6 ms·

I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.

by arnon 9y ago

FussyZeus 9y ago
You have the luxury of not depending on it coming back in order to earn a living again. I'm not saying it's a good thing they believe it, I'm saying the conned is still the victim: it's the conartist that should be punished, and the GOP has been conning Appalachia for decades.
- bdavisx 9y ago
  The real solution is how do you get the people being conned to recognize that they are being conned and quit voting for the people conning them. If there wasn't a payout (e.g. people being (re)elected), then it wouldn't be happening.
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    I mean one could make a very similar argument between the displaced coal miners and the people who still work for a failing startup. You want to believe the good times are coming again and that desire to believe can override a lot of really good logical thinking. Americans are hopeful, it's our single greatest strength and the source of our most disastrous failings.
    - iamatworknow 9y ago
      I think that comparison is a little weak. Most startups fail but some still succeed, and those working for the startups that are failing can look at the success stories and aspire to that, and it's not completely unreasonable for them to do so. Meanwhile there's no coal mining company that's booming while others flounder. The whole industry is shrinking. It'd be more like if cell phones were becoming obsolete in favor of cranial implants or something, but you were still working on a social app for Android.
      - FussyZeus 9y ago
        Well I mean staying at that specific startup. Obviously the industry is fine. Maybe you really like the company, maybe you really like the coworkers, maybe the coffee's real good, maybe you just hate change. Whatever the reason that attachment can keep you at a place long after you know you should've left.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    Oh, they know they're being conned, they're not stupid. It's just that they believe that both sides are conning them, and they vote for the most appealing set of lies.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      Or for the side that displays some empathy along with the lies.
- ska 9y ago
  As far as I can see everyone with half a chance for it has been conning Appalachia, or trying to, for pretty much as long as it's been recognizably a place.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
You should talk to some folks involved in economic development who have experience with politics and attitudes in W. Virginia. What I've heard is the coal lobby still has the most money and power and politicians are behaving in a short sighted manner in order to appease coal and protect themselves. It would take a lot of courage and political capital to burn (no pun intended) to tell the truth to the state about the future of coal. It's part hope part cronyism. W. Virginians are notoriously undereducated. So it will take a while but eventually the truth will be known and a day of reckoning will come. To be fair my undereducated family in neighboring rural Virginia truly believed Trump "will bring the jobs back". They were aghast when I showed them a video of Tim Cook on 60 minutes explaining that those (manufacturing) jobs aren't coming back.
- matty22 9y ago
  I grew up in West Virginia. You could not get elected in that state if you told the truth about coal jobs never coming back. So our politicians continue to pay lip service to the idea that "if we just de-regulate the coal industry, we can put WV miners back to work". I didn't grow up in the coal mining regions of the state and I've since moved away, but it is depressing watching the citizens of my home state consistently vote against their own interests due to outright fabrications and lip service paid to them by gutless politicians who lack the backbone to tell them the truth. West Virginia has a lot to offer and I do believe the people there could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they accepted the fact that coal is the past and the state needs to move forward into new industries/the future.
dangerlibrary 9y ago
For about a century, coal has been the cheapest, most reliable fuel for utility-scale power generation. For most of the eastern seaboard, coal has only been supplanted by natural gas (slowly) over the last ten years. Competing fuel price fluctuations dictated the change. Natural gas prices before fracking were both higher and much more volatile. There have been periods of ebb and flow that many workers and their families have managed to "wait out" in the past. Further, if you've lived your entire life in a coal town, the sheer scale of the plants, mines, railroads, and other infrastructure can make them seem permanent, reliable. It is very difficult to imagine so much specialized infrastructure simply ... going away. Imagine if you had spent your entire life as a datacenter tech, as had your father. You knew the business inside and out, understood the network of suppliers, the customers, the hardware, everything. You've gotten into arguments about different rack configurations and which you prefer to work on. This is your career. You got into this business because it would provide a stable life for you and your family, and you were damn good at it. Then people started telling you that we would no longer need datacenters - at all - in 5 years because there were now cheaper, better alternatives. You wouldn't believe them.
- shuntress 9y ago
  Why shouldn't I believe them? Assuming they are pointing to the datacenter equivalents of wind/solar/nuclear energy as the reason why datacenter use is shrinking. Edit: Did you mean to imply that Coal is not actually going away because the 'cheaper alternatives' are fake?
  - dangerlibrary 9y ago
    Wind and solar are non-starters. They're more expensive than coal and they can't cover base load. Nuclear could cover base load but is orders of magnitude more expensive (up-front) than coal. Huge investment, huge regulatory burden, huge political risk. Until recently, we hadn't built a new nuclear plant in the country for decades. [0] Coal is cheap and reliable. Always has been. What's killing coal is low, non-volatile natural gas prices from shale fracking. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/17/the-u-s-is-powering-up-its-first-new-nuclear-reactor-in-decades/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.

by arnon 9y ago

I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.

