West Virginia Has Always Been for Sale. Why Should Now be Different?
West Virginia has had one long history of selling valuable natural resources and public lands to commercial interests. When the dust settles from these transactions and they can be viewed without the hyped rhetoric of the moment, we often deeply regret them. But it has happened again. The West Virginia Legislature recently passed bills that would permit the auction to the highest bidder of pore space underneath sensitive state-owned forests and wildlife areas for the purpose of sequestering carbon from industrial processes. It did so without committee review or opportunity for public comment.