Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming, for Monday, November 18th. I'm Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - brought to you by the Cowboy State Daily Morning Show with Jake. From 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday, Cowboy State Daily's Jake Nichols takes you deeper into the stories that matter - and keeps up with the news, weather and sports in your part of Wyoming. Just tune into Cowboy State Daily Dot Com and join the conversation.

It's been 32 years since Wyoming produced less than 200 million tons of coal, a streak that's about to be broken - unless a miracle occurs, according to one of the nation's leading energy economists.

Cowboy State Daily's Greg Johnson spoke to Rob Godby, an energy economist and University of Wyoming associate professor. He said that with less than nine weeks remaining in 2024, Wyoming's coal mines need to produce 40 million tons of coal to keep the run alive - that's an average of about 5 million tons a week, which Wyoming's mines haven't hit for any week so far this year.

"Production was way down, more than 20% for the first half for the year, mostly first on a really, really warm and long winter that you know, people didn't have to heat their homes a whole lot, so they used a lot less energy, which means they burned a lot less coal… The coal plants themselves had huge stockpiles of coal, so they still they weren't ordering more and building up their stockpiles because they were already full."

Godby said that the Powder River Basin, which produces 97% of Wyoming's coal, is on the verge of a seismic shift that will lead to mines closing and potential consolidation.

Read the full story HERE.

The first candidate to throw his name in the ring for Wyoming governor in the 2026 election is Cody Republican Brent Bien.

Bien told politics reporter Leo Wolfson on Saturday at the Wyoming Republican Party Central Committee meeting in Big Piney that he's running for governor in 2026. Bien believes he can bring strong leadership to Wyoming and represent the voice of the people.

"He considers himself a very conservative, and he believes that people in Wyoming and the United States have been giving up freedoms and giving up their individual liberties as a result of federal overreach. He really wants to run his campaign on making Wyoming more self sufficient and stand up better to the federal government. He also wants to cut property taxes and make elections more secure."

Bien ran for governor in 2022, but was a relative unknown in the Wyoming political scene headed into that election, and was outraised by Gordon financially roughly five to one. Since that time, Bien has gained much larger statewide recognition.

Read the full story HERE.

A brutal and grisly murder in Big Sky, Montana, last month was initially reported as a grizzly attack. A man was found dead at his camping site, seemingly mauled to death. The gruesome scene a pair of witnesses stumbled upon led them to report it as a bear attack.

But it wasn't. And Cowboy State Daily's Jen Kocher reports that the Montana incident isn't the only murder in recent weeks that's been staged to look like a grizzly was to blame - but the sources she talked to say it's actually quite hard to successfully pull something like that off.

"I found out that it is very hard to stage a murder scene pretending to be a grizzly bear. In fact, none of the sources I spoke