Speak up: Slow our coal use?
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Waitress Tonya Woodring, 38, pours coffee at Lavern's Place, a breakfast spot for miners coming off the overnight shift.
Taking a break, she lights a cigarette and lists her family's "toys" - all purchased with the $80,000 a year her husband makes working a mandatory six 10-hour days a week in a job that bears little resemblance to the pickax mining of the past.
"There's a truck," Woodring says, then pauses. "Well, two trucks, the four-wheeler, a boat - and we're looking for a new home."
No other county in Pennsylvania produces more coal than Greene, population 39,808, about an hour's drive southwest of Pittsburgh. And few places feel coal's impact like this county, where growing numbers of people thrive on the commodity while the rest struggle in its shadow.
It's a peaceful place where folks talk in a drawl, cows meander through pastures, and posters on store windows advertise a future appearance by a troupe of brawny strongmen testifying to the power of Jesus.
Tranquil on the surface, rural Greene County is roiled by global economic forces: factories in China, floods in Australia, the rise of the euro, the fall of the dollar, stunning and disturbing developments in mining technology, discoveries of huge natural-gas reserves, the aging of American baby boomers, and, most important, the skyrocketing price of coal - now about $105 a ton on the spot market.
That's macro.
Gary R. Bowers, president of Producers Supply Co., provides the micro.
"Coal has been our livelihood forever," said Bowers, 38. His father and a grandfather were miners, and now his business in the county seat of Waynesburg supplies mines with everything from pipe valves to black tape.
In 1990, Bowers, who never went to college, got a $6.25-an-hour job behind the counter, the only employee. Three years later, he bought out the owner. Now he employs 18. "We're good," he said, smiling and leaning back in his chair. "We're very good."
Except for those who aren't.
"We have a dichotomy of economies," said Barbara L. Cole, administrator of the state's workforce program, CareerLink, in Greene County.
One-fifth of the county's labor pool of nearly 12,000 work in mining, earning $74,206 on average, more than miners elsewhere and Pennsylvania workers in general.
The rest of the county's labor force works mostly in retail, health care and local government, earning less than $32,000 a year, according to the latest state statistics.
"All the other jobs are just minimum wage," said Woodring, at Lavern's, where hungry miners can dig into a scrambled mountain of eggs, potatoes and sausage known as a garbage plate.
No wonder Bituminous Billy, a miner, is the county mascot. The sheer scale of coal mining is mind-boggling.
Nowhere is it more evident than from a hilltop vantage point in the middle of Consol Energy Inc.'s coal-processing complex.
On one side tower four huge silos of coal, each holding an average of 25,000 tons and connected by a warren of conveyor belts that swoop and climb like roller-coasters from the mine to the silos and onto a processing plant capable of sorting 6,500 tons an hour.
Seven 105-car trains a day pull through the complex, each car stopping under a chute to receive 110 tons of coal.
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