Dwayne Thomas, who is 70 years old and president of his local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America in southwestern Pennsylvania, spent 43 years working in Appalachian coal mines. For generations, in mines and the nearby steel mills that coal made possible, his family, like many others, has relied on jobs in the fossil fuel industry. Mr. Thomas knows the sacrifices that come with the work. His father, Elmer, died of black lung in 1995. His brother Robert was killed in an accident at the Maple Creek Mine in Bentleyville, Pa., in 1996.
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Despite having a sense of patriotism and longstanding pride in the role that miners have played in American history, he’s also aware that his region’s dependence on fossil fuel jobs needs to end. “Climate change is happening,” he told me recently by phone from his home in Fayette County, Pa. “We have to tackle it before it becomes too large an entity to take on.”
The best way to begin tackling climate change, as Mr. Thomas sees it, is taking the Green New Deal seriously, rather than rejecting it out of hand, as President Trump did this week, complaining that “it’ll kill millions of jobs” and “crush the dreams of the poorest Americans.”
Read the story from The New York Times by Eliza Griswold - “People in Coal Country Worry About the Climate, Too.”
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