Climate rentierism after coal: forests, carbon offsets, and post-coal politics in the Appalachian coalfields

Abstract

ABSTRACT The central Appalachian coalfields have become a major site of carbon forestry offsets on California's carbon market. I use these coalfields as a vantage point from which to examine the emerging dynamics of climate change and rentier capitalism in the rural Global North. Studying one valley on the Kentucky-Tennessee border where coal mining has largely ended, I document how emergent land uses take the form of rentier capitalism. I conclude that rentier dynamics articulated with deindustrialization have created the conditions for right-wing populism to emerge, in part in response to the experience of becoming ‘surplus population,’ drawing upon Tania Li's framework.