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Coal companies folding is hardly economic pain, just opportunity for solar and wind.
by jefflombardjr 7y ago
Coal companies folding is hardly economic pain, just opportunity for solar and wind.
- billsmithaustin 7y agoIt’s economic pain for coal miners.
- komali2 7y agoA failure on the part of the government and themselves to prepare for the inevitable. Mostly the government, since they're the ones we measure by unemployment rates.
- Waterluvian 7y agoLike the automobile was for farriers and the refrigerator was for ice deliverers. It's awful because real people are losing their jobs and probably don't have the best prospects. It's necessary though. It's one of the reasons a good government has social programs to support those whose jobs become obsolete.
- macintux 7y ago> Like the automobile was for farriers and the refrigerator was for ice deliverers. One significant difference: coal employees are concentrated in a relatively small number of communities, which means that those communities are collectively suffering greatly, and the employees have fewer opportunities because there are no more jobs locally. Farriers and ice deliverers were relatively evenly distributed, lessening the overall community impact and making it much easier to find a new career.
- wonderwonder 7y agoAnother significant difference is that coal is concentrated in states that even though they have almost no population still wield 2 senate seats. This is one of the, if not the reason that coal continues to thrive.
- eigenstuff 7y agoCoal continues to "thrive" because it went out of its way to keep those people impoverished and unable to fight back while it bought their state governments from governors down to school boards and sherrifs. You should go read about the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Coal Wars. Big Coal more or less committed genocide in Appalachia and not only got away with it but had some assistance from the US government. That's how powerful they are. The number of senators these states have is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme.
- ceejayoz 7y agoSure, but that's a surprisingly small industry given the political football it's been. Arby's employs more people. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-surprisingly-small-industries-that-employ-more-people-than-coal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-sur...
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoHow many does Arby's employ at $50K a year? For that matter, how many does Arby's employ full time?
- macintux 7y agoAnd how many small towns will disappear if Arby's does?
- Gibbon1 7y agoEconomic pain for coal miners is a political issue. You could for instance encourage solar companies to hire ex coal miners and pay them good wages.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThese jobs aren't in the same places and many people won't move.
- happosai 7y agoIn a few decades the people unwilling to move will be pensioners. Like gold mining towns, these will become abandoned eventually.
- od1nos 7y agoWish it was that easy, you can't just reschool a coalminer into an entirely different profession 10 years before their retirement.
- adventured 7y agoYou can easily skill shift a coal miner into eg the natural gas industry. Including at 10 years prior to retirement. I've known at least a dozen miners that transitioned to natural gas, in the greater Marcellus shale region. When shifting an experienced miner to the natural gas industry, the problem isn't education, it's replacement pay. They're usually technically, industrially competent people, and are well suited to the oil and natural gas industries as far as ease of skill adaptation goes. It's something our government/s should be pursuing aggressively (except usually the states where the coal industry exists don't want to go against those jobs and actively encourage that shift). If done correctly, you could make the job shift from coal to other energy industries far easier, buffering the labor hit, and drain the coal industry of the labor it needs to operate (accelerating its demise).
- macintux 7y agoReplacement pay and relocation. Asking an older blue collar worker to move away from family and friends to another state, more or less involuntarily, is much harder than encouraging a young tech worker to move to, say, California.
- elgenie 7y agoThe entire coal industry currently employs about 50K people. Meanwhile, Sears has cut 250K jobs in the last 15 years.
- adventured 7y agoA comparison which doesn't lessen the pain for those 50,000 mostly well-paid people in any regard what-so-ever. Those jobs are often not easy to replace financially for the people working them. It involves uprooting their families, or being away for weeks at a time, working in the natural gas industry or similar, and they still don't make more than they were making in coal. I grew up around coal country Appalachia. Making $50,000 per year in a coal mine in the early 1990s, anywhere in Appalachia, was a financial godsend for those workers. I knew a lot of families that it provided a solid middle class life for, people that otherwise were going to be stuck working low wage jobs in those regions, if there were any jobs at all (and it was a hard, dirty, unhealthy, dangerous job; they all knew that). A typical Sears worker has plenty of other opportunities at comparable or higher pay. There isn't a shortage of $13-$15 / hour jobs in the US, particularly in the locations where most Sears stores operated historically.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoWe should be putting those workers to work as part of the NPS/US Forest Service in Appalachia and the Rocky Mountains as these extraction jobs phase out. Better to focus on conservation and remediation instead of extraction IMHO (and the cost to employee someone in such a role is not much higher per person, ~$65k/year, than they'd receive at max social security benefits [~$35k/year]).
