Here’s an unexpected announcement that just came in from the Jim Justice for governor campaign:

Yesterday, businessman Jim Justice visited Bridgeport High School in Harrison County and announced his plan to retrofit West Virginia’s older schools, public buildings, and commercial properties. In Harrison County alone, 19 school facilities have been upgraded and are already seeing lower energy bills.

By making older structures more energy efficient, Justice wants to cut costs and put people to work. His initiative is budget-neutral and aims to lower utility costs by retrofitting public schools, hospitals, college campuses, airports, libraries, state agencies, and other old buildings across West Virginia.

Justice said:

At The Greenbrier we’ve cut costs and put people to work by investing in energy efficiencies. I want to retrofit buildings across the state so that we can cut utility bills and create new jobs.

The Clarksburg paper had this story about the event yesterday.  And as Andrew Brown from the Gazette-Mail has reported, energy efficiency programs have not exactly been the most popular topic among political leaders and regulators in West Virginia.

It’s a pleasant surprise to hear Justice talking about an important, but not very sexy, issue like energy efficiency. He’s also presented what — for a candidate who has been harshly criticized for not really talking much about specific policies — is a somewhat detailed plan for tackling this initiative.

More broadly, though, it’s hard to understand how Justice can on one hand be promoting major energy efficiency efforts and then insisting that he’s somehow going to to make sure that West Virginia produces more coal than ever before.

But maybe this announcement is just a prelude to a really major move by Justice in which the Democratic candidate and coal operator will renounce his refusal to acknowledge the climate crisis and pledge to do all he can to help West Virginia do its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.