Well, 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.
I agree to the people losing its life shattering, especially when one considers entire communities and ways of life are built around it. Another aspect to consider though is that coal in its entirety employs less people than Arbys the fast food restaurant. If tomorrow, the news announced that Arbys was in danger of going out of business, the country would shrug. Coal wields a disproportionate amount of political and cultural power for the number of people it employs and the damage it does.
Maybe because Arby’s jobs are shit, and even if they weren’t the skills easily transfer to the thousands of other restaurants.
Coal jobs are in that waning category of blue collar jobs that you can have a decent life on. So it’s lamented the same way as when auto plants close, manufacturing plants close, etc.
You’re right it has too much power, but you have to put more effort into understanding why.
Of 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.
I'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.
Can'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.
Problem is, retraining programs are generally ineffective, between 0-15% according to some sources. So transitioning workers from job A to job B is really more of a pipe dream than a reality.
It’s also partially why calls for UBI and other alternative solutions are gaining traction nowadays (although, atm only one person is running on that platform for President in the states)
Have there been any "successful" UBI experiments? I've seen results from a few that didn't pan out as expected, but conclusions were generally either that the method was flawed (which might be a cop-out) or that the amount provided didn't rise to the level of "true" UBI.
I'm genuinely curious as to whether it could replace other existing welfare programs, or if it would exacerbate self-destructive behaviors in the absence of opportunities for earned and delayed gratification.
Many UBI ‘trials’ have been run but stopped short of completion. Results never pointed to any negatives (unless you count level unemployment as a negative like it was counted in Finland). Generally outcomes are positive. Moreover programs akin to UBI have worked in places like Alaska.
Many of these trials are cut short due to ‘unsustainability’- generally due to the fact that the programs aren’t actually paid for by anything- UBI on its own is unsustainable ! As such, the candidate I mentioned above is running on a platform that looks to consolidate existing welfare programs and implement a VAT to help afford the policy.
Links please. You are making a lot of statements without any backing like "are gaining traction" and "have worked". Since you are having to educate us on these basic facts of the thing your excited about, could you go further and provide us good places to learn more?
I don’t believe the size of the payout is the right metric to be looking at. There’s more in common with UBI than you might think:
The government paid out some amount, to all residents, regardless of income, to be used unconditionally. Pretty much the defn of UBI.
To your point about standard deduction - it on the other hand does not pay out anything if you don’t make anything. The petro fund is an actual dividend, very much not a deduction.
UBI is substantially different than just handing out cash. The basic premise:
1) It is sufficient to provide a "basic" level of income
2) It is more efficient than targeted welfare programs (medicare, medicaid, food stamps, etc)
3) Community outcomes are improved by way of economic (retraining / small business starting), health (less stress / more treatment) and poverty (less stress = smarter financial choices)
So far, I haven't seen any experiment actually test any of those things. I don't know of any where participation has been contingent upon giving up other programs (so we don't know if it's better than targeted welfare), and none have lasted long enough to know if any behavior changes were influenced by the knowledge that the cash was going to be cut off in the future.
As such, I haven't seen much "success" in the way of UBI experiments.
BIEN lists the following five defining characteristics of basic income:
Periodic: Distributed in regular payments,
Cash payment: Distributed as funds rather than, for example, vouchers for goods or services.
Individual: Each citizen (or adult citizen) receives the payment, rather than each household.
Universal: All citizens receive the payment.
Unconditional: Recipients are not required to demonstrate need or willingness to work.
Your points 1, 2, and 3 are not definitions of UBI.
EDIT: the Finland trial looked at many of the outcomes you described above- linked above. Only half of the results are currently available. As I'd already mentioned, there hasn't been much in the way of negative outcomes in existing UBI and UBI-like trials.
Without points 1, 2 or 3, all you're testing is whether or not giving financially strapped people no-strings-attached money makes them happier and less stressed. Of course it does, at least in the short term (longer-term studies have demonstrated that money does not, in fact, buy happiness).
That doesn't mean that any of this is good public policy, that it would be better than current policies, or that it would improve long-term outcomes.
Notably, your Finland link indicated that there was no change to employment rates, which is unfortunate, and I think undermines a lot of the arguments I've heard from proponents of UBI- that people who are less stressed financially will be able to make better use of their time training into new industries, start small businesses, etc.
