She leads an organization that has been working with communities since 1994 to shift away from their dependence on extractive industries. In Greene County, Pa., where she lives, jobs related to the fossil fuel industry have been dwindling for decades, and not simply because companies have been driven out of business by the rising costs of federal regulation.

Just as important, there are pressures on extractive industries from mechanization, jobs moving overseas to take advantage of cheap labor, diminishing reserves and competition from natural gas and renewable energy sources. Unemployment, addiction and the environmental catastrophes left behind by the fossil fuel industry have also already made it starkly clear to many in the region that the economy needs to change.

Mrs. Coptis, who is married to a former miner and Marine, spends much of her time knocking on doors to talk to people about what moving away from fossil fuels will entail. The people she talks to believe the Green New Deal is settled policy, rather than an evolving proposal, and are worried that “front-line communities” like theirs will bear the brunt of the energy transition, that the Green New Deal will abandon them.

She’s inviting state and federal legislators to come to rural Pennsylvania to talk about the plan. But first she wants them to listen to people “to hear their legit fears that this transition is going to leave them in the dust as the country transitions to a new energy economy.” Such conversations are not easy ones. “Just because it may seem challenging to have the conversation with the coal miner who’s totally opposed to this doesn’t mean it’s not worth the time,” she said.

I sat down recently for eggs with Greg Stiles, a southwestern Pennsylvania miner vociferously opposed to the Green New Deal. He had just gotten off work in a nearby coal mine, where his job involves putting bolts in a mine roof to prevent a mile’s worth of earth from collapsing onto his colleagues. Mr. Stiles, who is 49, has been a miner for a decade. He doesn’t see his job as patriotic, just well-paying — in the low six figures.

But he believes what he’s seen on Fox News about climate change being “a scare tactic,” as he put it, designed to recruit “millennial and #MeToo voters” to the Democratic Party. As a hunter and fishermen, he believes in the importance of clean water, but sees little evidence of warming in the woods around his home in Waynesburg, Pa. And if the effects are being felt elsewhere, outside of the United States, well, then other countries can step up to do more.

“Are other countries doing their part? I don’t think so,” he told me.

It’s wrong to assume that the one in five Americans who qualify as “rural” subscribe to the same conservative politics, as such shorthand descriptions as “Trump country” and even “rural America” might have us believe. The idea that all miners or all communities bound to extractive industries are hostile to change is simply untrue. Appalachia has a rich history of miners — and their wives — organizing on behalf of their health, jobs and the environment; the mine workers union was founded to protect these principles.