A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal | Hacker News Reader

A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal

wsj.com

99 pointsJumpCrisscross112 comments

The partisan obsession with coal is cultural, not practical. West Virginia coal miners are a convenient proxy for the image of hardworking Americans being oppressed by unnecessary and burdensome regulation (as if regulation was the source of the woes of the coal industry).

In practice, the entire coal mining industry employs fewer people than Arby's (true fact). Expensive changes to environmental regulations, environmental costs aside, will help very few people in that industry. Coal is gonna go the way of buggy whips, and and politicians will still do the moral equivalent of demanding we ban cars because they frighten the horses.

The real trick is going to be reworking the grid to take advantage of the intermittent nature of wind and solar. And the Invisible Hand has opinions about that. If you can cache enough power to stabilize the grid, then the whole "baseline" model currently provided by coal and nuclear plants running at near-capacity goes away.

And storing power isn't exactly rocket surgery. There are a whole lot of ways to do it - batteries, compression, gravity, thermal, etc. Add in smart micrometering (which also isn't exactly rocket surgery), and you create an arbitrage opportunity. Buy energy when it's cheap (when the wind blows and the sun shines), and sell it when it's dear (the demand is up and the sun is down). The invisible hand smooths out the ripples for us. The difference is power prices metered by the second or the minute, not the year. Market forces will regulate the prices, not actual regulation.

And because this combination cache baseline and zero-margin generation is so efficient, it'll quickly displace fossil and nuclear financially.

We just need to survive another couple of decades.

Googling my own answer... in the US, nuclear provides about 20% of our electricity. Russia, 17.8%. China, only 2%, with a 6% goal.

France is 74%, a strong outlier, but I don't think they have much domestic coal.

France doesn't have any coal mining anymore, it was totally stopped in 2004 according to Wikipedia (French-only page). You can still see a lot of former "mining cities" (easily recognizable because of naming quirks and the distinctive houses) in parts where there was mines in the past. It seems to me it's still in the culture of some people (especially older ones), but it's fading.

France has a strong nuclear culture (though with fierce opposition from part of the population). Not too sure about the reason, but it might be because France has few resources, but lots engineering expertise. Nuclear also don't have much CO2 emissions and produce cheap electricity.

The invisible hand smooths out the ripples for us

Yes, that's all well and good, when we have a functioning Democracy, one that will regulate just enough to keep the playing field level, instead of regulating for large corporations to give them an advantage. Look at Comcast, AT&T and others like them. Regulation allows them to reap huge profits for subpar service, that their customers agree is not what they want, but we don't have any choice.

For the last 40+ years, the true aim of Republicans in Congress and the Executive has been to insure that Corporations have more rights than The People. All this culture war bullshit is a diversion (and we've been playing along so nicely devouring each other while the world shifts under our feet). Democracy has been taken over by corporatists.

The question is, will The People recognize this before it's too late to reverse (by Democratic means)?

Don't read my post as some libertarian competition-cures-cancer nonsense. I'm just pointing that we can create an opportunity for a lower-cost and more effective model, in this particular case.

Regulation isn't what helps large companies reap high profits. Monopoly and friction does. Read your Peter Thiel! In a truly free market, competition drives profit margins to zero. That's just basic economics, taken to its logical conclusion, as opposed to the illogical conclusion of politicians and economists who put aesthetics over mathematics.

Corporations are not Persons. Money is not Speech.

Fix those (which also implies taking the money out of politics) and the rest will follow.

Corporations being "persons" is merely a legal fiction that enables them to sue and be sued. I hardly see how this causes the problems you claim nor agree that this needs "fixing".

Corollary, money is and has always been a proxy for political power, in addition to being the raison d'etre of the corporation. Would love to hear your plans for weaning our economy off of money.

It's also ludicrous to suggest that "taking the money out of politics" (as if that was something that could be done) would just fix everything.

There are more people employed as solar installers in West Virginia than as coal miners in West Virginia.

But what's the median income of each group?

And while we’re at it, what percentage of each group prematurely dies of black lung?

You might not care if you die early of black lung if your much higher income from coal mining allows your family a higher quality of life until your death (when life insurance and social security survivor benefits kick in).

I'm pretty sure most people care if they die early or not.

And if you think Appalachian coal mining is a "higher quality of life", I suggest sitting down and watching the 1976 documentary Harlan County USA (about violence while striking against coal companies), and Coal Miner's Daughter (a film biopic of country singer Loretta Lynn, who grew up in coal country).

