Buchanan County is projected to lose nearly half its population in next 25 years. Can anything be done to change that?

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Three months after taking office in 1977, President Jimmy Carter went on national TV to declare that the nation must wage “the moral equivalent of war” to deal with an energy crisis.

This came in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis that happened when the oil-producing nations in the Mideast temporarily refused to sell oil to the United States and before the 1979 oil crisis brought on by the revolution in Iran.

Carter warned that the United States was too dependent on foreign oil, that we could never drill enough oil domestically to replace those international sources, so we needed to develop different sources of fuel. He had two in mind: coal and the sun.

Pairing coal and solar power seem incongruent today, but almost a half-century ago they made sense: We didn’t need to buy them from some other country. In today’s lingo, Carter wanted to “re-shore” America’s energy sources.

Americans did not embrace Carter’s solar power dreams, not in his day anyway. However, we dug coal like never before. The United States produced record amounts of coal — never the 1 billion tons a year Carter envisioned, but the country did dig 850 million tons his final year in office, up from 697.2 million his first one. The number of coal miners in the U.S. doubled. 

For Virginia’s coal-producing counties, times must have seemed good, or at least better than they had been. In Buchanan County, the county’s population surged by 18.5% during the 1970s. When the census-takers came around in 1980, they counted 37,989 people in Buchanan County, more than ever before. This was a decidedly young population, too. The median age in Buchanan County was just 26; one of the youngest in Virginia. The only places younger tended to be college towns. Buchanan County didn’t have a college but it did have coal — and there seemed to be a future in it.

After all, the president of the United States said so. He had mentioned it eight times in his famous speech, lauding it as “efficient,” “plentiful,” “our most abundant energy source.”

We all know what has happened to coal since. And as coal has declined, so has Buchanan County. Today its population is estimated at 19,056 — about half of what it was at its peak in 1980. No other county in Virginia has been losing population at a faster rate than Buchanan County. Now come population projections from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia that say that over the next quarter-century, Buchanan County’s population will fall by almost half again — 48% if you want to be precise — and be just 9,888 by the year 2050. That would be just 26% of what the county had been in 1980.

Economically, we understand why: Coal is down and it’s hard to find a place to develop other industries in a mountainous county. 

Demographically, we understand why, too: As coal fell, many working-age adults moved out in search of jobs elsewhere. The main cause of Buchanan’s population decline hasn’t been death, it’s been people moving out. That’s left the county with an aging population. Within less than a single lifetime, Buchanan has gone from being one of the youngest counties in Virginia to one of the oldest — 47.3. And now, mortality is working its will, as one generation in Buchanan County dies off and simply isn’t replaced.

Politically, though, here’s what I don’t understand: Who will pay for this?

We have, as a society, nearly killed coal as an energy source.

In 1977, when Carter gave his speech and complained that “too few of our utilities have switched to coal,” 46% of the nation’s power came from coal. By the time he left office, the figure had edged up to 50.7%. Today, it’s 16.1%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and that figure will keep falling as coal plants retire and other forms of energy come online. Carter’s solar dream is now coming true: We produced more energy last year from renewables than from coal. 

I am not here to argue for a fossil fuel. I understand both the carbon emissions and the economics that are driving coal out of the marketplace. However, in killing coal, we’re also killing coal communities, with Buchanan County as just the most vivid of many examples.

In military terms, these communities are simply collateral damage in the “war against coal.”

In social terms, though, where is the justice for a place like Buchanan County?

Coal isn’t the only harmful product we’ve tried to shut down. In the 1990s, 46 states sued the nation’s top tobacco companies to recover the health care costs they were running up to care for people who had gotten addicted to cigarettes. Out of that came the 1998 “master settlement” by which the tobacco companies have paid out billions. Virginia was one of just two states (North Carolina was the other) that dedicated part of its settlement money toward building a new economy in former tobacco-producing counties. This is the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, better known as the Tobacco Commission, which has nothing to do with tobacco and everything to do with economic development. No one has ever used the term “reparations” to describe the Tobacco Commission, but that’s essentially what’s involved there. 

You can argue that many former tobacco-growing counties still haven’t recovered from the loss of a mainstay industry, but my point is there is an ongoing effort to do so in the form of an endowment that started out at about $1 billion. Where is the billion-dollar endowment to help build a new economy in the coal counties? Yes, I realize that they’re all covered by the Tobacco Commission, too, but let’s be realistic: While those counties grew some tobacco, it was never the economic driver the way that coal was. Virginia’s main tobacco counties — in Southside — have also had other economic opportunities. They’re relatively flat, for one thing, so it’s easier to carve out a big industrial park such as the Southern Virginia Megasite in Pittsylvania County. 

Tobacco had an easy villain that could be squeezed for cash, and lots of it — the tobacco companies. Coal doesn’t. Coal companies? Last year, ProPublica counted 63 coal companies that had gone out of business in the decade prior. They won’t be paying any reparations to coal country. 

So how could we create the coal equivalent of the Tobacco Commission with a billion-dollar endowment? 

Should we tax, say, renewables? First, it’s probably not a good idea to be driving up the price of energy — that’s both regressive and inflationary. Second, while renewables have displaced some coal, the energy source that “won” the “war on coal” wasn’t renewable energy, it was natural gas. That’s now the nation’s number one energy source, producing more power than renewables (second) and nuclear (third) combined. We could tax natural gas — but that still drives up the price of energy (those who like a carbon tax would think that’s a fine thing, but their goal would be to lead people to switch to renewables, which is not guaranteed).

I suppose the larger question is, do we, as a society, owe anything to places like Buchanan County? Should we just sit by and watch them shrink? Some might say yes: Economies change all the time. The Canadian prairie city of Winnipeg seemed destined to become the Chicago of the North until the Panama Canal opened and the city’s rail hub became less vital. I’ve never gotten anyone to admit this on the record, but some in the economic development world say we simply shouldn’t waste time on places like the coal counties; too much effort is required for too little payoff. In other words, they’re beyond help. It’s an economic form of hospice: Keep them comfortable but we can’t really save them.

Still, Buchanan County is our county. All these are our counties. What should be the state’s response to these population projections? Gov. Glenn Youngkin has adopted Petersburg for a special “partnership” to focus state attention. That makes sense economically (Petersburg is a stressed community) and politically (it looks good for a white Republican to be taking an interest in a majority Black city). I don’t begrudge Petersburg any of the gubernatorial attention it’s gotten. However, maybe the next governor ought to take a long, hard look at these population projections and ask herself what she can do to change some of these trajectories.