When a group of coalfield residents and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy halted production at Arch Coal’s Dal-Tex operation last month – courtesy of a legal injunction from federal judge Charles Haden – it reignited a continuing discussion about the economics of coal in West Virginia.

An excellent column in the February 19th issue of the Charleston Gazette by the editorial page editor, Dan Radmacher, bluntly stated the obvious: coal causes poverty. The three major coal-producing states in the US rank in the bottom half in poverty rates, with West Virginia next-to-last. And the poorest counties in West Virginia, with the highest unemployment rates, are the coal-producing counties.

Radmacher was answered in the Gazette a week later with a fluff piece from the president of the National Mining Association (indicating the level of the public relations battle going on) talking about how good coal has been for West Virginia: jobs jobs jobs blah blah blah – you know the routine. He claimed that the coal industry contributes $3 billion in direct benefits to the state’s annual economy and – in a kind of loaves and fishes effect - $10 billion in "indirect" benefits.

(You have to wonder into which category the hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual campaign contributions to state elected officials fall.)

We can probably safely assume that those benefit figures are as inflated as industry estimates of the costs of complying with environmental regulations – which in the case of sulphur dioxide, for example, were about two thousand times higher than the actual costs.

In a recent advertising supplement to the Sunday Gazette-Mail, the state coal industry claimed $17 billion in total benefits to the state – half the gross state product. But what’s a few billion dollars among friends? The same supplement said the industry provides $1 billion in West Virginia wages on one page, and $2 billion on another.

But even accepting the coal industry’s numbers – however ephemeral they may be – when you add up what it costs West Virginia to support Big Coal, the state comes out the loser.

Begin with the fact that most of the land these out-of-state corporations are draining their profits from was stolen from the farmers who originally owned it. As I mentioned last month, by 1923 half the state’s land area, containing 80 percent of the total exploitable resources, was owned by nonresidents. Think of the billions of dollars in wealth that has been transferred out of West Virginia in the past century.

Add to that the industry practice in the early 1900s of importing miners to West Virginia from Europe and other sections of the US. When the coal companies decided to increase their profits by replacing miners with technology over the last few decades, over 100,000 West Virginia miners were put out of work, and essentially dumped on the state economy.

This not only put an extra burden on taxpayers in the form of increased social costs. It also had the effect of keeping average wages lower here than any other state in the region – one of the principal reasons the coal companies imported miners in the first place, and the phenomenon Governor Underwood keeps referring to every time he claims credit for a new employer moving here because of "the quality of the West Virginia work force."

Here’s another consideration: since 1998 was a record year for coal production in West Virginia, that means that the potential $5 billion dollars in union wages those 100,000 coal miners would have earned and spent in the state last year if they were still doing the mining, instead went into the pockets of corporate stockholders. And the source of that wealth is forever gone from West Virginia.

It’s impossible to figure out exactly how much those lost jobs currently cost the state. The population continues to drop in the coal regions; and obviously many former miners have retired (the average age in West Virginia is second only to Florida), died of black lung disease, or moved into other, usually lower-paid jobs. But if the industry can use ballpark numbers, so can we.

Since the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the state are disproportionately in the coal counties, and the state poverty and unemployment rates are about a third higher than the nation’s, it is entirely reasonable to attribute a third of the state’s annual social welfare costs to coal’s dominance of the West Virginia economy. This seems like a conservative figure, in light of the industry’s claim to be responsible for creating more than half of the jobs in West Virginia – in which case they should be responsible for half of the unemployment, too.

But one third accounts for $40 million in annual unemployment benefits (coal pays $6 million per year into the Unemployment Fund. In 1992 unemployment benefits in the mining industry paid $2.43 for every dollar the industry contributed.)

A third of welfare payments would cost another $35 million. And coal’s share of food stamps and school lunches adds $100 million more. Plus Medicaid payments of at least $50 million. And if you include a third of Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance recipients you can add yet another $800 million to the annual cost of West Virginia coal.

(Keep in mind though, that in the weird way the economy is calculated, all the federal tax money coming in to defray these costs is considered an economic plus to the state.)

Dividing the annual Workers Compensation benefits by three gives you about $170 million. Compare this to the WV Coal Association’s boast of a less than $100 million contribution to the fund. The industry congratulates itself that, since the recipients are dying off, some of the surplus left over from their $12 million annual contribution to the state "black lung" fund can help the shortfall in Workers Comp.

Of course, we don’t want to ignore the nearly $200 million some scofflaw coal corporations still owe to the Workers Compensation fund. A sweetheart deal cooked up between labor and industry to release them from their obligation threatens to let this be another write-off picked up by other West Virginia taxpayers.

Well, we’ve racked up a pretty good-sized chunk of change already, and we’ve hardly started counting how much of a liability Big Coal is to West Virginia. Are they paying their fair share of taxes? And if not, how much is the average taxpayer putting out to make up the difference? What kind of effects is coal having on other West Virginia industries, like agriculture, timber and tourism?

What about the environmental costs? The health costs? The costs to families and communities? And even the spiritual costs?

We’ll explore some of these other issues next month.