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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

In the US, largish numbers of people live in places that have historically mined a lot of coal. And by a historical quirk, many of those places are in states that are closely divided between two political parties. A further historical quirk makes those states all-or-nothing in some political elections.

So by appealing to the people who mine coal, you can tip an enormous amount of political power. That makes the mining of coal a massively important issue, because -- rather than despite -- its diminishing contribution to power generation.

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This is so true it's painful.

I feel bad for these people. I really do. The writing has been on the wall for decades that coal is a bad horse to back, and poverty is keeping their options limited.

This is another example of why we need a better social safety net. Let's retrain those people with skills that will better suit them and their families. There is no reason that they should suffer with this dead-end life/career/poverty.

Retraining isn’t as effective as one might hope. For one, it is cheaper to retrain large number of people in a handful of fields than a handful of people in a large number of fields. So you get an oversupply of, say, HVAC installers. Second, many of these miners (and factory workers) live in company towns. Once the company leaves the town slowly dies due to economic suffocation. The stores, plumbers, schools, doctors, etc that used to sell services to the miners now have fewer customers because people slowly move out and the ones that stay have less money because the mining jobs are gone. It would be better to bulldoze the towns and relocate everyone to places that aren’t dying but, unsurprisingly, people don’t like that. There are hundreds of small towns like this across America that have been hoping for a new company to come and save them for decades. When a new company comes along they want to pay low wages and no taxes, and desperate local politicians acquiesce.

My understanding is that the targets of this resent social safety nets. They view them as demeaning, especially since they are capable of work. But the only work traditionally available in the region is coal mining, and that won't be fixed by retraining. So they see the coal, and the ability to work, and grow resentful that they are forbidden from putting these two things together.

They are also attached to the places, and do not wish to leave. Retraining for new jobs in cities, or even different rural areas, means leaving longstanding family homes.

I need to note that I'm not an expert. I'm speaking here thirdhand at best. But I'll note that in the last Presidential election, when asked to choose between a candidate who promised retraining and social safety nets versus one who promised to re-open the coal mines, they overwhelmingly chose the latter.

"They are also attached to the places, and do not wish to leave"

That's kind of a distorted way to look at it. People do leave, and then they aren't included in the population that's under the microscope. So the remainder is always being distilled down, no matter how bad things get, until the outside world decides they can be ignored. Same thing with farmers in the 20th century.

This is from memory and may be off, but I recently read somewhere that in the UK coal went from 70% of power to 3% in something like 30 years. Politically I guess it must have withered away.

Also, WV is stereotypically coal country, but isn't a lot of coal mining now done via open pit mining out west, like Wyoming? Not sure that's closely divided or matters much for the Presidential elections.

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