who now works in solar energy. Around the table are also Katey Lauer, a community organizer, and Crystal Good, the independent publisher of West Virginia’s only black media publication, Black By God. Hornbaker has taken some mushrooms from her garden and made a risotto, and Lauer has spun a salad out of homegrown kale and beets. All three women appear in King Coal and are working across disciplines to help reshape Appalachia’s self-conception.

“What the Trump election really showed was that coal is our identity,” says Good. “And when you take away someone’s identity and you don’t have anything to replace it with you are creating panic and chaos. So if we are not a coal miner, who are we?”

“One piece of the story that gets missed about mining identity, and the film plays with this,” says Lauer, is that “it used to be that the primary identity around mining was the union. ‘I’m a union member. I’m a union man. We’re a union family.’ And [coal baron] Don Blankenship and company had a deliberate strategy to break the unions that involved an awareness that identity mattered.”

Lauer refers to Friends of Coal, a pro-industry group set up in response to hits the industry was taking from environmental activists in the early aughts. It has since become a ubiquitous catchphrase in Appalachia, used to deter criticism of the coal industry and consolidate the culture around the coal mythos.

“We are not that special,” says Good. “Yes, I am Appalachian and I wear it, but really we are just like any other place in the world that has had an extraction economy. We are not unique. But people have to rally around jobs or identity. So the work with the narrative I am trying to build around black folks in Appalachia is something people can see as part of the greater consciousness of black America, rather than separate from it.”

The women discuss the merit of the myths they’ve inherited around organizing. Lauer recounts her time working for a campaign in the 2020 governor’s race that attempted to build a broader movement rather than organize around their political candidate’s identity. Hornbaker explicates different ways to identify with the land, other than through the mines. Good talks about the harmful values she’s inherited from Appalachian working-class culture around the virtue of working yourself to the bone. Sheldon watches her friends with pride, letting them speak at length.

I interrupt the women and ask them all, unreasonably, to prescribe a solution.

Lauer sighs and says, “There’s this illusion that a $30,000 grant is going to solve the underpinning of the problem.”

“Or learning to code!” says Hornbaker.

“I think we will find more answers if we are humble enough to name the depth of how difficult the problem is.” says Lauer. “Policy and foundation leaders push this simple solution and there’s some arrogance about that.”

“Things like King Coal are important for the spirit,” says Good. “Our soul is suffering because we’ve been told we are proud coal miners but now we don’t have coal.”

Pineapple is served for dessert. “It’s local!” jokes Sheldon, who bought it from Walmart. We sit across from each other. As in Sheldon’s film, the complexity of the problem is respected at this table. But through local food and fellowship, the way forward becomes clearer. If Appalachia’s past has been dominated by a monoeconomy and a monopoly on myth, it will no doubt need an interdisciplinary approach in reorganizing its future — changing the way people relate to work, local natural resources, and the past.

Most of all, the future is a matter of resource ownership. Like Doy Russell said, “We have everything we need . . . it’s just who’s in charge of it.” Will Appalachia be owned by anonymous corporate entities that strip it for parts, or by the people who live on, love, and often nurture the land?

Each shot of King Coal, on which Sheldon’s husband served as the director of photography, is composed with a painterly regard. Sheldon’s voiceover provides a poetic commentary that makes room for contemplation. The viewer understands that there is not just coal, the by-products of ancient geologic movement and compression, in these mountains. There are people here, too, living rich and meaningful lives amid the region’s radical changes.

“I found an old notebook trying to remember what I was doing with this film,” says Sheldon. “I had asked myself if documenting joy is as valuable as documenting pain. I was like, I can’t make another film that is going to make people feel paralyzed. There has to be joy. I know the film is hard for people, but I feel there is still hope in it.”

_{King Coal}_{opens in New York City August 11 at the DCTV Firehouse. The following week the film will release in select cities. For tickets and information visit kingcoalfilm.com/screenings.}

_{Chandler Dandridge is an American psychotherapist and educator. His clinical interests revolve around addiction, anxiety, and exploring creative ways to improve public mental health.}

The United States of America as a Sacrifice Zone / by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

_{^{“Fight Poverty Not the Poor.” (Photo: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)}}

In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we’re assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it. Small business owners must sacrifice their paychecks so that their companies will continue to grow, while politicians must similarly sacrifice key policy promises to get something (almost anything!) done.

We have become all too used to the notion that success only comes with sacrifice, even if this is anything but the truth for the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. After all, whether you focus on the gains of Wall Street or of this country’s best-known billionaires, the ever-rising Pentagon budget, or the endless subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, sacrifice is not exactly a theme for those atop this society. As it happens, sacrifice in the name of progress is too often relegated to the lives of the poor and those with little or no power. But what if, instead of believing that most of us must eternally “rob Peter to pay Paul,” we imagine a world in which everyone was in and no one out?

