'Devastating': Trump moves to undercut green energy hobbling WV economic development

Wallace is president and CEO of Green Bank for Rural America, an enterprise launched last year to deliver capital and technical assistance to hundreds of community leaders to establish climate and clean energy projects in underserved rural and coal communities.

During the April 30 conference hosted by ReImagine Appalachia, a regional coalition of economic and environmental leaders, Wallace reported the Green Bank was poised to do big things, powered by a $500 million grant awarded last year through Congress’ Inflation Reduction Act.

The Green Bank had been on track to provide $100 million to community leaders by the end of March and had $63 million teed up for five Appalachian states to support Hurricane Helene relief, Wallace said.

But that funding for the Green Bank — which remains operational — was frozen by the Trump administration in February.

“That’s just a devastating opportunity cost,� Wallace said.

The Green Bank isn’t alone in having lost opportunities due to unilateral Trump administration freezes on federal funding that have gotten federal agencies in legal trouble.

The Trump administration has moved to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for federal programs, including those meant to help West Virginia recover from natural disasters and grow stronger instead of weaker amid a global transition to renewable energy advancing despite the White House’s best efforts to stop it.

President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announced in March that agency Administrator Lee Zeldin had notified previously selected awardees in a $6 billion funding competition — including a Virginia-based lending intermediary designated to support the Green Bank — that their grant agreements had been terminated.

The intermediary, Appalachian Community Capital, had launched the Green Bank after being selected by the EPA last year for a $500 million award out of $20 billion allotted through a grant competition for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established via the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that passed in a Democratic-controlled Congress with no Republican support.

The grant termination, which a federal judge said the EPA didn’t appear to take legally required steps to implement in a pending lawsuit challenging the move, is one of many measures the Trump administration has taken to hobble efforts to strengthen community recovery and economic development efforts that would improve climate resiliency in vulnerable places like flood- and outage-prone West Virginia.

Last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it was ending its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which has supported states and local governments in their work to lower hazard risks. The Association of State Floodplain Managers called the move “beyond reckless� in a statement.

A FEMA spokesperson claimed in a statement the program was “more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters,� but the move hinted at a farther-reaching step Trump has threatened: abolishing FEMA, which would require congressional action.

FEMA acting Administrator Cameron Hamilton was fired Thursday, one day after he testified before a House of Representatives subcommittee that he didn’t think it was “in the best interests of the American people� to eliminate FEMA.

Also on Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced it would stop updating its tracker of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, which government and insurance agents have used to analyze costs linked to extreme weather.

West Virginia was affected by 47 weather or climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each between 1980 and 2024 when adjusting for inflation, according to the tracker. Nine of those came just since 2020, with climate change driving more extreme weather patterns.

The Trump administration has been hostile to programs enacted through the Inflation Reduction Act. That hostility has jeopardized the landmark climate investment law’s tax credits for renewable energy investments and production that even some Republican members of Congress have said are worth saving in the budget reconciliation process because they’ve created manufacturing jobs and tax revenue largely in rural, Republican-leaning areas.

“I hate to break it to you, but our world has a climate, and it’s not our fault that there is an environment that we live in,� ReImagine Appalachia program director Dana Kuhnline said during a May 1 news teleconference Appalachian groups held to push congressional funding priorities that contradict the Trump administration’s enmity toward environmental justice.

The EPA terminated a $1 million grant it selected to award the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection under former President Joe Biden because it found the grant didn’t abide by its policy of not funding programming that promotes environmental justice, diversity, equity and inclusion.

“[I]t feels very absurd to see these buzzwords used against Appalachia, because — yes, to be frank — nearly all of our counties in the central Appalachian region have an intersection with environmental issues because of the history of coal mining and logging and other methods of extraction,� Kuhnline said. “And that is a history that we can’t change.�

W.Va. community and environmental groups’ budget priorities

Thirty-four community and environmental groups signed an April 28 letter to leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations committees urging support for investments in economic and workforce development as well as flood resiliency in Congress’ ongoing appropriations process.

The groups called for expanded use of FEMA’s Public Assistance program to cover private bridge repair and replacement, observing that when a flood destroys private culverts and bridges, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair the damage and restore access from homes to everyday life and emergency services.

The groups also backed expanded use of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Disaster Home Repair program, which has provided grants to low-income homeowners to repair homes damaged in a presidentially declared disaster area.

Groups signing the letter included the American Friends Service Committee — West Virginia, Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action, the West Virginia Environmental Council, the West Virginia Healthy Kids and Families Coalition and the West Virginia Rivers Coalition.

Their advocacy follows February flooding that ravaged West Virginia’s southern coalfields, triggering a State of Emergency for 14 counties and leaving three people dead in McDowell County.

“We need FEMA to rethink how it shows up in rural places,� West Virginia Rivers Coalition deputy director Autumn Crowe said during the May 1 briefing. “That means meeting people where they are with mobile teams and local partnerships, recognizing that in some of our rural hollers, a private bridge that’s washed out might be that community’s only connection to the outside world.�

Trump has suggested eliminating FEMA, claiming the agency “has been a very big disappointment� during a Hurricane Helene briefing the first week of his second presidency.

