For numerous communities across our nation, coal represents much more than the unseen energy source behind the light switch. From 
West Virginia to Wyoming, Pennsylvania to Kentucky and Virginia to Illinois, high paying coal mining jobs provide food on the table, school tuition, the family car, and the monthly mortgage payment. State and local taxes and fees paid by the mining industry also help build the schools, hospitals, and roads in those communities. Low cost electricity from coal also helps small businesses grow and allows America’s manufacturing sector to remain competitive, keeping U.S. jobs here at home.
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As you can see, coal does not come from urban centers of boundless economic diversity. It comes from rural areas where other economic opportunity is often limited. Take Boone County, West Virginia, for example, where coal mining accounts for 55 percent percent of total, private-sector employment, and where those mining jobs pay average weekly wages equal to 137 percent of private-sector average weekly wages across the county as a whole. What does that mean? It means that 75 percent of all private-sector wages paid in Boone County, West Virginia, come from coal. Further, coal and its production provide an important (often principal) tax base for coal-producing counties, and for the state as a whole.
Boone County’s economic benefit from coal production is not unique. There are six counties in West Virginia – Boone, Clay, McDowell, Mingo, Webster, and Wyoming – where the total wages paid by coal mining account for 44 percent or more of total private-sector wages paid in the county.
Across the border in Kentucky, there are seven counties where mining accounts for at least 30 percent of all private-sector wages. In Knott County, Kentucky, mining provides 47 percent of all private-sector jobs and 68 percent of all private-sector wage income.
The same is true in Buchanan County, Dickensen County and Wise County, Virginia, too. And the same is true in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where coal mining accounts for 22 percent of all employment and the average wages paid in coal mining are 183 percent of those paid county wide. Taken together, those two numbers mean that coal mining accounts for about 40 percent of all wage income in Greene County.
For many communities across rural America, coal is, simply put, their economic lifeblood.