Coal is dying in the US faster than Obama aimed to kill it
34 replies, posted
Linking directly to the source is paywalled, but if you click the link in this tweet it goes around it - or if not, you can just read the thread below this tweet where the reporter summarises it anyway
https://twitter.com/Ed_Crooks/status/1089186288220192768
https://twitter.com/Ed_Crooks/status/1089188214521413632
So much winning, we're going to get tired of winning.
Trump will save the American dream from dying!
https://addup.sierraclub.org/images?file=78e06339c486ca5f05ad94115bfb7bde19f6819e.jpg/@mx_900
Clean coal will not fail! #MAGA #LockHerUp #FinishTheWall #CleanCoal
Non pay walled source from Stanford:
https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/what-killing-us-coal-industry
Imagine this if you will: after this shutdown, and Trump wins/loses his precious wall, him making yet another, longer shutdown, over restauring & boosting coal production...
trump issues an EO demanding the wall be built with piles of coal stacked 40 feet high. Take that Liberals!
Can you imagine if we had treated the horse and buggy post-intercontinental railroad like we treat coal now? "We can't abandon the horse and buggy industry! Millions of stagecoach drivers will lose their jobs if everyone can just ride on a single train! We need government subsidies for the horse and buggy industry now!"
Good. Fuck coal..
Not that any of the coal masturbators will notice
only if it persists while a democrat is in office
I've shared this anecdote before but one of my coworkers at my last job used to be a coal miner in either Virginia or Kentucky, can't quite remember. He was laid off three times in two years. The whole industry is just so unstable due to opposing market forces before you even start talking about regulation.
The whole "but coal jobs!" argument was always as flimsy as tissue paper. It's called training. You know what happens as those coal jobs dry up? New jobs in renewable energy appear. Subsidize training these coal workers for equivalent jobs in the new energy fields.
Not only does it keep them working - and in a field with a far more dependable future - it's probably a hell of a lot safer too. Especially for the ones who are currently working in the mines.
Also let's not forget that the amount of coal industry jobs there are is quite small. Arby's, the fast food place, employs roughly (slightly more) Americans than the entire coal industry, and it also doesn't kill its employees anywhere near as frequently.
But what about the customers?
Adapt it for other purposes then.
Certain tropical countries seem hell-bent on converting rainforest to farmland... Since they show no intention of stopping, then at least they can be slowed down. The secret to this issue? The fact that high rainfall causes tropical soils to lose nutrients rather fast, so cropland on former rainforests becomes basically worthless in a short period of time. Luckily, the natives of a tropical area made an ingenious invention that is super-effective: terra preta. And guess what is an ingredient to it? Yup, coal.
Strange to produce coal for agricultural purposes, and even stranger the fact that it saves the rainforests, but at least it's something, even if downscaling is still going to need to occur
Depends on whether fast food or global warming is killing Americans quicker.
(Unless that was a jab at Arby's itself. But hey, I like Arby's.)
its made with charcoal not coal. the natives certainly did not have access to that
The coal industry can be revived if Trump makes an exclusive deal with the North Pole. I heard Santa requires a lot of coal for all those naughty kids.
Na mate he's getting his coal from Australia. That Tony Abbott guy really followed through on his coal jobs promise.
I don't know what it is with the older generations. The car wasn't a war on horses. The cell phone wasn't a war on land lines. The computer wasn't a war on mathematicians. Now today, every alternative is a war on coal. Trying to make the elite rich pay their share is a war on capitalism. Just fucking get it through your minds that Shit. Changes. Stop trying to stay in the past and drag everyone down with you
It's fear. Fear of not winning anymore. Trump's presidency was a massive win for them.
That's easier said than done when your entire community is built around a single purpose.
Yeah, these communities should have planned better years ago. They should have diversified income streams and made contingencies for a future where their mining products were no longer marketable.
Thing is, it's really hard to build up anything at all in mining towns. That land you built your bar on top of? Oh guess what, the coal seam runs under it. You're getting bought out/kicked off. That doesn't even touch the ecological/geological issues that spring up like the Centralia mine fire. As soon as it becomes too expensive to mine or resources dry up those companies are leaving, which means those employees are probably leaving too. As an entrepreneur, you're constantly at risk of the bulk of your local customer base disappearing if you try to start something in a mining town. The nature of the industry itself acts as a barrier to development and diversification.
These people have been trapped by the industry they're working in. There was a brief period of time where these jobs paid well, didn't require much formal education, and it looked like they would be around so long as there were resources in the ground. The retraining initiatives seem like a bad deal for a lot of these people since they have to do more work/get educated for comparable or reduced pay.