You have the luxury of not depending on it coming back in order to earn a living again. I'm not saying it's a good thing they believe it, I'm saying the conned is still the victim: it's the conartist that should be punished, and the GOP has been conning Appalachia for decades.

bdavisx 9y ago
The real solution is how do you get the people being conned to recognize that they are being conned and quit voting for the people conning them. If there wasn't a payout (e.g. people being (re)elected), then it wouldn't be happening.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  I mean one could make a very similar argument between the displaced coal miners and the people who still work for a failing startup. You want to believe the good times are coming again and that desire to believe can override a lot of really good logical thinking. Americans are hopeful, it's our single greatest strength and the source of our most disastrous failings.
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    I think that comparison is a little weak. Most startups fail but some still succeed, and those working for the startups that are failing can look at the success stories and aspire to that, and it's not completely unreasonable for them to do so. Meanwhile there's no coal mining company that's booming while others flounder. The whole industry is shrinking. It'd be more like if cell phones were becoming obsolete in favor of cranial implants or something, but you were still working on a social app for Android.
    - FussyZeus 9y ago
      Well I mean staying at that specific startup. Obviously the industry is fine. Maybe you really like the company, maybe you really like the coworkers, maybe the coffee's real good, maybe you just hate change. Whatever the reason that attachment can keep you at a place long after you know you should've left.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Oh, they know they're being conned, they're not stupid. It's just that they believe that both sides are conning them, and they vote for the most appealing set of lies.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Or for the side that displays some empathy along with the lies.
ska 9y ago
As far as I can see everyone with half a chance for it has been conning Appalachia, or trying to, for pretty much as long as it's been recognizably a place.

ryanmarsh 9y ago

You should talk to some folks involved in economic development who have experience with politics and attitudes in W. Virginia. What I've heard is the coal lobby still has the most money and power and politicians are behaving in a short sighted manner in order to appease coal and protect themselves. It would take a lot of courage and political capital to burn (no pun intended) to tell the truth to the state about the future of coal. It's part hope part cronyism. W. Virginians are notoriously undereducated. So it will take a while but eventually the truth will be known and a day of reckoning will come. To be fair my undereducated family in neighboring rural Virginia truly believed Trump "will bring the jobs back". They were aghast when I showed them a video of Tim Cook on 60 minutes explaining that those (manufacturing) jobs aren't coming back.

matty22 9y ago
I grew up in West Virginia. You could not get elected in that state if you told the truth about coal jobs never coming back. So our politicians continue to pay lip service to the idea that "if we just de-regulate the coal industry, we can put WV miners back to work". I didn't grow up in the coal mining regions of the state and I've since moved away, but it is depressing watching the citizens of my home state consistently vote against their own interests due to outright fabrications and lip service paid to them by gutless politicians who lack the backbone to tell them the truth. West Virginia has a lot to offer and I do believe the people there could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they accepted the fact that coal is the past and the state needs to move forward into new industries/the future.

dangerlibrary 9y ago

For about a century, coal has been the cheapest, most reliable fuel for utility-scale power generation. For most of the eastern seaboard, coal has only been supplanted by natural gas (slowly) over the last ten years. Competing fuel price fluctuations dictated the change. Natural gas prices before fracking were both higher and much more volatile. There have been periods of ebb and flow that many workers and their families have managed to "wait out" in the past. Further, if you've lived your entire life in a coal town, the sheer scale of the plants, mines, railroads, and other infrastructure can make them seem permanent, reliable. It is very difficult to imagine so much specialized infrastructure simply ... going away. Imagine if you had spent your entire life as a datacenter tech, as had your father. You knew the business inside and out, understood the network of suppliers, the customers, the hardware, everything. You've gotten into arguments about different rack configurations and which you prefer to work on. This is your career. You got into this business because it would provide a stable life for you and your family, and you were damn good at it. Then people started telling you that we would no longer need datacenters - at all - in 5 years because there were now cheaper, better alternatives. You wouldn't believe them.

shuntress 9y ago
Why shouldn't I believe them? Assuming they are pointing to the datacenter equivalents of wind/solar/nuclear energy as the reason why datacenter use is shrinking. Edit: Did you mean to imply that Coal is not actually going away because the 'cheaper alternatives' are fake?
- dangerlibrary 9y ago
  Wind and solar are non-starters. They're more expensive than coal and they can't cover base load. Nuclear could cover base load but is orders of magnitude more expensive (up-front) than coal. Huge investment, huge regulatory burden, huge political risk. Until recently, we hadn't built a new nuclear plant in the country for decades. [0] Coal is cheap and reliable. Always has been. What's killing coal is low, non-volatile natural gas prices from shale fracking. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/17/the-u-s-is-powering-up-its-first-new-nuclear-reactor-in-decades/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...