- grogenaut 7y agoThe usfs is short 50k people in Appalachia?
- toomuchtodo 7y agoNot all coal mining happens in Appalachia (this specific company mines in Wyoming and Montana). Is it unreasonable to expect it straightforward to transition workers from an industry that employs less people than Arby's (the fast food establishment) into other roles?
- dv_dt 7y agoPerhaps politics in congress is driven more by the mine owners than it is by the miners.
- rossdavidh 7y agoWell, it can be both. Just because it's good for the environment, and maybe even the economy as a whole, doesn't mean that it's not causing pain. Real pain, to real people. Who really should be helped, perhaps helped to get those jobs in solar and wind! If we had a functional Congress, that's the sort of thing we would be doing.
- chipperyman573 7y agoOf course it's anecdotal evidence, but I listened to a podcast a while ago (don't remember which one) that invited a government clerk that helped people find retraining programs. According to her, her department has so few people applying that they would accept literally any request for training - even if it had nothing to do with what the funds were allocated for (in this case retraining from coal to solar). According to her, a big part of the problem is you have people in (usually small) towns whose parents lived their entire lives working coal, and think that the only way to be a man is to work it too.
- fzeroracer 7y agoI'd be curious to see how this trend holds up among the various blue-collar careers. My parents were commercial fishermen and they wanted me to get as far away from fishing as possible.
- rossdavidh 7y agoCan't speak to that specifically, but one thing I have heard in other similar cases is that the people who try the retraining programs, find that they don't work. Some people can sit in a classroom and listen to a lecture and learn something, other people learn by doing something on the job. If we still had widespread apprenticeship as a way to learn, this would be fine. Classroom training isn't really the greatest way to learn something. But it's the way our society has doubled down on in the last generation or so, to the point that high schools shut down shop class programs and expanded AP, regarding anyone who didn't go to college as a failure. Again, I don't know if it applies to the case you're discussing, just raising it as a possible explanation.
- 7y ago
- mbell 7y agoEconomically speaking its mostly opportunity for natural gas.
- elgenie 7y agoThat reverses the causality. The opportunity existed 12-15 years ago; coal mining concerns going bankrupt is at the end of the process. Natural gas being able to beat the pants off coal on both price and pollution while also being generated in the US is the reason that natural gas plants opened and coal ones closed.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoPrice and pollution yes, but carbon no. Natural gas plants, while nominally 490 gCO2-eq/kW vs. coal's 800, are still very high carbon. Add in methane leaks from pipeline distribution and then LNG compression energy as the export market from the US rapidly increases in the gulf and it's parity. Fracked natural gas is a disaster from a climate change perspective. This is why we need to price in carbon externalities in energy markets.
- elgenie 7y agoAgreed that pricing in carbon externalities is a necessary step, but that will only make solar / wind / hydro more attractive with respect to natural gas. My point was more that the reasons that the coal industry is dead is that natural gas won exclusively on short-term economic thinking with zero contemplation of externalities.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoI'm more concerned about nuclear being more attractive wrt natural gas, since huge low-carbon nukes are getting shut down right after coal to be replaced with fracked natural gas. This is backwards from a climate change perspective. Damn fracking pulled the bottom out of electricity prices, screwing over nuclear plants whose O&M is pretty high. They were fine when electricity revenue was normal. But fracking dropped it off.
- mschuster91 7y agoIt is only "hardly a pain" when you look at the whole country. But for cities where the only meaningful employer in hundreds of km range is the local mine and its suppliers and customers, the consequences of a rapid unscheduled employer disappearance are disastrous. And who would have thought: exactly those regions are, no matter the country, the ones where the right-wing populists easily gained and kept ground. I mean, sure, the people there will wake up once they realize that no amount of kicking out foreigners will bring back their coal jerbs, but for now democracy is stuck with the aftermath of decades of ignorance.