> The partisan obsession with coal is cultural, not practical. West Virginia coal miners are a convenient proxy for the image of hardworking Americans being oppressed by unnecessary and burdensome regulation (as if regulation was the source of the woes of the coal industry).

Bang on.

The knock-on effects of this are surprisingly nasty, though. Whole swaths of country identify as mining country. Taking that away from them with economics is an assault on their culture, and the people concerned react like any culture that senses its core is under attack.

You can treat them as something obsolete, a dying beast we can circle like vultures. Or you can find a way to get them off of coal that doesn't involve invalidating how they think of themselves.

And lots of people who don't live in mining country identify culturally with the miners. They see themselves as the "real Americans", being victimized by shadowy cultural elites and unnecessary regulations. So the coal miners as a political force aren't relevant per se. The coal miners as a symbol are extremely relevant. This only becomes more potent as American conservatism drifts away from a free market ideology and toward a protectionist/nationalist ideology. It doesn't matter that market forces are doing this to the coal miners. Their traditional way of life must be defended! The importance of intergenerational poverty and black lung disease cannot be overstated!

And the miners keep dying of black lung and caveins, and their neighbors have their water poisoned by runoff.

You can tell people that their identity is killing them, and it might actually be true. But most people tend to think of losing their identity as functionally equivalent to not only their death, but also the deaths of everyone they hold dear.

It's not something you can prize people away from readily.

That cultural identification issue is massive.

I was involved in a software project where management kept wanting to define the company as manufacturing, rather than primarily retail. The only way I could rationalise that is because it gave them an inflated sense of importance about their place in the world.

As a result, they ended up with a software system bigger and more complicated than their business dictated, meaning additional on-going admin and support load.

That's small fry, however, compared to a state's or country's cultural identification, which has the potential for far-reaching destruction.

How did countries like England deal with the shutting down of coal mines in the 80s ? Was there any reskilling program.

It did not go well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984%E2%8...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_King...

It’s more than that. Mineral rights in that part of the country is an old money game, and coal mining is a proxy for many extractive industries.

The modern GOP came out of the turbulence of the 60s. The conservatives are the result of crossing betrayed southern democrats angry about desegregation with western resource interests. It’s part of the machinery of the party.

It would be easier to convince them if liberals didn't outright mock them, Hillary bragged that she was going to put a lot of miners out of business.

There's also the sense of abandonment. Coal miners worked and died for generations to provide the energy that made comfortable city life possible. Now when they are no longer needed they get thrown away like an old tool. If liberals actually promoted something other than "leave behind everything/everyone you know and move to the city" they might be more receptive to dropping coal.

> if liberals didn't outright mock them,

>Hillary bragged that she was going to put a lot of miners out of business.

Searching for "hillary coal jobs", it seems your statement is based on a misrepresentation of what she said. (if "politifact" is to be believed)

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/may/10/...

Coal emissions kill... which is why zero-cabon-emission nuclear power is essential for powering the base load of the green future. Though if the current rules prohibiting the recycling of partially spent fuel, lack of incentives for LFTR reactor research, streamlining regulations and environmental studies, and moving from gigawatt-scale reactors to designs using a cluster of SMR (small, modular reactors) isn't pursued then, unfortunately, it's probably better to ignore nuclear.

or large scale energy storage. is that hard to do? yes, it is also hard to do nuclear power safely, and also hard to build huge offshore oil rigs, but we can do all of these things.

Zero carbon emissions? The uranium drag line, trucks, ships, trains, and smelters are all fossil fuel powered, and that doesn't include the prodigious amounts of steel and cement needed for a nuclear plant. It might be less carbon-intensive than, say, oil, but it's certainly nowhere near zero.

LFTR reactors, if they actually had significant economic potential, wouldn't need incentives. India or China would have gone all-out on them, but the fact is they still require Uranium to get started, and even in theory they aren't much better than what we're currently using for fission-based power.

Ignoring both coal and nuclear is pretty much inevitable, as long as natural gas and renewables stay this cheap or cheaper.

> The uranium drag line, trucks, ships, trains, and smelters are all fossil fuel powered, and that doesn't include the prodigious amounts of steel and cement needed for a nuclear plant.

There is considerably less ore mining and refining involved in nuclear compared to renewable, due to the orders of magnitude higher energy density.

It's fallacious reasoning, because by that standard, NOTHING produced by the current society is zero carbon. Nuclear itself is zero carbon, just like wind or solar. But all three require material that could conceivably be produced in a zero carbon / 100% offset regimen. So the correct approach is to push for zero carbon transport, zero carbon cement etc. Or just tax the carbon to get it to a planetary safe level and let the market allocate.

