It should be noted that many of the energy states mentioned have very small populations, Wyoming, North Dakota, West Virginia, Alaska. Oklahoma and Louisiana are somewhat larger though they've both lost congressional districts over the last decades. The smallness of states does effect coal as they're very dependent on populated states to use a product that tends to be very unpopular outside of coal mining regions and has competitive alternatives. Hence Montana sending a delegation to Washington state begging them not to shutdown their portion of the Coalstrip power plant.
Texas of course is the exception. It's the biggest producer of oil and gas (by far). It's also where the corporate jobs are and always consolidate to in hard times (much to the chagrin of Louisiana and Oklahoma).
Nobody mention Pennsylvania which is of course the number two producer of Natural Gas. Couldn't have eviscerated Appalachian coal without it.
As far as environmentally friendly competitors for fossil fuel, can anyone name the state that produces the most wind energy (by far)? They actually burned 40% less coal last month than they did in the same month in 2014.
With all the coal and natural gas in western Pennsylvania, it's no wonder there's been such a dramatic shift toward the Republicans there. If you overlay a map of Pennsylvania's coal and gas fields onto a map of the Commonwealth's recent political trends at the county level, there's almost a perfect correlation between the presence of hydrocarbons underground and a shift toward the Republicans.
Not that it was ever very credible in the first place, but James Carville's assessment of Pennsylvania politics is finally about to be discarded in favor of a new paradigm, illustrating an increasingly Democrat eastern half, and an increasingly Republican western half, with Allegheny County becoming an increasingly East Coast-style Democrat exclave (I have less than 20 posts so I can't post the necessary links to illustrate this trend), and Erie County remaining part of the Great Lakes Democrat belt.
