The coal industry in the U.S. has spent decades inundating our communities with billions of tons of toxic coal ash. That ash has seeped toxic metals into the water that we drink. Its dust has spewed radioactive particulates into the air that we breathe. It has even turned the walls and soils of our homes, schools, parks, and hospitals cancerous due to its largely unregulated use as cheap construction fill.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that coal killed nearly half a million people in the U.S. from 1990-2020, with coal powered power plants tied to the deaths of nearly 103,000 in Ohio and Pennsylvania alone. Yet, instead of seeking to protect the people of their states from this poisonous bottom line, electeds and politicians in and outside of coal country continue to devote public time and resources to defending the private interests of the coal industry.
The Attorney General Doing Coal’s Bidding
Take, for example, West Virginia’s Attorney General John McCuskey.
McCuskey spent his first year in office vociferously attacking basic environmental regulation and the rights of other states to protect their populaces from polluters. McCuskey has joined other Republican attorneys general to clamor for and celebrate the end of lifesaving provisions of the Clean Air Act, to attack Michigan’s right to protect itself from poisonous Canadian pipelines, and to assail New York and Vermont for trying to make polluters pay for the havoc they wreak on their communities.
All of those actions are designed to make it easier for polluters to poison people, but some serve the dual function of serving as PR stunts for McCuskey’s own dirty donors. While announcing West Virginia’s attack on New York’s Superfund Act, for example, McCuskey was flanked by executives from the West Virginia Coal Association and GO West Virginia, the state’s oil and gas lobby.
The Serial Polluters Making up WV’s Coal Associations
It certainly serves the interests of WVCA and GOWV’s membership (and extractive industry writ large) for West Virginia taxpayers to foot the bill for challenges to basic corporate accountability measures in New York and Vermont. The benefits to West Virginians themselves, however, are much harder to grasp. Indeed, members of WVCA and GOWC have profited off poisoning West Virginians for decades.
American Electric Power, for example, owns several coal plants in West Virginia. A member of the West Virginia Coal Association, AEP is notorious for its aggressive opposition to basic environmental regulation. It has also contributed mountains of toxic pollutants to the region’s air and water, which has led to the increase of health problems like bronchitis and other respiratory issues, and has even increased communities’ risk of cancer. ProPublica found that the area around one AEP-owned plant had a lifetime cancer risk of 1 in 1,800, which is “more than five times the level the [Environmental Protection Agency] deems ‘acceptable.’”
Or, take EQT, a Pennsylvania-based company whose facilities in West Virginia have forced multiple families to relocate because they were experiencing such profound health issues, including tinnitus, chest pains, dizziness, nausea, and more. Their concerns about their health, and EQT’s role in it, were met with functional silence by the state. Yet, per the state’s own records, “EQT’s emissions contain[ed], among other chemicals, benzene and toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, hexane and formaldehyde — all classified as volatile organic compounds [VOCs]. When inhaled, the chemicals are known to cause dizziness, headaches, tremors, anxiety, confusion, nerve damage, muscle fatigue and — at high levels — death. Some are known to cause cancer.” EQT has a representative on the Gas & Oil Association of West Virginia’s Board of Directors.
A subsidiary of the FirstEnergy Corporation—a member of WVCoal—operated a facility that was the ninth highest U.S. emitter of greenhouse gases in 2023. Diversified Energy, a GOWV member and the country’s largest owner of oil and gas wells, is currently pushing for WV to loosen water protections in the state and was sued in 2022 by West Virginia landowners for failing to properly and promptly plug its abandoned well holdings, an oversight that is horrible for human health and the environment alike.
Coal-Funded McCuskey
So why are West Virginia’s taxpayers funding suits in the interest of these companies? It might have something to do with the fact that many of WVCA’s members, companies with representatives of the board of directors for the WVGO, and their PACs count themselves among McCuskey’s donors. Diversified alone has sent no less than $9,500 McCuskey’s way since 2020. American Electric Power and its “Committee for Responsible Government” has sent McCuskey $5,000 since 2019, $3,000 of which was in 2024 alone; FirstEnergy sent $3,000 McCuskey’s way from 2019-2020. EQT gave a $1,000 check in 2020 and another in 2024. The list goes on. (For more info on where to find these donations, check out West Virginia’s Campaign Finance Reporting System here.)
Public officers should work in the public interest. They shouldn’t make a mockery of their job—and their constituencies—by holding press conferences with executives who act only in the interest of the corporate conglomerate responsible for poisoning their own state’s people and environment.
“John McCuskey” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.