• Coal is dying in the US faster than Obama aimed to kill it
    34 replies, posted
For a generation or two mining went from a job you did everything you could to avoid to an obvious, easy answer for these communities. Why work hard in school to get out when you can always work in the mines? Why pay taxes to fund schools for your kids when they can always work in the mines?
We have a pilot project here in Germany where we use old coal mine shafts for hydro-energy storage as it's the easiest access to 500+ meters of free fall you will ever get .
There's plenty of reasons to support small towns, not the least of which being that they're better environments to work in bar-none and are generally healthier to live in because there's no light/sound or air pollution. Also, because of the more remote regions, as we can actually see in data with Colorado, people are generally healthier physically. There's plenty of reason to have towns, but we need to find or switch their perviews to things like research and small factory support networks. As Sabeleye said, for a long time factories worked within small towns to produce replacement parts and etc. The move toward Cities has only hastened the ecological damage done by Cities which produce a fuckload and as we've seen in regions like California, just don't have the room to move people in.
By no practical reason I meant to the capitalist system in which we (and Americans especially) live. Perhaps ruthlessly utilitarian to a fault would have been more accurate.
The system we live in is one of Instrumental Rationality, it doesn't ask bigger questions it only seeks to complete end goals.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.