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Advocates for diversification see over-reliance on the coal industry continuing to impoverish much of Appalachia. But local ownership of economies offers a way forward as corporate interests abandon much of the region: “Those people don’t have any stake in the communities there. They don’t have any reason to reinvest in the human capital and public services and goods."

Renewable energy capacity additions beat out new fossil fuel projects globally by more than two to one in 2017, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the United Nations. The surge in renewables is led by solar but includes wind, biofuels and geothermal energy. “We are at a turning point ... from fossil fuels to the renewable world,” one commentator said. “The markets are there and renewables can take on coal, they can take on oil and gas.”

The Government Accounting Office is recommending termination of a federal program that allows coal companies to “self-bond” against mine clean-up costs. The practice lets mining companies promise to pay for reclamation, even though they may be in no financial position to do so. The recommendation to amend the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act would protect taxpayers but come at no small expense to already-struggling coal companies.

FirstEnergy’s plea for a government bailout puts the Trump administration in a difficult political position: Whether to rescue a failing industry at the expense of ratepayers and other sectors of the U.S. energy economy or let market forces determine outcomes. Saving the company “would hurt rival energy businesses and could raise electricity prices for companies and consumers across the Midwest and mid-Atlantic states.”

The latest government jobs report shows Wyoming, the biggest coal-producing state in the U.S., having added only five full-time coal-mining jobs since 2016. The industry is hampered by the rise of natural gas and renewables alongside customer preferences for clean electricity generation. “When companies don’t see a lot of positive on the horizon, they’re always reluctant to hire again,” said one Wyoming official.

As it closes two nuclear plants in Ohio, FirstEnergy continues a downward spiral leaving communities to pick up the pieces. "As Cindy Winland of the Just Transition Fund has pointed out, the size and the number of closings of coal-fired and nuclear plants in Ohio makes the state an epicenter of energy industry disruption."

In a blow to the coal industry in Montana and Wyoming, a federal judge has ruled that the Bureau of Land Management must consider potential impacts on climate change in deciding on further permitting of federal coal leases. The case could ultimately put a legal limit on the amount of coal mined in the region. “This ruling is the latest example of courts forcing the federal government to be honest with the American public,” one plaintiff said.

Coal production near Hazard, Ky., has dropped to about 4 million tons a year from 17 million tons a decade ago, and where there were once dozens of coal companies in the region there are now only seven. The labor-force participation rate is roughly 44 percent, compared to 70 percent annually. Economic diversification lags, and towns in the region are in dire financial condition. "We're still dealing with the aftermath of layoffs in the coal industry," said a spokesman for the Hazard-based Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program. "You don't recover from the loss of 13,000 coal industry jobs [in eastern Kentucky] since 2011 overnight."

In upstate New York, community advocates of various stripes are pressing for public transparency around the cleanup and redevelopment of the defunct Huntley Generating Station, which must proceed “in a way that both protects and includes the public whose members will have little choice but to live with the results.” Huntley, emblematic of an increasingly uncompetitive U.S. coal-fired electricity-generation fleet, closed two years ago this month.

In anticipation of the closure of Colstrip Generating Station in Montana, one of the power plant’s owners has pledged $3 million “to help its host community transition beyond coal.” The commitment brings the total in such funding from the station’s owners to $10 million. “Any help is a good thing,” said one advocate for keeping the struggling plant alive. “There’s going to have to be a lot done.”