This situation didn't come without warning. People have been trying to address the problem for decades with limited success. No one wants to rock the boat when the system is so volatile, and mining companies continue to threaten to and actually do just up and move when towns ask them to help future proof these communities. It's a really shitty situation with no obvious solution that generations have been born into. People are focused on the opiate deaths in these areas right now, but these places have always been prone to substance abuse, violence, and self-harm.
My grandparents grew up in what's now a blown out mining town. I'm pretty sure my grandmother still has some makeshift furniture fashioned out of dynamite crates in her home. They managed to barely claw their way out of the mines after my grandfather's military service and started a local business. They grew up in violent homes with angry drunks. They strove to raise their kids better than their parents raised them and did what they could to take care of kids in the neighborhood that weren't so fortunate. My dad and his brothers still grew up with a ton of abuse, but relatively they had it pretty good. They all graduated high school. They all went to college. They all stayed out of prison. Most of their childhood friends died in their 20's. The shit my dad and his brothers went through echoes through my cousins, brother, and I.
The people still living in these places are mostly people left behind. Anyone that had the means to get out of these shitty places did so. Anyone smart enough and lucky enough to find a way out took it. Most started as immigrant communities, and people put up with living this shitty of a life and subjecting their kids to that sort of environment mainly out of desperation because the alternatives were worse. Fixing this isn't going to be easy. You're working against the environment, you're working against the mining companies/moneyed interests, you're working against corrupt local governments, and you're largely working against a population with poor physical and mental health that doesn't know anything else. You can't just use a blanket of federal training grants and hope people will fix these problems themselves. These communities are also going to have to come up with solutions from the ground up, and they're going to need people from within the communities to lead the charge.
The problem here is similar to other rural areas. We're banking on people growing up in these places, going off to get needed skills in their communities, and then choosing to go back to live in what was probably their personal hell instead of moving on to greener pastures. Going back usually means worse pay. Going back will inevitably force you into a fight against all of the people working to keep profiting off of the systems that make these places terrible to live in. Going back means raising your kids in an environment that probably left you with a lot of scars.
This post has ballooned far out from what I initially intended, so I'm going to do my best to wrap up my thoughts. The "free market" solution to these places is to just let them die out. I don't think that's a good option. I'm sure a number of these places are going to have to anyway. I keep thinking that boosting the pay of government workers would help. People that have the skills and the desire to help are more likely to put up with all of the shit these towns throw at them if the pay isn't terrible. These places need better teachers and social workers just as much if not more than they need high speed internet or green energy jobs. Politicians preying on whatever glimmer of hope these people still have after living in these places are absolute monsters.
https://youtu.be/cXVZVCoaxM4
Training doesn't mean anything if the training means you have to move out of state. Many of the regions that are negatively impacted by this are regions that are poor for windmill and solar plants with very little in the way of economic potential. These are people who need coal because its the only well paying job they have.
Training is great on paper but it burst doesn't work for people trapped in the true desperation of Rural America.
That varies depending on elevation and proximity.
Aye, the big issue a lot of people don't acknowledge is that a huge number of American towns were founded entirely around a single industry, usually because that's where the resources were found. A coal town with no rivers, shit farm land, and 500 miles of wild forest in all directions isn't exactly a hotspot for a service economy, or a tourism economy.
Many small town in America are dying and there's nothing that can be done, because there's no practical reason for them to exist any more except to support the people who already live there.
I mean, has the coal industry ever really been a good place to work in? Like from its inception its consumed workers with its danger, low pay, enourmous health issues, and things like company towns trapping people in legal slavery. Up until recently, nobody was singing the praises of coal or coal mining.
Before recently 5 corporations didn't control the flow of information to 300 million people.
The thing is back when technology wasn't nearly as advanced, you could reasonably have a few iron works in every county, a factory that produced some component, or some mineral extraction that went to somewhere else, it all worked because even our most high tech stuff needed pretty basic components. A great example I read recently was about how the Victory ships steam turbine engines were made in the middle of ohio and indiana, neither places were anywhere near the ports and shipyards of the east and west coast but the small companies there were able to produce these things because they weren't really that complicated and the bar of entry wasn't that high to do precision machining back then.
Fast forward today, everything has some form of high tech component in it, be it a special alloy or some composite or electronic, its so much harder for small companies to get integrated into the manufacturing supply chain that they get left behind.
When Boeing wants to build a jet, they have to rigerously audit every contractor and sub contractor, and with things like NADCAP and AS9100 standards being pushed to cover the entire industry, if you don't have the resources to get a cert you're shut out of the industry.
Coal miners used to have powerful unions behind them. The issues that come with the job were still there, of course, but at least mining companies weren't running like cults.
ya but then the states let them open up non union mines, the closed down unionized mines, and conned the government into taking over the pensions they weren't funding
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