Schwartzman: Appalachia After Coal

In Climate Rentierism After Coal: Forests, Carbon Offsets, and Post-Coal Politics in the Appalachian Coalfields author Gabe Schwartzman (University of Minnesota, Geography) examines Appalachia’s coalfields through the lens of climate change and rentier capitalism.

Rentier capitalism describes the economic practice of gaining large profits without corresponding contributions to wider social, public goods. This is generally done through ownership of assets that generate income, such as rental properties.

In this article, Schwartzman pays particular attention to recent changes in carbon offset practices, which have become increasingly popular throughout the last decade. States such as California have implemented carbon dioxide emissions “cap and trade” programs, which are policies that require large industrial polluters (utility companies, oil companies, etc.) to reduce emissions by a set amount per year. If a polluter does not meet their emissions targets, they can either purchase credits from another polluter that had reduced emissions below their target, or they can purchase up to 8% of their target reductions from offsets.

Since 2014, carbon offsets and other climate change mitigation measures have provided sizeable new sources of rent for large corporate landlords in the Appalachian coalfields. As a result, carbon offsets and climate finance in rural Appalachia are big business – with landowners in the region netting at least several hundred million dollars from offset sales in the last 5 years.

Here, Schwartzman explores how these new “climate rents” have feed into new forms of rentierism in the Appalachian coalfields, a rentierism that has largely left the people in the region without work and experiencing diminishing investments in basic infrastructure.

Without local industries to support a tax base, funding for schools, roads, water systems, and public services have evaporated. As work has become scarce and government does not invest in infrastructure, many people have left these deindustrializing communities. This article pulls from work other scholars, such as Tania Li, who defines the term ‘surplus population.’ Surplus population refers to those people that have stayed in Appalachia despite deindustrialization. These people are the rural poor who have nowhere to go, dispossessed of land or livelihood when a new production regime displaces former livelihoods and offers few jobs in return. Schwartzman states that the central Appalachian coalfields exemplify Li’s thesis. He argues that rentierism in Appalachia, in the context of deindustrialization, increasingly renders people surplus to capital accumulation. He concludes these effects are intimately tied to emergent ‘rural resentment’-driven right-wing populism.

Overall, this article highlights the centrality of land and land ownership in the post-coal political economy in Appalachia and contributes to literature focused on rentier capitalism, with particular focus on the effects of rentier dynamics for people living in the coalfields. Schwartzman argues that an understanding of these theories and its effects is required for a national political alliance that convincingly promises to improve the quality of life for rural people.