Coal miners in election 2016

[Knife]

So, I live in the west, listening to the VPOTUS debate and Pence is saying 'save the coal miners job' or some variation of it for the whole opening. Not a lot of coal mining left around here, what's the deal?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[LadyTevar]

He pulled the same thing in WV.

[Knife]

Is it a play for WV and Penn? I just don't know the 'local' politics of the east.

[Simon_Jester]

Coal mining is one of those symbolic Manly Men Doing Manly Things jobs. So "save the coal miners" resonates better than "save the accountants" or "save the janitors" would. Sort of like how "save the whales" gets you more donations than "save the green south-eastern poopfish" or whatever.

[K. A. Pital]

Hope you all have learned your lesson, dear participants in this thread.

You got smacked by the miners.

Ridiculing the working class does not end well. Even when they are misguided.

[LadyTevar]

No, I knew WV would turn Red, simply because the Miners had been pandered to. Sadly, I think even the miners knew those promises were empty, but voted anyway. Now, we'll see how much farther WV can fall.

[Gandalf]

No, I knew WV would turn Red, simply because the Miners had been pandered to. Sadly, I think even the miners knew those promises were empty, but voted anyway. Now, we'll see how much farther WV can fall.

It's also a state that's been going redder since 1996 and the period of the culture wars. People may not have believed in his ability to protect mining, so maybe they liked the Pence parts of the ticket?

[Block]

No, I knew WV would turn Red, simply because the Miners had been pandered to. Sadly, I think even the miners knew those promises were empty, but voted anyway. Now, we'll see how much farther WV can fall.

It's also a state that's been going redder since 1996 and the period of the culture wars. People may not have believed in his ability to protect mining, so maybe they liked the Pence parts of the ticket?

Nah. Hillary basically came out and said fuck you to the coal people, everyone who's indirectly reliant on the coal industry, and anyone whoever had family that was in coal. She did a terrible job of talking about economics in general.

[MKSheppard]

everyone who's indirectly reliant on the coal industry

A while back in Pennsylvania, an explosives plant closed because it's main customer the coal industry wasn't using as much explosives as before...

[FireNexus]

Hope you all have learned your lesson, dear participants in this thread.

You got smacked by the miners.

Ridiculing the working class does not end well. Even when they are misguided.

We got smacked by a bunch of former miners who've bought into a big lie about what made them former miners. When Trump's efforts to bring back coal mining jobs are as successful as his efforts to stop illegal immigration by building a wall, they'll hopefully change their minds.

I get why they're pissed and why they did what they did. But coal mining cratered because of fracking. And there is simply nothing Trump could do that would bring it back without pissing off a whole bunch of analogous workers in natural gas states.

[Block]

Hope you all have learned your lesson, dear participants in this thread.

You got smacked by the miners.

Ridiculing the working class does not end well. Even when they are misguided.

We got smacked by a bunch of former miners who've bought into a big lie about what made them former miners. When Trump's efforts to bring back coal mining jobs are as successful as his efforts to stop illegal immigration by building a wall, they'll hopefully change their minds.

I get why they're pissed and why they did what they did. But coal mining cratered because of fracking. And there is simply nothing Trump could do that would bring it back without pissing off a whole bunch of analogous workers in natural gas states.

That's not the only reason it cratered and you know it. It's been declining for decades. Instead of going out there and saying "Hey, these jobs aren't coming back because X, Y, Z, but I respect your hardworking traditions and want to work with you to make you the heart of (insert one of the many fucking things we've stopped making but desperately need for infrastructure) country. I will require that all government contracts for infrastructure development use (said product) from America." Where she gives them hope of new jobs, makes a concrete promise that she can keep as long as congress doesn't totally fuck her, and does something we as an entire country need anyways, instead she said "I declared war on the coal industry! Fuck all of you!"

[FireNexus]

That's not the only reason it cratered and you know it. It's been declining for decades. Instead of going out there and saying "Hey, these jobs aren't coming back because X, Y, Z, but I respect your hardworking traditions and want to work with you to make you the heart of (insert one of the many fucking things we've stopped making but desperately need for infrastructure) country. I will require that all government contracts for infrastructure development use (said product) from America." Where she gives them hope of new jobs, makes a concrete promise that she can keep as long as congress doesn't totally fuck her, and does something we as an entire country need anyways, instead she said "I declared war on the coal industry! Fuck all of you!"

How can I know something that is a load of bullshit. Coal has seen a gradual decline for a long time, and that has a lot to do with pollution regs that aren't directly tied to climate change. Coal caused acid rain and health-damaging particulate emissions that people aren't keen to see come back. But there was never a war on coal. There were just regulations that gradually made it more expensive to use than it was worth. If it hadn't been for fracking, it might even be possible to bring back coal in force.