‘A new economic future’ sought amid funding turmoil

Groups aiming to spur economic growth in West Virginia while shoring up its climate resilience report being poised to do just that with federal funding help.

Wallace projected impacts of:

• $1.6 billion in total regional investment
• $400 million-plus in capitalization and technical assistance grants to community lenders
• Up to 850,000-ton annual reduction in harmful air pollution
• 13,000 jobs
• 4,000 people trained

Jacob Hannah, CEO of Huntington-based workforce development nonprofit Coalfield Development Corp., noted during the ReImagine Appalachia conference a collective led by his group had won a $62.8 million grant award from the U.S. Economic Development Administration. Focused on expanding emerging climate-resilient sectors of the local economy throughout a 21-county area in West Virginia, ACT Now — the Appalachian Climate Technologies Coalition — won the award via the Biden-approved American Rescue Plan Act to spur job growth by establishing a hub of green economy jobs. Hannah said the grant award money was leveraged to draw another roughly $20 million in matching, nonfederal funding. “And then those funds were distributed throughout our partnerships, throughout our communities, throughout West Virginia, to have that amplifying effect of funding that couldn’t have been achieved had any of us tried to go after this on our own with our limited capacity,â€� Hannah said. Hannah reported Coalfield Development has revitalized 350,000-plus square feet across a 21-county service area, remediating brownfields and transforming abandoned buildings into community hubs for mixed-use housing and business development. Coalfield Development has incubated, supported and created 92 new businesses, Hannah said. Katie Loudin, strategic development director at the ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä-based West Virginia Community Development Hub, which secures funding to serve underinvested communities throughout the region, said during the conference the Hub provided nearly $300,000 in mini-grant funding and predevelopment technical assistance to communities to support resident-led community development efforts last year. But Loudin said federal cuts were driving communication pauses, with fewer federal staff available to answer questions decreasing the Hub’s ability to “move nimbly and be responsive to our communities.â€�

“We’ve really seen an investment in coal-impacted communities, in communities who are trying to look for a new economic future, one that isn’t dependent necessarily on fossil fuel extraction or boom-and-bust cycles,� Loudin said. “They’re looking for more economic stability.� Great value placed on tax credits at risk in GOP Congress Renewable energy tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act have been helping meet that demand throughout the country. The Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit program created by the law, an incentive to increase in solar and wind in low-income communities, had over 49,000 approved applications in its first year totaling nearly 1.5 gigawatts of expected energy capacity and approximately $3.5 billion in public and private investment into communities, the Department of the Treasury reported in September. Federal programs and clean energy tax credits are expected to boost income by $5 billion for West Virginians and result in roughly 7,000 jobs per year in the state from 2025 to 2035, according to a forecast by global consulting firm ICF and commissioned by the American Clean Power Association, a renewable energy industry group. Repealing 45Y and 48E tax credits enacted by the Inflation Reduction Act would raise the nation’s household energy bills around $6 billion annually in the next five years and $25 billion annually by 2040, per a study released in March by Energy Innovation, a San Francisco-based climate policy firm.

The tax credits are named after sections of tax code, allow direct payments from the IRS for the value of the tax credits for political subdivisions, states and tax-exempt organizations — with a bonus of up to 10% for use in energy communities like those throughout West Virginia. In their letter to congressional appropriations panel leaders, the 34 Appalachia-based groups urged support for the tax credits, deeming them essential for continued industrial and energy sector growth. ‘Giant waste of money’ Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee member, Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., a House Appropriations Committee member, and Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., did not respond to requests for comment on whether they support preserving Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, expanded eligible use of the USDA’s Rural Disaster Home Repair Program and use of the FEMA Public Assistance program to cover private bridge upgrades.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, voted against the Inflation Reduction Act and called it a “giant waste of money� in a call with reporters Thursday. Capito indicated she was open to preserving Inflation Reduction Act tax incentives.

“I do believe there’s a new economy growing with renewables and battery storage and chip development and chip manufacturing, and I want to see companies be able to onshore those jobs into the country,� Capito said.

Capito also expressed concern about a FEMA Review Council Trump has established with what the Department of Homeland Security said is a goal of “streamlining the nation’s emergency management and disaster response system.� Pre-disaster mitigation funding, Capito said, is “money well-spent.�

But Capito indicated she’d like to see the federal government “claw back� as much Inflation Reduction Act funding through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund as possible, suggesting the EPA was justified in cutting off that funding. Capito cited a secretly recorded video from conservative activist organization Project Veritas that emerged in December appearing to show an EPA worker referring to distributing funding as “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.�

But the EPA already had obligated funds in line with the congressionally approved Inflation Reduction Act.

Promise in peril

Groups affected by federal funding freezes should be open about those impacts, Wallace and Loudin advised during last week’s conference.

“Solidarity is a survival strategy,� Wallace said.

But Wallace fears that what doesn’t kill economic and energy development efforts in West Virginia and throughout central Appalachia might make region developers warier instead of stronger.

“I think there’s been a lot of empty promises made to Appalachians,� Wallace said, “and we don’t want to be the bearers of those empty promises.