West Virginian primary voters nominated a brash, loud-talking billionaire coal magnate and man-made global warming skeptic to represent their party in the state’s gubernatorial race.
The Mountain State’s only billionaire, Jim Justice, defeated former U.S. attorney Booth Goodwin and West Virginia’s Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler Tuesday and will go to face Donald Trump-supporting Republican state Senate President Bill Cole for the governor’s office.
Justice is hedging his bets on championing coal power and attempting to separate himself from the Democratic Party on global warming.
“Until we have really accurate data to prove (man-made global warming) I don’t think we need to blow our legs off on a concept,” Justice told the Register-Herald editorial board.
He is open to the scientific approach to determining whether so-called man-made global warming is truly a threat, but added he is not yet convinced.
“I believe there’s an awful lot of scientists that say, ‘no, no, no, this is just smoke and mirrors.’ I welcome the discussion, but I don’t know, I just don’t know,” Justice added.
Cole, Justice’s Republican opponent, promised last year to boycott President Barack Obama’s carbon regulations, which have since been stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until the rules’ legality can be confirmed.
The state’s environmental activists are torn, but are largely repulsed by Justice’s positions on coal and global warming.
The Sierra Club’s West Virginia chapter, for instance, refused to endorse any of the Democratic candidates during the state’s primary election, though the group says it will likely support one of the candidates in the general election.
“Both Justice and Cole are poor choices at this point,” Jim Sconyers, chairman of the West Virginia Sierra Club, told reporters Wednesday.
One of the cornerstones of Justice’s message is his position on coal production in the state. As governor, he says he will convince the Environmental Protection Agency to use a “cumulative, weighted limit for carbon emissions, instead of an individual limit for each power plant” to administer Obama’s climate rules. His decision to lean toward the coal industry is part of a promise he made during his campaign to not “give up on coal.”
Along with his views on coal and the environment, Justice is also attempting to personify himself as the anti-establishment, businessman’s political candidate, something akin to a Democratic version of Donald Trump.
“I’m not a politician. I’m a business guy that loves our state and loves you,” Justice said at a rally after defeating his Democratic opponents. “Do you want a politician or do you want someone who can really make it happen?”
Justice also promised West Virginia’s coal-reliant citizenship that, if elected, he would “take this state where it’s never been before.”
Justice is likely to meet some stiff headwinds during the general, as he shares a political party with Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, whose anti-coal policy objectives are widely disliked in West Virginia.
The former secretary of state came under intense fire in March for claiming her policies were “going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
She later apologized but only after being confronted by a former West Virginia coal miner, who claimed the policies she is advocating helped push him out of the coal industry.
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