Natural gas needs to be phased out due to CO2.

Eventually, but for now it's a 50% reduction over coal.

Eventually, yes. One nice thing about the US natural gas boom is that power plants for natural gas have much lower capital costs than coal plants, so there will be less screaming when they are eventually shut down.

There are several ways now to burn natural gas without releasing even a single ounce of CO2 into the atmosphere. For example, one way cracks natural gas into hydrogen and into solid black carbon which is a fine powder, and easy to store away.

Natural gas will be an integral of the energy mix for the next 50 years at least.

Nuclear power is now arguably too late. We've got enough renewables manufacturing capabity to add a lot every year, while nuclear power plant starting now (e.g. Hinkley Point C, which has been in planning since 2008) won't be ready for at least 5 years.

I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group, so while I agree it would be great if nuclear power was resurrected (being safer and cleaner than any other form of power, solar included, despite its representation in the media), it very likely will never happen--purely for economic reasons.

Ironically, it's wind and solar that finished off nuclear power. Renewable energy has high variability in supply, but sells power at zero marginal cost. That means grid demand becomes highly variable during the day.

Nuclear (and coal) are both systems with high capital costs and very low marginal cost. To be cost competitive, they both need to produce power 90%+ of the time to amortize the initial capital. However, with the current variability in demand, they can't get anywhere close to 90% demand from the grid.

This leaves a market opening for peaker plants with very low capital costs, notably natural gas and hydro in the US. Hydro is saturated, and combined with low-cost fuel due to the fracking boom, natural gas is exploding.

Basically, the net result of wind/solar is actually a wash, from an environmental standpoint. That will get better with HVDC interconnects (reduces variability of wind), but in general it is not happy outcome.

I hope you can answer a theoretical question I've had about Nuclear energy for a long time: if instead of stopping the construction of new Nuclear plants, the US had continued to build more of them, would that have lead to a decrease in capital costs and enough of a Nuclear Energy Ecosystem that it would be cost-competitive with Coal, if not with Renewables? Or are the costs of safety-measures the main cost center for building new reactors?

I find it helpful to look at how other countries handle nuclear, not just the US - particularly China and Russia, where "safety" and the usual fingerpointing about those treehugger liberal regulations simply don't apply. Did they scale out nuclear much more than we did? How much? With what technical innovations, if any?

And if their nuclear ambitions, in the end, didn't come to a whole lot more than ours did... well, why not? It wasn't "regulation", so there must be other structural factors at work, which may or may not be the same as ours.

China is still expanding nuclear capacity with ~20 new reactors under construction.

They have not gone all in on nuclear and are exploring as many alternatives to coal as they can.

China gets only 2% of its electricity from nuclear - a tenth of what the US accomplishes. New reactors will get them to 6%. This strongly suggests to me that environmental regulation is not the limiting factor.

> This strongly suggests to me that environmental regulation is not the limiting factor.

Why does it suggest that?

China has only been seriously trying to cut back on coal for ~10 years.

All it shows is that coal is cheaper than nuclear and that to a rapidly industrializing country cheap is more important than environmentally friendly.

On the other hand the US is shutting down plants and decreasing overall capacity.

Yes, but... whenever reading discussions about nuclear power, I'm told over and over that the reason we don't have more nuclear is because of over-regulation and irrational environmentalism, not other factors - that if we weren't so regulated, it'd be cheap and easy to do.

China, as you observed, has no qualms about "environmentally friendly", so according to America's nuclear proponents, China should have more nuclear than us, not less, since it's cheaper. This is not the case, ergo their argument is flawed.

> This is not the case, ergo their argument is flawed.

Your argument doesn't really make sense.

Nobody is arguing that nuclear is cheaper than dirty coal.

Proponents argue that it's cheap and orders of magnitude more environmentally friendly than burning dirty coal.

China is still very price conscious and are building out nuclear in an effort to reduce pollution - proving that the Chinese do believe nuclear can be done cheaply and safely.

Not really answering your question but, from the IEA the capital cost of a nuclear plant is about 50% higher than a coal fired one. Although cost overruns over the last 15-20 years points to that being maybe too generous. That would indicate that safety issues are only about half to a third the cost problem.

Other problem is the long construction times. As the planning and construction time becomes a larger fraction of the payback time, the economics gets increasing bad. That's a problem for nuclear plants with 10-15 year construction time lines and 30 year payback. Compare with nat gas or solar plants with 2-5 year build outs. Worse nat gas plays back in 5-10 years.

