New reporting digs into a question that sits close to home for every group working below a culm pile: Pennsylvania sends hundreds of millions of public dollars to the waste coal industry, and it is fair to ask what the environment is getting back.
An Inside Climate News investigation published with the Pennsylvania Capital-Star on September 2 details the public subsidies flowing to the state’s waste coal sector, through energy credits and tax programs, at a time when renewable energy development in Pennsylvania has stalled.
The reclamation bargain
Waste coal plants burn the legacy piles of low grade coal refuse that sit in and above many of our watersheds, leaching acid and metals into streams. The industry has long argued that the subsidies are really payments for reclamation: burn the pile, remove the pollution source, and reclaim the land. That bargain is why waste coal enjoys a favored status in state energy policy that wind and solar largely do not.
The question the reporting raises
The investigation asks whether taxpayers are getting the cleanup they were promised, and it lands at a moment when the economics of coal refuse plants keep getting harder and several have idled or closed. When a waste coal plant shuts down, the piles it was supposed to consume stay put, and so does the acid drainage running off of them. Meanwhile the state’s renewable sector, which could be competing for some of that public support, has languished.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Watershed groups have a direct stake in this debate, whichever side of it they land on. Some of our streams are cleaner because a nearby plant consumed the pile that was killing them; others sit below piles that a subsidized plant never got to. As lawmakers revisit energy subsidies, groups should be ready to speak from local experience about what actually reclaims mine scarred land, and to push for cleanup funding that does not depend on the fortunes of a single aging industry. The full piece is worth reading before the next legislative session picks the issue back up.
Source: Pennsylvania Capital-Star, reporting by Kyle Bagenstose for Inside Climate News, September 2, 2026. Current as of September 11, 2026.
