The Transition's Coal Counties and PFAS Towns

Jason Bordoff's Columbia SIPA work frames the climate transition's distributional problem: the communities that built and powered the industrial economy bear the largest displacement costs from its retirement. Coal counties in Wyoming, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Petrochemical towns along the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. The policy question is whether trade-adjustment infrastructure can be built fast enough.

The energy transition is not just a national or sectoral story; it is a story about specific places. Coal counties in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Wyoming. PFAS-contaminated communities in Michigan, Vermont, and North Carolina. Oil patches in Louisiana and West Texas. These are the places where the gap between transition policy and on-the-ground reality is most visible, and where the political-economy costs of getting the transition wrong have already produced sustained electoral consequences.

The Coal-Country Transition

Central Appalachian coal production has fallen from over 300 million tons annually in 2000 to under 100 million tons in 2024. The decline predates IRA-era climate policy — it was driven primarily by cheap natural gas from the Marcellus shale formation and by declining demand for thermal coal. The transition has produced sustained economic contraction in McDowell County, Mingo County, Letcher County, Harlan County, and dozens of others where coal employment had been the dominant economic activity.

The federal response has been substantial in nominal terms. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $11.3 billion for abandoned mine land cleanup, which provides remediation jobs in coal regions. The Inflation Reduction Act's "energy communities" bonus provides higher tax credits for clean-energy investments in former fossil-fuel-dependent areas. The Justice40 initiative directs 40% of federal climate spending toward disadvantaged communities, many of which are coal-dependent.

The empirical record of these programs so far is mixed. Federal spending has reached the regions but has not generally produced employment recovery at the scale of the lost coal jobs. The clean-energy investments — primarily utility-scale solar — have lower labor intensity than the underground mining they replace. The mine-reclamation work is real but is largely a short-term project rather than a sustained employment source.

The PFAS Story

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a category of "forever chemicals" used in firefighting foam, non-stick coatings, waterproof fabrics, and industrial applications. They are bioaccumulative and associated with cancer, immune dysfunction, and developmental problems. The 3M Cordova plant in Illinois, the Wolverine Worldwide operations in Michigan, the various Air Force bases with firefighting contamination — these are the geographic concentrations of PFAS liability.

The 2024 EPA designation of certain PFAS as "hazardous substances" under CERCLA triggers federal cleanup authority. The 2024 federal drinking-water standard for PFOA and PFOS sets enforceable maximum contaminant levels at 4 parts per trillion. The combination has produced substantial new spending — billions of dollars in cleanup costs across affected communities — but the underlying contamination extends to about half of US public water systems.

The legal landscape is active. 3M settled with public water systems in 2023 for $12.5 billion over PFAS contamination. DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva (the spinoffs from the original DuPont PFAS production) settled for $1.2 billion. Individual property-owner lawsuits continue, particularly around military bases. The remediation is partial — PFAS do not break down naturally — and the long-term health surveillance of affected populations is still being designed.

The Coalfield-vs-Petroleum Comparison

The Appalachian coal counties have been declining since the 1950s. The petroleum-dependent regions (Permian Basin in West Texas, the Bakken in North Dakota, Louisiana refining communities) are still producing. The transition challenge is therefore different in scale and timing.

The Permian's structural future depends on global oil-demand projections. The IEA Net Zero scenario implies substantial production declines after 2030. The political pressure on Permian communities, where oil is still the economic foundation, has not yet reached the level the coal counties experienced because the production has not yet declined. When it does, the transition challenge will resemble the coalfield story at much larger scale.

The Place-Based Response

The IRA's design partially recognizes the place-based nature of the transition. The "energy communities" bonus directs investment toward former coal regions and brownfields. The 45Q carbon-capture credits provide alternative income for fossil-fuel companies that develop CCS projects. The 45V hydrogen credits and the manufacturing tax credits target specific regional industrial clusters.

The empirical record is early. The largest clean-energy investments have indeed clustered in Republican-leaning states (Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina) where the energy-community bonus and the existing industrial infrastructure align. The political economy is that the IRA's geographic distribution may be more durable across political cycles than its national policy would be on its own — a deliberate design feature that ties Republican-district employers to the program's continuation.

What the Comparison Implies for Transitions Generally

The coal and PFAS stories share certain features. Concentrated local damage from a national or industrial pattern. Diffuse benefits that flow elsewhere. Political-economic representation that under-counts the affected regions. Transition policy that arrives after the damage has been substantially done.

The coal transition is mostly the cost-bearing phase; the gains flowed to natural gas consumers and to the IT-economy regions where the alternative economy is concentrated. The PFAS transition is earlier-stage; the cost-bearing phase is now, and the alternative economy that benefits is not yet clearly defined. Both illustrate that transitions imposed without place-based investment produce political-economy backlash that constrains future climate policy.

The Honest Reading

The energy transition is not a uniform national process; it is a sequence of specific local stories about communities that produce fossil fuels or that bear the legacy contamination of past industrial activity. The federal policy framework — IRA, BIL, Justice40 — has recognized the place-based dimension more explicitly than the 1990s manufacturing-decline policy did. The empirical record on whether the recognition translates to durable economic recovery in affected regions is early. The 2030s will produce the test of whether the current generation of place-based transition policy can do for coal country and PFAS towns what TAA failed to do for displaced manufacturing workers, and the answer will substantially shape whether climate policy retains political viability.

The Path-Dependence Problem

Place-based damage compounds across generations. The communities hardest hit by the coal transition were hard-hit before the transition because of earlier rounds of capital flight and population decline. PFAS contamination is concentrated in places that already had substantial industrial legacy. The pattern is that institutional neglect compounds, and the communities that need the most investment are the ones least able to attract it. Federal place-based programs are the institutional response to this dynamic. Whether they produce durable recovery or whether the path-dependence is too entrenched is the empirical question for the next decade.