If I had to guess, overly aggressive safety regulation adds about 50% to the cost. A lot of the cost is actually just in concrete (it is amazing how much concrete a nuclear plant uses), and concrete costs wouldn't have come down with volume.

Even if you relaxed the safety regulations, natural gas has an edge with fracking.

The engineering and construction requirements are costly and burdensome, but I don't think that explains the insane costs.

I think most of the market burden stems from the regulatory delay and uncertainty. That delay and uncertainty makes it impossible to quickly build plants, regardless of how stringent the engineering specifications. And if you can't quickly build one plant, you can't quickly build ten of them, and you lose the expertise and proficiency needed to build them cost-effectively.

I remember reading an article about the South Korean nuclear industry. At their peak they could build a nuclear power plant quickly, on time, and on budget. Presumably these plants adhered to Western standards. Repetition built project management proficiency and a skilled, specialized workforce.

Ultimately I don't blame the regulatory agencies, per se. I blame the mandate they've been given by a very fearful population. Industry doesn't know what will pass regulatory muster because the regulators are winging it because the public makes safety demands completely divorced from concrete science and engineering.

My takeaway is that if you're going to regulate, you better be darned sure what, why, and how you're going to regulate. If you (i.e. Joe Public, Senator Smith) can't answer those questions, then regulation will prove disastrous. If you can answer those questions well than the true regulatory burden will quickly become apparent and industry will adjust accordingly or exit, without all the confusion, bickering, and wasted resources.

It's like with GMOs: people against GMOs (or proposing strong oversight) can't articulate well why, how, or precisely which aspects of the industry they want to regulate. Which makes it easy for me to vote against propositions purporting to regulate the industry. A poorly articulated solution is no solution at all, and a poorly articulated problem is strong evidence there may not be any problem.

The primary cost of nuclear plants are due to the hyper-over regulation of the industry. If the same risk-mitigation requirements were in place for coal power stations costs would be comparable.

As it stands coal stations produce more nuclear waste than nuclear power plants https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Not really. Nuclear plants don’t scale down. The same factors putting coal plants out of business impact nuclear — cheap, flexible gas and renewables.

With electricity, peak demand is king. It doesn’t make sense to build a billion dollar nuclear plant that isn’t needed except for August.

Wonder if HVDC could increase the viability of nuclear. Colorado, for example, despite plenty of space and nearby uranium mines, doesn't have nuclear- supposedly because there isn't demand for that much power!

Nuclear seems to be one of those incredibly capital intensive projects where scale is king. If you could build one site as big as you wanted, wherever you wanted, that could sell every watt of power anywhere in the country- maybe that works a lot better for nuclear.

Why does it always need to be one or the other? You are allowed to have a variety of different powering tech. Just like programming languages, one language does not have to be the only one. Stop thinking singular. Choice are the most successful here.

As a political matter, energy policy tends to make either/or choices. As you say, this is definitely not ideal.

I found this video pretty good asking the question about baseload https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-5VkFo-fsg

This country's willingness to dump massive entitlements on the coal, etc. industries while simultaneously deriding individual entitlements is the height of hypocrisy. Really makes me wonder what the breaking point is for this particular brand of cognitive dissonance. You'd think things like the recent Carrier factory shutdown would at least present a speed bump to this sort of thing.

I'm guessing it's something like

individual entitlements: giving money to slackers, encouraging them to be lazy

entitlements on coal: helping hard working americans get/retain their jobs

not that i agree with this line of logic.

Oh yes, and what's more amazing is that it's about 60,000 coal miners whose jobs we're talking about.

That's fewer than Arby's. That's fewer than people who work in museums.

It's insanity.

Individual entitlements are a majority of federal spending. In comparison, government incentives for coal are almost non-existent. You seem to be off by at least 10,000%.

The funding model is completely different. Entitlement programs are funded by employers as a cost of doing business and taxpayers, and they’ve been providing intergovernmental loans for years to keep loan costs down. Meanwhile shoving billions to cover miner health programs and re-shore busted pension funds are paid by the taxpayer, who maybe gets lower coal energy costs, but probably not. That’s before we get into the uncalculated, externalized costs of coal on the environment.

Government incentives for coal are huge. It’s just that most of them take the form of allowing them to dump toxic waste without any consequences, so it doesn’t show up in the official budget.

The coal industry deserves the same respect they show Silicon Valley and my peers, which is none.

The Crown made me re-learn about this event.

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-12-16/the-crown-discove...

No one's really arguing for coal, truly. They're arguing for jobs, respect, and a livelihood.

