Renewable Energy: The New Texas Tea
Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia should try it instead of throwing up barriers In 2009, Texas was the nation’s biggest consumer of coal for the generation of electricity. By 2019 Texas had cut its consumption of coal by a third and replaced it with . . . If you expect the next words to be […]
ORVI Insider #4: Quality of Life Investments Could Drive Prosperity in Small Cities and Towns
A Message From Our Executive Director The Ohio River Valley, like much of the country, is currently living under the nation’s microscope – we are facing scrutiny from pundits trying to predict our contribution to the outcome of the Presidential election, we are navigating the turbulent waters of educating our children during a pandemic, we […]
West Virginia’s Oil & Gas Industry Pushing for Millions in Property Tax Cuts
While West Virginians are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and trying to figure out if their kids can attend school, the oil and gas industry is working with the West Virginia State Tax Department to cut its property taxes by as much as $62 million per year. Last month, the state tax department released a […]
Quality of Life-driven prosperity for small cities and towns
Earlier this year, the Belomar Regional Council, an economic planning and development council comprised of governments in Belmont County Ohio, and Ohio, Marshall, and Wetzel Counties in West Virginia, submitted an updated Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy to the US Economic Development Administration. It contained this SWOT chart. The only opportunity for economic development identified in […]
The Fracking Boom in Appalachia: Big GDP Growth, Small Amount of Jobs and Local Income
“If our economy seems to be growing but that growth is not sustainable because we are destroying the environment and using up scarce natural resources, our statistics should warn us. But because GDP didn’t include resource depletion and environmental degradation, we typically get an excessively rosy picture.” – Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Winner The standard […]
ORVI Insider #3: Inequality is Robbing Workers of Pay in the Ohio River Valley
The Ohio River Valley Institute aims to circulate our findings as widely as possible, making our research and messaging strategies available to all – starting with this newsletter.
Inequality is Robbing Workers of Pay in the Ohio River Valley
Workers in West Virginia should be making $117,000 a year on average — and they would be too, if only we had pursued the same economic strategies we had in the 1970s. Instead, we’ve taken power away from workers, lowered taxes on the wealthy, and designed an economic system that redistributes money upward. That $117k […]
Pennsylvania Prevails on Absentee Voting Access
Pennsylvanians will now have more time for their ballots to make it to election clerks’ hands and be allowed to offer drop boxes, after separate rulings from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Thursday.
Pennsylvania’s Tight Deadlines Threaten Thousands of Absentee Votes
For years, Pennsylvania’s election officials have been raising the alarm: The state’s absentee ballot deadlines are too tight—there just aren’t enough days between deadlines to request and return mail-in ballots to turn them around. Too many votes cast properly go needlessly uncounted. And if they don’t solve this now, the problem will only get worse.
Three new barriers to Appalachian petrochemical expansion
How Saudi Arabia may cripple the US fracking boom and the Appalachian petrochemical buildout along with it It’s hard to conceive of a worse scenario for the nascent Appalachian petrochemical industry than a world in which the price of oil is chronically low, competition from more efficient producers of ethylene is increasing, and growth in […]