Conway certainly looks and sounds awful, but coal is a pretty hefty factor, and pretty hard to campaign around. Eastern Kentucky (and West Virginia for that matter) is a colony. Only about 2 million tons of East Kentucky coal gets used in state, the rest gets shipped to end users elsewhere.
Take Florida for example. In 2001 Florida got more electricity from Coal than Natural Gas, by 2009 Florida was getting twice as much electricity from NG than coal and now it's more than 3X. FP&L is actually buying a coal plant and shutting it down because that's cheaper than to continue buying power from the plant it was contracted to do. Of the coal Florida does burn, it burns more from Colombia than East Kentucky. Florida decided 15 years ago that Appalachia coal was becoming too expensive and they took advantage of technology (Natural Gas Combine Cycle plants) and luck (fracking and low NG prices) to forge a whole different path.
I could repeat that story over and over again for each end user of Eastern Kentucky coal, but the people of East Kentucky aren't going to listen, they have their common delusion that if they squawk Obama enough time it'll all come back. And politicians in both parties are enablers of this idea (Beshear did try to do some kind of summit in EKy trying to promote alternatives, but given geography, infrastructure, and quality of work force issues any transition will be beyond tough). Grimes and Conway peddle the swill just as hard as Mitch and Bevin and they are all horrible rotten people. The fact is that Appalachian coal is in it's seventh decade of decline and that will continue.
So, let's talk about West Virginia.
Only one state has fewer people than it did in 1950--West Virginia. In 1950, West Virginia was the fourth youngest state, now it's the third oldest. Combine that with the highest disability rate in the US and WV has the highest percentage of people collecting SS checks, more than 25% of the state. It has the highest drug usage of any state and the highest drug overdose death rate of any state by far. Thanks to all of that and more, it has a death rate 15% higher than the next state. It's birth rate is actually below average despite having the 6th highest teen birth rate. It has a substandard infrastructure and extremely difficult terrain to try to maintain that infrastructure (airports actually crush houses in WV). Since it's a colony, it's already poor, but thanks to a collapse in commodity prices it's severance tax collections have blasted a huge whole in the state budget.
There is a bit of difference between WV and EKy coal as WV is the largest producer of met coal used for steel making and most of that met coal is exported around the globe. The good thing about met coal is that it fetches a higher price than thermal (electric) coal and thus you can employee more people if needed to get it out of the ground. West Virginia actually added coal jobs in Obama's first term thanks to a global boom in the met coal market (thanks to Chinese demand and natural disaster in Australia) but that has totally reversed after a peak in 2012 and man, are the colonial overlords throwing WV off the train.
Of course, the two main coaltards running for Gov in WV aren't going to try to discuss that, they'll just bleet "War on Coal", and the colony will continue it's descent into a demographic and public health hell. It's disgusting.
It should be noted that the Eastern Panhandle has nothing to do with coal and has much better demographics and health and has actually gained more than 100,000 people since 1950 (while the rest of the state is down 270,000), but it only makes up 10% of the state.
Very informative.
