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Comment by fasthands9 | Hacker News Reader

>As coal jobs gradually fade away, the community can either adapt to renewables and tech, or die out.

This is very easy to say if you don't live there. There is no reason to think that a town that exists because it has a coal deposit is going to be a logical place for any business to put a clean energy plant of some sort.

If you are going to be for phasing out coal very quickly then you have to be willing to bite the bullet and accept that certain regions of the country are just going to be completely effed over.

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I wonder about this because it seems like we were totally ok with moving manufacturing jobs overseas for example, or when a shipyard closes up shop in a town we accept it, but when it comes specifically to coal jobs it’s like all of a sudden it’s all about won’t someone think of the poor families?!

I would generally agree that if as national policy we are going to do something like shut down an industry we should try and help people including maybe just buying them out (reskilling/learn2code is extremely difficult), but it’s kind of like what Elon said once which was good which was when we lower the price customers don’t want to pay us the higher price and when we raise the price they want the lower price they initially agreed to (it wasn’t that exact thing but you get my point) and when it comes to subsidizing industries like we do for oil and gas for example I think the same mentality applies.

We are not okay with manufacturing moving overseas. I don't know where you got that idea, it is clearly false. Ross Perot was in 1996 one of the most successful third party candidates ever, and he ran on the "great sucking sound" of NAFTA moving manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

The one difference is manufacturing hasn't been lost in the US - by most measures we make more stuff in the US than ever. There are less jobs though because of automation, but those jobs have been replaced by engineering. Coal mining by contrast is a death industry and won't come back. What people in the coal industry need is someone to setup a factory in their town. A factory making some weird widget in a small town tends to make a rural town.

People were not ok with manufacturing moving overseas, the owners of those factories were. Closing a coal mine affects the owner of the mine directly. This has nothing to do with the workers- the owners would be just as happy to turn MT coal miners into opioid welfare recipients as they were NC textile mill workers as long as the owners continued to make money.

Consumers were also ok with manufacturing moving overseas, as they were all buying these cheaper products, making it impossible for local manufacturing to survive.

> If you are going to be for phasing out coal very quickly then you have to be willing to bite the bullet and accept that certain regions of the country are just going to be completely effed over.

What do you think happened to Appalachia? It sucked for a while, and it's still not a bustling tech hub and never will be, but people are adapting and in a few generations it will be a good (if less populated) area.

If only we gathered some money together from all of the places, especially the places that are booming and were the opposite of effed over, and then used that money on the regions of the country that would be effed over, to un eff over people, possibly by moving them to non-effed over locations! I don't know what that would be called, but boy that would be something!

It seems like large scale renewables are done by a large outside crew that comes in and gets things going as fast as possible.

That might be the only way wind can be done because of the size.

But for solar, it seems like there could be a local crew that installs a row of panels every day. Or week.

Currently the landowner gets rent, the area gets taxes but the locals don’t see much from renewables. Truck in racks and panels a month ahead of when they’re needed. Try agrivoltaics.

And any time you decide to eff over anyone, you can and should expect resistance.

> accept that certain regions of the country are just going to be completely effed over.

Pieces of countryside do not suffer. People are potentially more mobile than that.

Sure. It's fine to tell people to move. I have moved a lot of times in my life so I'm not personally offended.

But most people do not move and do not want to move and I think people on here underestimate the political difficulty of telling people they will have to sell their house for close to nothing and move to life an adequate life.

People in those towns have family connections going back centuries in some cases. They wouldn't even take a buyout, because they know everyone and it would be like losing family. If you haven't exper it, it doesn't seem like a valuable thing to worry about losing, but it is the world they know, and we shouldn't be surprised if many of them fight to keep it, potentially in a literal fashion. I don't know what the answer is, but buyouts and financed moves will be seen as authoritarian, while ending subsidies and just letting places fail might be seen as a faceless market force, even if itbis worse for those involved

America has weathered these events before mostly by shrugging.

See: the deindustrialization of New England in the 1920s, the Dust Bowl and its migrations, the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt

> People in those towns have family connections going back centuries in some cases.

You are correct, in some cases they go back 2-4 centuries. From when their ancestors settled in the colonies there. Settlers. Colony. 2-4 centuries, short term by European standards. It is hypocritical to expect it to be eternal now. There was no guarantee that it would last past when they milked out all the non-renewable resources. As noted, the US tends to be fairly institutionally indifferent to e.g. a Dust Bowl.

I hope that they better than that this time, I really do. But not at the expense of keeping coal mines and coal-mining-towns with no other viable way open. It never was a good job anyway (see "black lung").

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