Yes, I already mentioned the employment thing. And this was only in regards to 1year of the trial/
Moreover, all these positive outcomes you seem to dismiss (and add that in the long term money doesn’t buy happiness- which is neither here nor there) doesn't mean that any of this is NOT good public policy, that it would NOT be better or that it would NOT improve long-term outcomes.
If anything, all the outcomes: lower stress, greater happiness, etc, are all known to lead to healthier individuals, with more fulfilling lives, with plenty of potential benefits for society as a whole.
Moreover, trialing UBI is a red herring. How many welfare programs have been trialed before implementation? How many have been researched thoroughly on their per dollar outcome? The fact is, many of these programs are implemented without any trial and only on the basis of perceived outcomes that would lean positive. Why should UBI be any different?
There are also plenty of examples that show that direct cash is oftentimes more favourable than some other variant; see the charity GiveDirectly’s entire premise.
To argue that no successful trial has been run, that outcomes have not been favourable, or that the general idea of UBI is flawed until we research it to death, is to be overtly skeptical.
It's the "U" part. Taking money from the middle and upper classes just to give it back to them is inherently inefficient and entirely pointless.
Additionally, I disagree that it has been researched to death. People have infinite wants, and we have finite means. I would personally rather see this play out at a smaller level in reality (not a time limited trial that biases the outcome) before we go all in on 300 million people. And if we are not going to be replacing existing programs with it, I would rather not see it happen at all. That's my personal preferences based on what I currently know, at least.
Current proponents of UBI aren’t looking to fund it by taking money from the middle and upper class AND are looking to consolidate it with existing welfare programs.
I'm fine with UBI, but I don't think it fixes this kind of problem. A good job is not just a source of income (though of course it is that). It has a lot of other psychological and social impacts as well, which UBI doesn't replace.
But again, not saying it's not a good thing, just that it doesn't really solve this problem.
That 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.
Price 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.
Agreed 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.
I'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.
There was pretty much nothing going on in terms of nuclear power development in the US between 1990 and 2008 or so, and Watts' Bar is the only reactor to come online in the US in the last 25 years. Fracking wasn't the cause of that lull.
People stopped building new reactors in that time but they were also doing license extensions and operating and making good money. Today they are shutting down early in deregulated markets because natural gas brought electricity revenue below O&M costs.
“The most likely candidates for a coal-to-gas conversion are 50-plus year old units, less than 300 megawatts in capacity and generally early generation sub-critical utility boilers – the least efficient, most costly to operate and with the lowest overall capacity factor in the coal fleet,” he wrote. “Most plants west of the Mississippi River built in the 1960s or later aren’t as attractive as candidates for fuel switching since they are often larger, more efficient and tend to burn Powder River Basin coal, a cost effective fuel with a more favorable emission profile than the bituminous burned by many eastern plants.”
Sidenote: Power River Basin coal is that which is mined by the company this article refers to as having entered bankruptcy.
A 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.
We 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]).
Better yet, put them to work reclaiming mine sites where possible. Rape is not too strong a word to describe mountain top removal. I don't even care if it comes out of my taxpayer dollars instead of the pockets of the coal operators who need to be held responsible, I just want it done. It has to be done, there are places in West Virginia that have been on boiled water warnings long before Flint. And so much of Appalachian culture is having deep ties to the land, so it'd be very meaningful work in the same way being an nth generation coal miner is meaningful work, regardless of how misguided that seems to outsiders.
Interesting idea. What does reclaiming a mine site achieve practically? Any chance an abandoned mine could be repurposed as a datacenter, solar panels lining what used to be a mountain top?
Not 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?
Like 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.
> 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.
Another 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.
Coal 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.
A 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.
Tennessee had a budding green power sector back around 2005. TVA nuked it with absurd, arbitrary restrictions on who can put up solar panels on their houses because TVA is in bed with the coal operators and green power was competition they didn't want. It kills me to think about how much more money this state would have in its economy now if that hadn't happened.
There's reasons the whole "just replace coal jobs with solar jobs" thing has never played out. It's not for a lack of trying or because nobody here ever coming up with the idea. It's because the powers that be sure as hell weren't gonna let it fly.
(TVA continues to be the least green utility in the South btw. Promotion of the welfare of the people of the Tennessee Valley my ass.)
You 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).
Replacement 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.
Really doubt that solar companies are hiring in the same towns as coal mines are. The reality is that when the mines go, the communities supported by the mines will go, too.
It 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.
