[ryanmarsh]

You should talk to some folks involved in economic development who have experience with politics and attitudes in W. Virginia. What I've heard is the coal lobby still has the most money and power and politicians are behaving in a short sighted manner in order to appease coal and protect themselves. It would take a lot of courage and political capital to burn (no pun intended) to tell the truth to the state about the future of coal. It's part hope part cronyism.

W. Virginians are notoriously undereducated. So it will take a while but eventually the truth will be known and a day of reckoning will come.

To be fair my undereducated family in neighboring rural Virginia truly believed Trump "will bring the jobs back". They were aghast when I showed them a video of Tim Cook on 60 minutes explaining that those (manufacturing) jobs aren't coming back.

[matty22]

I grew up in West Virginia. You could not get elected in that state if you told the truth about coal jobs never coming back. So our politicians continue to pay lip service to the idea that "if we just de-regulate the coal industry, we can put WV miners back to work".

I didn't grow up in the coal mining regions of the state and I've since moved away, but it is depressing watching the citizens of my home state consistently vote against their own interests due to outright fabrications and lip service paid to them by gutless politicians who lack the backbone to tell them the truth.

West Virginia has a lot to offer and I do believe the people there could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they accepted the fact that coal is the past and the state needs to move forward into new industries/the future.