In that context, consider recent policy debates on Capitol Hill as the crucial midterm elections approach. To start with, the passage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises real, historic advances when it comes to climate change, health care, and fair tax policy. It’s comprehensive in nature and far-reaching not just for climate resilience but for environmental justice, too. Still, the legislation is distinctly less than what climate experts tell us we need to keep this planet truly livable.

In addition, President Biden’s cancellation of up to $20,000 per person in student loans could wipe out the debt of nearly half of all borrowers. This unprecedented debt relief demonstrates that a policy agenda lifting from the bottom is both compassionate and will stimulate the broader economy. Still, it, too, doesn’t go far enough when it comes to those suffocating under a burden of debt that has long served as a dead weight on the aspirations of millions.

In fact, a dual response to those developments and others over the past months seems in order. As a start, a striking departure from the neoliberal dead zone in which our politics have been trapped for decades should certainly be celebrated. Rather than sit back with a sense of satisfaction, however, those advances should only be built upon.

Let’s begin by looking under the hood of the IRA. After all, that bill is being heralded as the most significant climate legislation in our history and its champions claim that, by 2030, it will have helped reduce this country’s carbon emissions by roughly 40% from their 2005 levels. Since a reduction of any kind seemed out of reach not so long ago, it represents a significant step forward.

Among other things, it ensures investments of more than $60 billion in clean energy manufacturing; an estimated $30 billion in production tax credits geared toward increasing the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and more; about $30 billion for grant and loan programs to speed up the transition to clean electricity; and $27 billion for a greenhouse gas reduction fund that will allow states to provide financial assistance to low-income communities so that they, too, can benefit from rooftop solar installations and other clean energy developments.

The IRA also seeks to lower energy costs and reduce utility bills for individual Americans through tax credits that will encourage purchases of energy-efficient homes, vehicles, and appliances. Among other non-climate-change advances, it caps out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, reduces health insurance premiums for 13 million Americans, and provides free vaccinations for seniors.

As the nation’s biggest investment in the climate so far, it demonstrates the willingness of the Biden administration to address the climate crisis. It also highlights just how stalled this country has been on that issue for so long and how much more work there is to do. Of course, given our ever hotter planet and the role this country has played in it as the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, anything less than legislation that will lead to net-zero carbon emissions is a far cry from what’s necessary, as this country burns, floods, and overheats in a striking fashion.

Pipelines and Sacrifice Zones

Earlier iterations of what became the IRA recognized a historic opportunity to enact policies connecting the defense of the planet to the defense of human life and needs. Because of the resistance of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as every Senate Republican, the final version of the reconciliation bill includes worrying sacrifices. It does not, for instance, have an extension or expansion of the Child Tax Credit, a lifeline for poor and low-income families, nor does it raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though that was a promise made in the 2020 election. Gone as well are plans for free pre-kindergarten and community college, in addition to the nation’s first paid family-leave program that would have provided up to $4,000 a month to cover births, deaths, and other pivotal moments in everyday life.

And don’t forget to add to what’s missing any real pain for fossil-fuel companies. After all, coal baron Manchin seems to have succeeded in cutting a side deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for a massive natural gas pipeline through his home state of West Virginia and that’s just to begin a list of concessions. Indeed, the sacrificial negotiations with Manchin to get the bill passed ensured significantly more domestic fossil-fuel production, including agreement that the Interior Department would auction off permits to drill for yet more oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and possibly elsewhere, all of which will offset some of the emissions reductions from climate-change-related provisions in the bill.

It’s important to note as well that, although progress was made on reducing fossil-fuel emissions, expanding health care, and creating a fairer tax system, for the poor in this country, “sacrifice zones” are hardly a thing of the past. As journalist Andrew Kaufman suggests, “One thing that does seem assured, however, is that the arrival—at last—of a federal climate law has not heralded an end to the suffering [of] communities living near heavy fossil-fuel polluters.” And as Rafael Mojica, program director for the Michigan environmental justice group Soulardarity, put it, the IRA “is riddled with concessions to the big carbon-based industries that at present prey on our communities at the expense of their health, both physically and economically.”

Keep in mind that Michigan is already anything but a stranger to sacrifice zones. Case in point: the water crisis in the city of Flint as well as in Detroit. The Flint Democracy Defense League and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization have battled lead-poisoning and water shut-offs for years in the face of deindustrialization and the lack of a right to clean water in this country. Such grassroots efforts helped sound the alarm during the Flint water crisis that began in 2014 and have since linked community groups nationwide dealing with high levels of toxins in their water supply so that they could learn from that city’s grassroots organizing experience. Meanwhile, so many years later, Michiganders are still protesting potential polluters like Enbridge’s aging Line 5 oil pipeline.

And there are many other examples of frontline community groups protesting the ways in which their homes are being sacrificed on the altar of the fossil-fuel industry. Take, for example, the communities in the stretch of Louisiana between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that contain hundreds of petrochemical facilities and has, eerily enough, come to be known as Cancer Alley. There, among a mostly poor and Black population, you can find some of the highest cancer rates in the country. In St. James Parish alone, there are 12 petrochemical plants and nearly every household has felt the impact of cancer. For years, Rise St. James and other local groups have been working to prevent the construction of a new plastics facility near local schools on land that once was a slave burial ground.

