The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum solar panels aren’t about radical environmentalism. They’re about an old coal town creating its own economic future.
Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, Carl Shoupe spent his best years in the mines of Harlan County, Kentucky.
Harlan County is a once-vibrant coal mecca nestled against the Virginia border in the state’s southeast corner. Shoupe joined labor fights there in the early 1970s, when union miners battled coal executives and their political patrons for better pay and protections in a struggle enshrined in Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary “Harlan County, U.S.A.” Shoupe looks back fondly on the industry’s heydays, when the money flowed steadily into Benham, the 500-person town where he has lived for the past 30 years, and it qualified as a “Cadillac coal town.”
By 2006, years after he’d retired, the industry had changed dramatically. Hardhat-clad men toiling underground had given way to a new method of mining. Unable to cheaply mine Harlan County’s exhausted seams, coal companies took to blowing the tops off mountains with explosives, leaving patches of barren, craggy wasteland amid a once idyllic hilly, green canopy of sugar maples, oaks and hemlocks. Worse yet, the coal firms brought in non-union workers to do the job.
“It was all scab miners,” Shoupe, 70, told The Huffington Post in a recent phone interview. “My generation of coal miners in Eastern Kentucky is the last generation of union coal miners. There’s not a block of coal being mined today in the commonwealth of Kentucky by union miners.”
The coal industry may have been keeping the lights on at night and homes warm in winter, but it wasn’t putting food on the table anymore, at least not for Harlan County.
Eleven years ago, Shoupe decided to do something about his area’s economic slump. He started researching renewable energy, still a nascent industry then, and preaching what he learned. To many of his neighbors, his words were heresy.
“They were calling me every kind of turncoat,” Shoupe said. “We took some abuse, man, let me tell you. They cursed us and called us everything in the world, saying we were trying to cut down the coal industry.”
In 2010, he and a like-minded friend ran for city council in his hometown of Benham, and both won. In political office for the first time, Shoupe hoped he could start changing local policy. The town’s mayor, a coal industry supporter, proved an obstacle to Shoupe and his allies, but his seat on the council became a helpful pulpit for talking up his energy plans.
In 2013, he launched a campaign with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, a grassroots group advocating for change in poverty-stricken coal country, to raise tens of thousands of dollars from nonprofits like the Sierra Club, Climate Justice Alliance and MoveOn.org to demonstrate the potential for renewable energy. That summer, they used about $10,000 to fix up the home of an elderly widow who was spending up to $700 a month on heating in the winters. They hoped the project would be a proof of concept, that even families indoctrinated in the coal industry’s tribalism toward other fuel sources would understand the value of at least saving money on energy.
It worked.
“The first winter after we finished was so cold and so bad most people in the community’s electricity bills went sky high,” Shoupe said. “Her electrical bill went down by half of what it was in years past.”
Four years later, his campaign got its biggest win, when the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum, a 36,000-square-foot shrine to the business that built Benham, installed about 80 solar panels on its roof in hopes of saving money on energy. The move generated surprised headlines across the country. The San Diego Union-Tribune declared an “irony alert.” ABC News called it a “sign of the times” and filed the story under its “weird” section. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman praised the museum for seeing the future, even when “Trump doesn’t.”
More: A Coal Museum In Kentucky Went Solar This Month. The Backstory Is Even Better.
Coal is killing the planet. It's wonderful that coal country is waking up to reality.
Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, Carl Shoupe spent his best years in the mines of Harlan County, Kentucky.
Harlan County is a once-vibrant coal mecca nestled against the Virginia border in the state’s southeast corner. Shoupe joined labor fights there in the early 1970s, when union miners battled coal executives and their political patrons for better pay and protections in a struggle enshrined in Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary “Harlan County, U.S.A.” Shoupe looks back fondly on the industry’s heydays, when the money flowed steadily into Benham, the 500-person town where he has lived for the past 30 years, and it qualified as a “Cadillac coal town.”
By 2006, years after he’d retired, the industry had changed dramatically. Hardhat-clad men toiling underground had given way to a new method of mining. Unable to cheaply mine Harlan County’s exhausted seams, coal companies took to blowing the tops off mountains with explosives, leaving patches of barren, craggy wasteland amid a once idyllic hilly, green canopy of sugar maples, oaks and hemlocks. Worse yet, the coal firms brought in non-union workers to do the job.
“It was all scab miners,” Shoupe, 70, told The Huffington Post in a recent phone interview. “My generation of coal miners in Eastern Kentucky is the last generation of union coal miners. There’s not a block of coal being mined today in the commonwealth of Kentucky by union miners.”
The coal industry may have been keeping the lights on at night and homes warm in winter, but it wasn’t putting food on the table anymore, at least not for Harlan County.
Eleven years ago, Shoupe decided to do something about his area’s economic slump. He started researching renewable energy, still a nascent industry then, and preaching what he learned. To many of his neighbors, his words were heresy.
“They were calling me every kind of turncoat,” Shoupe said. “We took some abuse, man, let me tell you. They cursed us and called us everything in the world, saying we were trying to cut down the coal industry.”
In 2010, he and a like-minded friend ran for city council in his hometown of Benham, and both won. In political office for the first time, Shoupe hoped he could start changing local policy. The town’s mayor, a coal industry supporter, proved an obstacle to Shoupe and his allies, but his seat on the council became a helpful pulpit for talking up his energy plans.
In 2013, he launched a campaign with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, a grassroots group advocating for change in poverty-stricken coal country, to raise tens of thousands of dollars from nonprofits like the Sierra Club, Climate Justice Alliance and MoveOn.org to demonstrate the potential for renewable energy. That summer, they used about $10,000 to fix up the home of an elderly widow who was spending up to $700 a month on heating in the winters. They hoped the project would be a proof of concept, that even families indoctrinated in the coal industry’s tribalism toward other fuel sources would understand the value of at least saving money on energy.
It worked.
“The first winter after we finished was so cold and so bad most people in the community’s electricity bills went sky high,” Shoupe said. “Her electrical bill went down by half of what it was in years past.”
Four years later, his campaign got its biggest win, when the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum, a 36,000-square-foot shrine to the business that built Benham, installed about 80 solar panels on its roof in hopes of saving money on energy. The move generated surprised headlines across the country. The San Diego Union-Tribune declared an “irony alert.” ABC News called it a “sign of the times” and filed the story under its “weird” section. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman praised the museum for seeing the future, even when “Trump doesn’t.”
More: A Coal Museum In Kentucky Went Solar This Month. The Backstory Is Even Better.
Coal is killing the planet. It's wonderful that coal country is waking up to reality.
