The Town That Coal Built Faces a Cloudy Future in Global Energy Shift
The world’s push to reduce greenhouse gases could uproot the livelihood of many people, including the 80 percent of this town’s residents who depend on coal.
COLSTRIP, MontanaCOLSTRIP, Montana—At the Rosebud Mine, Gary Lyons deftly uses two small joysticks to operate a 6 million-pound excavator that unearths tons of coal each day. The coal runs the power plant across the highway.
White-haired Lyons earns $34 an hour and has worked at the mine his entire career. Good pay for skilled labor is the culture here in Colstrip, a town surrounded by sagebrush that sprung to life in 1924 to provide coal for the locomotives of the Northern Pacific Railway. It’s been a coal town ever since.
Yet Colstrip, population 2,300, faces a cloudy future. While many coal towns have struggled for years, its story shows how far the industry’s tumult has spread beyond the hollows of Appalachia. The United