I've got a lot of family from southern Appalachia (N GA to WV).

If coal sunsets, America needs to make a promise that we're going to do right by miners. In a bigger, more sustained way than recent token retraining efforts. Something on WPA / TVA scale.

If we made that bargain, and stood by it, then we'd be able to start seriously transitioning away from coal, with broad local political support, today.

And I feel like this is something that we as a country need to get better at anyway, as it's going to happen to a lot of industries in the next 100 years.

There are only 50k coal miners in the USA. I'm not at all against generous job retraining programs, but why does the rest of the country/world need to be held off any progress on this issue for the sake of a relatively small group? There are individual companies that have more employees.

After 9/11 the airline industry lost something like 40,000 jobs. We didn't resurrect the WPA then. What makes coal special?

The airline industry is scattered all over the country. If you lose your airline job in, say, Chicago, there are a lot of other jobs in Chicago. But coal is the backbone of a big chunk of Appalachia. If you lose your coal job in Welch, West Virginia, there's nothing else. And if there are a few other jobs, the number of laid-off coal-related people absolutely swamps the openings.

So move people away, bulldoze the towns and let it return to nature.

Honestly, I'd love if our society chose to be more generous and invest in retraining workers across the board. But if someone loses their job in Welch, West Virginia, and there's nothing else ... they might need to move.

How is it different from steel jobs drying up in Gary IN? Or automobile jobs in Detroit? Or fishing jobs in Maine? Or tobacco jobs in ... wherever tobacco was grown

> tobacco

The Carolinas and Virginia, I think.

And you're right, it's not that different.

The only thing I'd say is that I believe steel jobs were a bit slower of a transition. I believe most of the slide took place in the 60s - 80s as lower cost Japanese steel took off?

Tobacco is also somewhat replaceable. If you were planting it, you can plant other things. So the glide path is a bit easier.

Most of the lost coal mining jobs were also lost in decades past:

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES1021210001

Set the "from" date back to 1985 (earliest year available in this UI).

There were 170,500 American coal mining jobs in January 1985. When Obama entered office in January 2009, there were 86,400.

Point. So I guess the jobs left are the last of the industry.

The irony is that production of coal seems to have increased (see top graph; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_St... ) since 1970.

Goes to show the power of political narrative vs a reality of automation. But I suppose even for the companies it's a lot easier to blame Washington than tell people you bought a $250,000 machine to replace them.

> The irony is that production of coal seems to have increased

I think that's the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. But that's all strip mining with giant machines. It's more capital and fewer workers.

> But I suppose even for the companies it's a lot easier to blame Washington than tell people you bought a $250,000 machine to replace them.

It's more like: somebody else bought a $250,000 machine to replace them five states away.

I think a big part of it is that airline industry is typically co-located in cities with large numbers of other jobs, allowing a region to soak up the loss a little more easily.

In coal dependent regions, the mining jobs create downstream jobs in transportation and general support of mining towns. This means when a mine shuts down, along with it go other local jobs, from gas station attendants to truck drivers and freight train conductors.

There's already a major shortage of truck drivers in this country. Maybe not where the mines are, but elsewhere.

But if they're truck drivers, then they should be able to drive trucks elsewhere, for other industries.

So, at least that part of the downstream economy shouldn't be a factor.

Unless, that is, they insist on continuing to be truck drivers for coal mines, and living in the same place that they have always lived. But if they're going to be intransigent, then I don't have a lot of sympathy for them.

Please note, my uncle is a truck driver, and I've heard a lot about the industry from his personal experience. I do actually have a lot of sympathy for truck drivers in general. But this is a transportation industry, and they have to go where the jobs are.

Sure -- in theory all the regional jobs should be transferable to another region. That doesn't make it any less painful when a region's primary economic resource closes shop without a replacement. The absolute best case scenario, where everyone finds a happy new position elsewhere still results in a dead town filled with blighted property.

I think the biggest problem with the political issues surrounding coal is that it's so iconic an industry in the areas it operates. That makes it all too easy to overestimate the size and importance of the industry. In reality, it's been dwindling for a long time, though its complete death is by no means imminent.

And it's difficult (not unlike with the armed forces) to untangle respect with support for expansion.

I respect the hell out of anyone who mines coal for a living. It's gotten safer, but it's still a tough job that I'm glad I don't have to do.

I absolutely oppose anything that expands the coal industry.

So how do I square those? Personally, I feel like we as a country owe the folks who did that work maybe a bit more than we would others.