Then, of course, there are many other sacrifice zones where the issue isn’t fossil fuels. Take the city of Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County, Washington, once home to a thriving timber and lumber economy. After its natural landscape was stripped and the local economy declined, that largely white, rural community fell into endemic poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse. Chaplains on the Harbor, one of the few community organizations with a presence in homeless encampments across the county, has now started a sustainable farm run by formerly homeless and incarcerated young people in Aberdeen as part of an attempt to create models for the building of green communities in places rejected by so many.

Or take Oak Flat, Arizona, the holiest site for the San Carlos Apache tribe. There, a group called the Apache Stronghold is leading a struggle to protect that tribe’s sacred lands against harm from Resolution Copper, a multinational mining company permitted to extract minerals on those lands thanks to a midnight rider put into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2015. Along with a growing number of First Nations people and their supporters, it has been fighting to protect that land from becoming another sacrifice zone on the altar of corporate greed.

On the east coast, consider Union Hill, Virginia, where residents of a historic Black community fought for years to block the construction of three massive compressor stations for fracked gas flowing from the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Those facilities would have potentially subjected residents to staggering amounts of air pollution, but early in 2020 community organizers won the fight to stop construction.

Consider as well the work of Put People First PA!, which, in Pennsylvania communities like Grant Township and Erie, is on the tip of the spear in the fight against an invasive and devastating fracking industry that’s ripping up land and exposing Pennsylvanians to the sort of pollutants that leaders in Union Hill fought to prevent. Note as well that, in many similar places, hospitals are being privatized or shuttered, leaving residents without significant access to health care, even as the risk of respiratory illnesses and other industrially caused diseases grows.

Such disparate communities reflect a long-term history of suffering—from the violence inflicted on indigenous people, to the slave plantations of the South, to the expansion (and then steep decline) of industrial production in the North and West, to pipelines still snaking across the countryside. And now historic pain inflicted on low-income and poor Americans will increase thanks to a growing climate crisis, as the people of flooded and drinking-water-barren Jackson, Mississippi, discovered recently.

In a world of megadroughts, superstorms, wildfires, and horrific flooding guaranteed to wreak ever more havoc on lives and livelihoods, poor and low-income people are beginning to demand action commensurate with the crisis at hand.

Dark Clouds Blowing in from the “Equality State”

While reports on the passage of the IRA and student debt relief dominated the news cycle, another major policy announcement at the close of the summer and far from Capitol Hill slipped far more quietly into the news. It highlights yet again the “sacrifices” that poor Americans are implicitly expected to make to strengthen the economy. Just outside of Jackson, Wyoming, one of the wealthiest and most unequal towns in this country, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell committed his organization to take “forceful and rapid steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply and to keep inflation expectations anchored.”

Couched in typically wonkish language, his comments—made in the “equality state”—may sound benign, but he was suggesting capping wages, an act whose effects will, in the end, fall most heavily on poor and low-income people. Indeed, he warned, mildly enough, that this would mean “some pain for households and businesses”—even as he was ensuring that the livelihoods of poor and low-income people would once again be sacrificed for what passes as the greater good.

What does it mean, for instance, to “moderate demand” for food when more than 12 million families with children are already hungry each month? It should strike us as wrong to call for “some pain” for so many households facing crises like possible evictions or foreclosures, crushing debt, and a lack of access to decent health care. It should be considered inhumane to advocate for a “softer labor market” when one in three workers is already earning less than $15 an hour.

It is disingenuous to say that the economy is “overheating,” as if what’s being experienced is some strange, abstract anomaly rather than the result of decades of disinvestment in infrastructure and social programs that could have provided the basic necessities of life for everyone. Nonetheless, Powell continues to push a false narrative of scarcity and the threat of inflation to smother the powerful resurgence of courageous and creative labor organizing that we’ve seen, miraculously enough, in these pandemic years.

At this point, as a pastor and theologian, I can’t resist quoting Jesus’s choice words in the Gospel of Matthew about how poor people so often pay the price for the further enrichment of the already wealthy. In Matthew 9, Jesus asserts: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” The Greek word “mercy” is defined as loving kindness, taking care of the down and out. In Jesus’s parlance, mercy meant acts of mutual solidarity and societal policies that prioritized the needs of the poor, which would today translate into cancelling debts, raising wages, and investing in social programs.

Despite the encouraging policy-making that hit the headlines this summer, America remains a significant sacrifice zone with economic policies that justify their painful impact on the poor and marginalized as necessary for the greater good. It’s time for us to fight for a comprehensive, intersectional, bottom-up approach to the injustices that continually unfold around us.

_{Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. She is the author of “Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor” (2017).}

_{Common Dreams, September 15, 2022, https://www.commondreams.org/}