Conyers, Coal, and the Future of West Virginia
West Virginia state leaders are in an uproar this week over a remark about coal made by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, elder statesman and one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. Congress.
With all the angry statements coming from the likes of Senator Joe Manchin and Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, you’d think that Rep. Conyers had called us West Virginians a bunch of inbred hillbillies (oh, wait — that came from coal industry lawyers, as reporter Ken Ward Jr. reminded us in his excellent post about this whole flap).
No, what Conyers said was that the jury is out on whether coal can be clean, and that coal is perhaps not the golden ticket to economic nirvana for mining states like West Virginia.