And if that happens to also be a more a practical approach to transitioning our economy off a toxic energy source? So much the better.

> What makes coal special?

The coal industry is a larger portion of the economic activity of the states it's in. The airline industry is diffused across the country. Helping the coal industry is kind-of like gerrymandering.

> What makes coal special?

Coal workers are important because the suburban whites who make up the GOP's voting base identify with them.

How many hedge fund managers are there in the US? And yet they have a special provision in the tax code that they pay a maximum income tax rate of 15%. You could just cut a $200K check to every single coal miner and cost half what the carried interest loophole costs the US Treasury - every year.

>but why does the rest of the country/world need to be held off any progress on this issue for the sake of a relatively small group?

That seems to miss the parent poster's main point, which was proposing a way of making progress on this issue.

Coal is "special" because the economic benefits can be funneled narrowly and that allows oligarchs to get rich and pay off the government so they get richer.

One such oligarch was just revealed to have written 6 of Trumps excecutive actions on coal energy.

It’s a misleading statistic. Probably 500k more workers are employed in railroads, power plants, trucking companies, schools, etc. All dependent on coal.

Using those numbers is like saying that only data center support workers work in tech. Every pair of hands at AWS probably supports 1000x people downstream.

Why? There have been warnings, economic indicators for years that coal was not sustainable. That coal based jobs would be destroyed. These folks had ample time to adjust their lifestyle, to retrain for new industries and such. Instead, not only did they not take proactive steps to remedy their situation, they fell for a hucksters false promises and voted for him.

Why should I respect these people?

There are likely just as many structural reasons that people in coal country are still there as there are reasons for people in like income city neighborhoods to be stuck there. You are vastly oversimplifying both their responsibility and yours for the situation they are in.

What have these people done to deserve such treatment? Have they made strides to further their education? Have they embraced modernity? And where has that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality gone? As far as I can tell, the coal industry a small, whiny, retrograde minority that refuse to engage with reality. They done nothing for me except ruin my future from the other side of the continent.

> Have they embraced modernity?

Wow. Sounds like you ought to embrace modernity, specifically the part about tolerance for others who are different from you.

As for the substance of your question: They vote. We're talking several states' worth of voters, who will turn against anybody who advocates your position as a political platform. So, politically, if you want to kill coal, you have to not dead-end these people, no matter what you think of them personally.

I'm sorry but this election has taught me the limits to my own tolerance. My patience for "The Reds" is exhausted. As someone who grew up in these places, I can tell you without hesitation: These people won't change. They despise change. They don't want new jobs, any more than they want healthcare. What they want is endless adoration and rose-tinted nostalgia. The coal industry is a racehorse with a broken leg and it should be treated as such. And if coal miners can't figure that out, they shouldn't be accommodated.

Why should I have tolerance for someone who thinks their need to keep an obsolete job is more important than my need to not die?

Those who lose those obsolete jobs have a higher probability of dying than you do. The stress literally kills people, even if they don't commit suicide or wind up addicted to opioids.

Sure, but there are way more of us so the harm is far larger. Coal currently kills about a million people a year worldwide, and thousands in the US.

And I don’t even want them to become destitute! I just want to help them move on to a better job. Meanwhile they apparently don’t care that they’re dumping poison into the air. Why should I tolerate that?

> Meanwhile they apparently don’t care that they’re dumping poison into the air.

And what would you regard as signs of "caring"? If they quit their job? In a region with no other jobs, you want them to voluntarily quit to show that they "care"? If not that, what?

The rest of your post is fine. This one sentence, though, is pretty judgmental.

A sign of caring would be not supporting politicians who want to subsidize their industry so that it can continue to poison the world long after it stops being economically viable.

Why? There are ~76,000[1] coal worker in the US out of 151 million people in the workforce[2]. Why does this minuscule industry deserve more protections then say Toys 'R' Us' 31,000 employees?[3] Just because they all vote GOP?

Coal is a terrible industry that is destroying the world. It can't go away quick enough.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-sur...

[2] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000

[3] http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/16/news/companies/toys-r-us-emp...

Devil's advocate question, why?

We are talking about an ~200,000 person industry, why does the federal government need to go take care of each small industry that gets out-competed?

I could see having a generic program in place for retraining, which does exist [1]. But it's not like journalism, say, which could arguably have an out-sided improvement for the rest of the country above and beyond its business model and is worth saving for its own sake. Coal is highly polluting and prematurely kills ~10,000 people/year in this country [2]. It seems like a rational government should regulate against it, if anything.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-coal-retrain... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...

