THE COAL TRAP: A BROADSIDE AGAINST WEST VIRGINIA ENERGY POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

The author of The Coal Trap, James Van Nostrand, speaks with some authority in this blistering indictment of how politicians and utility regulators have sheltered the Appalachian coal industry from trends generally impacting the nation's electric generation business.1 Van Nostrand flashes his credentials in the opening pages, noting he is the son of a celebrated Iowa utility regulator, Maurice Van Nostrand; worked at the New York Public Service Commission for five years following law school; and represented large electric and gas utilities at a major law firm in the Pacific Northwest for roughly half his career before turning to the groves of academe.2 At the time of his midlife job change, the convergence of energy law with environmental practice accelerated with the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, ruling that carbon dioxide emissions fell within the agency's regulatory reach as a "pollutant" under at least one provision of the Clean Air Act.3 Van Nostrand acknowledges he had little appreciation of climate change prior to his "road to Damascus" moment after he joined the Pace University faculty.4 There, upon taking charge of the school's Energy Project, he became steeped in environmental law (a specialty at Pace), eventually taking an advanced law degree in the subject.5 His next stop, in 2011, landed him in the lion's den: he accepted a newly created teaching post as director of West Virginia University Law School's Center for Energy and Sustainable Development.6 The law school's dean explained she envisioned the Center as a "counterbalance, of sorts, to the dominant role of the extractive industry" and its environmental impacts in the state.7 The Coal Trap, coming some 10 years after his appointment, indicates Van Nostrand took the dean at her word. "18 The Clean Power Plan (CPP) - a complex construct envisioning forced "generation shifting" (requiring utilities on a differentiated state-by-state basis to avail themselves of lower-carbon generating sources to achieve prescribed CO2 emission reductions) - gestated over several years and emerged as a final regulation in August 2015. "21 But it all became moot: the U.S. Supreme Court took the highly unusual step in early 2016 of staying the CPP while litigation proceeded (implying a majority of justices thought EPA was not likely to succeed on the merits).22 And while the legal fortunes of the CPP received a boost when a much-reduced version of the regulation substituted by the Trump