They're fair questions.

1, Realpolitk) Because our democracy gives states power outsized to their population through the Senate, and because there are several purple states along the coal belt.

Consequently, their voters (many of whom are miners or employed because of downstream mine revenue) possess to the political power to force people to listen to them.

2, Moral) In 2014, per capita income for the region was $37k, or about 80% of US. Poverty was 19.7% vs 15.6% for the US [1]. From personal experience, there are still places that feel like 1950. (Also, per capita, the area has been and is disproportionately over-represented in our armed forces)

3, Economically Practical) As others noted, there isn't exactly a humming engine of economic diversity in the region. Heavy industry and mining is vastly overrepresented, which generally means if "the plant" closes the town dies.

4, Cultural) From music to speech to food, there's a distinct culture there. So moving "elsewhere" isn't just a geographic change, but more akin to uprooting thousands of people from New Orleans and dropping them in other cities.

As another commenter suggested, "Why not just move people away?"

Honestly, I'd be fine with this, if it were done humanely.

But screwing people isn't going to win votes (or feel particularly morally righteous). And short of that, we aren't going to get the environmental change we need.

Hell, we could have probably transitioned the entire region off coal for a fraction of the budget we spent on the Iraq War.

[1] https://fahe.org/appalachian-poverty/

What is so special about coal miners?

Tons of other industries have undergone or will be soon bigger shifts in unemployment. Retail workers have been hit hard by online shopping. Taxi drivers have been hit by Uber and Lyft and the like. Truck drivers will be hit by self-driving trucks. Factory and warehouse workers have been hit by automation, which will only continue.

I don't feel like we "owe" coal miners anything more than we owe other people who are industries facing declines.

That said, I agree with most of what you are saying - technological innovation and other changes are hitting certain groups of people fairly hard and we, as a society, need to do more to help them transition to other careers.

I'm surprised they don't pack up and head to Midland Texas where they can't hand out high paying contract jobs fast enough.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/looking-for-a-job-these-ci...

I happen to be in favour of a model based on WPA to tackle unemployment in general, but coal doesn't have any special claims and should not be afforded any.

I am aware that is essentially dooming West Virginia, but people will then simply have to move. No that is not easy. But if we allow one particular group to claim special rights, then all other groups will have similar requirements and we will end up in a situation where we will never be able to advance the state of the country, or the world.

If we had chosen the "Luddite solution" back in the day, then instead of being obese we would have been starving. Essentially nobody would have learned to read or write, and we would have been happy to have two sets of clothes.

No special rights were due then, no special rights are due today.

If you want WPA/TVA type jobs to replace the coal mining jobs that no longer exist, then the people have to be willing to go where the construction work is to be done.

We can't just guarantee that they'll get WPA/TVA jobs to do all the construction in the country, without having them be willing and able to move to where the work is.

Moreover, construction is a young persons job. Older people can't work those kinds of jobs, at least not with the same level of efficiency and willingness to kill yourself (sometimes literally).

So approximately zero point zero percent of those miners would be able to actually do those construction jobs, even if they were willing to do so and willing to move close to where the work is.

Is mining that different in terms of physical requirements to construction?

I'll admit I'm not intimately familiar with modern coal mining.

But from the people I know in the industry (even older) vs who seems to be employable by our state DOT, I'd daresay the number should be a lot higher than ~0.0%.

Modern coal mining has transitioned to mostly automated mountain top removal instead of the digging mines into the ground we might be more familiar with from film/tv, that's part of the reason the number of jobs has been shrinking combined with of course the switch to natural gas and renewables for power generation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/04/heres...

I found this PBS Newshour report that was inspiring:

Job training and community college put coal miners on a new path https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/job-training-community-col...

The question is, is it to optimistic? As someone who has never been to the region first hand, I'd be curious if it is too idealized.

Warning: this one will pull your heartstrings and is pretty slickly produced, but it's also not inaccurate.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bVkCDZ4RUIg#

It's a difficult problem, people being who they are. Certainly, there's less public education in the area, but people are difficult to move to new things anyway.

For all the "Well, they should just change" opinions, I try and ask myself what I'd do if (constructed hypothetical) tomorrow it turned out that running computers caused cancer.

Honestly, the reason I'm here instead of living a different life was my grandfather lying his way into the Navy at 17 during WWII, taking advantage of the GI Bill, and getting through graduate school.

Sans that, I'd have been born up in the hills of east Tennessee, and probably never have seen a computer as a child.

I think the US has ended up with right wing populism like Trumpism because there is no social democratic alternative available in the US. We've gone through all the same de-industrialization in my native Norway as the US has. I come from a blue collar industrial town in Norway which used to produce paper, glass, ships, raincoats/workwear, pots, pans, insulation etc. It felt like every few years as I grew up another venerable old factory closed down for good.

Except people in my town never went through the kind of hardship I see the American working class go through because we had already built up extensive institutions to deal with it. We spend something like 10x as much per capita on job retraining for unemployed people. If they can't get new industry going and retraining people for those industries, they use other means like moving government functions to the towns that have been hardest hit. Keeping unemployment low is a very high priority in Norway, in no small part due to the labour party (social democrats) having "work for everybody" as their slogan since the 30s.

I got an American wife, and I really cheered for Bernie Sanders. I had so hoped he could have brought many of the things we have been able to enjoy for decades here in Norway to Americans. Unfortunately he lost, but I think there was movement in the electorate and openness to new ideas like I've never seen before. I had never thought you could get that many votes in the US saying anything positive about socialism.

> If coal sunsets, America needs to make a promise that we're going to do right by miners. In a bigger, more sustained way than recent token retraining efforts. Something on WPA / TVA scale.

One of the major 2016 Presidential candidates had a plan to help them [1]. The miners overwhelmingly voted for the other candidate.

[1] http://static.politico.com/b8/90/cbbc9c59413089d87e8d6340f13...

Status quo at what cost?

It shows how embedded the powers-that-be are into coal that they can convince the government to waste tax-payer money on propping it up for a little while longer.

Maybe it'll give them a bit more time to continue their divestment process, so their paper value doesn't drop off a cliff once this policy is scrapped.

> In one study, Mr. Greenstone and his co-authors found that in China, which is currently negotiating to buy more U.S. coal, life expectancy is reduced by three years in households that use subsidized coal in the winter.

Even though life expectancy has been dropping across the U.S., here in NYC life expectancy has increased by 3 years over the last fifteen due largely to new policies around home heating fuel and other laws to reduce fine particulate emissions. Sad to see Trump trying his best to take us back in the other direction.

paywall circumvention: https://outline.com/fJDRmH

For anyone not in the know, Trump is merely following the recommendations of the Department of Energy regarding providing economic payments to Coal/Nuclear to value the very very real value they provide in fuel-mix diversity. I recommend reading up on "Resiliency" and the Polar Vortex event of 2014. Essentially, the east coast almost ran out of the necessary power to serve load. This is because they had gas pipeline delivery issues and much gas was being used for residential heating. Fortunately, ~80% of the Coal slated for retirement in the region was available. The DOE stated things would have been "catastrophic" without coal there.

So yes Coal is uneconomic and awful for the environment. However, it is important to recognize the value that it and Nuclear bring as they often have a minimum of 3 months of fuel on-site unlike gas, intermittent renewable, and batteries.

He’s following recommendations from a department where he appointed a leader who wanted to shut it down, and also didn’t know what it did? That makes it so much better!

Rick Perry probably wanted to keep the coal industry from being shutdown regardless, but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side. The need to reimburse coal for the value it provides is well understood by all the experts at the DOE, FERC, and the ISO/RTOs. ISO-NE is deeply concerned with the upcoming retirement of several large coal units and has run into hot water for considering subsidizing them. These organizations run reliability studies to determine the impact from these retirements. They KNOW this is a problem and are trying to determine possible market solutions.

Just saying we don't need any coal shows a definite lack of understanding of the industry and the problem. I work in power system transmission, but have zero connections to either coal or nuclear. My only "skin" in the game is a deep concern for premature coal retirements based off of all the public studies which have been run.

Edit: My memory is a little foggy, but I just double-checked myself and the coal plants in ISO-NE I was thinking about were actually natural gas plants that wouldn't be impacted by loss of pipeline as they were served by a local source. If they had enough of those, you wouldn't need to keep nearly as much coal around. However, I bet they're fairly rare.

“but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side”

Can you explain that parenthetical? I’m at a loss.

I don't get why you're downvoted so much. Coal certainly has a place, even nuclear does in a country as big as the US. Going on a "monofuel" energy production (which would be gas, for now) has a lot of hidden costs on top of the obvious ones (gas is significantly more expensive than coal on industrial scales for energy production, but still far cheaper than nuclear or solar).

Not to mention that using coal extends the deadline on your country's gas reserves, reduces the much-hated fracking etc.

I'm not sure either. I work in this industry as a professional engineer and as a neutral party. The facts are the facts at this point. It might not fit someone's agenda though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com