The real, main decline in coal started in 2009 and was all fracking. Natural gas prices cratered and aren't going back down any time soon. Add in that it's easier spin up and down gas plants, cheaper to build them, and easier to extract every last watt of energy with gas turbines than coal fired plants, and it's a no brainer. Gas got more attractive before fracking, but with the medium-term picture being rosy to gas prices, and the prospect of a now more expensive and undeniably dirty fuel remaining viable in the long term (when it starts filthing up the air and water again and people with any environmental agenda that doesn't allow all externalities to be passed on to the public) there is not a lot of chance that generators are going to spend huge amounts of capital investing in using the shittier fuel that is bad for their image and potentially disastrous for their bottom line less than five years from now.

Fracking may well not be the only reason coal died, but it's the single biggest. According to the EIA, coal usage fell twice as much between 2008 and 2010 than it had in the preceding 20 years before the fall started. That's because of the price of gas and the relative strength of gas as a fuel for generation over coal when it's cheap. Unless Trump can guarantee a positive return for coal generation for a period of 20 years or more, there is no business logic for switching back to coal when generators have so much talent and capital wrapped up in the cheaper, superior fuel.

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25392

Look at the very first chart. Also this gem:

Coal and natural gas generation shares over the past decade have been responsive to changes in relative fuel prices. For example, particularly low natural gas prices throughout much of 2012 following an extremely mild 2011–12 winter led to a significant rise in the natural gas generation share between 2011 and 2012, often displacing coal-fired generation. With higher natural gas prices in 2013 and 2014, coal regained some of its generation share. However, with a return to lower natural gas prices in 2015 favoring increased natural gas-fired generation, coal's generation share dropped again.

Environmental regulations affecting power plants have played a secondary role in driving coal's declining generation share over the past decade, although plant owners in some states have made investments to shift generation toward natural gas at least partly for environmental reasons. Looking forward, environmental regulations may play a larger role in conjunction with market forces. Owners of some coal plants will face decisions to either retire units or reduce their utilization rate to comply with requirements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel-fired power plants under the Clean Power Plan, which is scheduled to take effect in 2022 but has recently been stayed by the Supreme Court pending the outcome of ongoing litigation.

This has nothing to do with wanting to shit on the miners. It's a simple fact: Coal is dead. It was always going to die as a response to fracking, even if it was already in a slow decline before fracking started and has had an accelerated death in response to environmental regulations. But the EIA makes clear that the environmental regulations are a secondary contributor. You might stem the bleeding by cutting those regulations, but a coal plant is a big investment and nobody is going to put the capital up to start building new ones or do long term upgrades to keep open existing ones when the relative cost of gas is likely to remain low and the permissive regulatory environment is not at all certain to persist long term. The only way to bring it back is to stop fracking entirely and/or win multiple national elections in a row for the GOP until fracking runs dry.

The idea that coal is coming back in four years or even a decade is just an undeniably stupid one. You can disingenuously make the subtle assertion that repealing regulations will make coal competitive again, but I've read my employer's briefs on the long term troubles to our nuclear fleet from gas. They don't expect that technology whose costs compare to coal's to become viable in the next decade. And that was WITH the clean power plan. A carbon free source of energy that cost compares with coal couldn't compete with natural gas in an environment that rewards low carbon generation. How can coal compete in an environment that just doesn't punish it quite so severely?

[Block]

We're not talking about the same thing. Production of coal has decreased sharply since 2008 due to demand. Coal Mining JOBS the only thing that matters to the people dependent on the industry for their livelyhoods have been evaporating for a long time. Mostly due to technological improvements. It is accelerating as demand dries up, sure, but they'd already lost 50% of the workforce nationwide since 1980. Telling them you want their jobs to disappear without offering specific replacements is stupid. The Obama Administration has spent money on retraining, certainly, but Hillary didn't do a good job of promoting that, trying to expand on it and how she'd improve it.

America's coal industry now employs 80,030 people, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's down from 219,661 in 1978, the first year the Mine Safety and Health Administration began collecting statistics. In 2007, before Obama took office, the number was 100,011.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/decli ... le/2556187

[Gandalf]

No, I knew WV would turn Red, simply because the Miners had been pandered to. Sadly, I think even the miners knew those promises were empty, but voted anyway. Now, we'll see how much farther WV can fall.

It's also a state that's been going redder since 1996 and the period of the culture wars. People may not have believed in his ability to protect mining, so maybe they liked the Pence parts of the ticket?

Nah. Hillary basically came out and said fuck you to the coal people, everyone who's indirectly reliant on the coal industry, and anyone whoever had family that was in coal. She did a terrible job of talking about economics in general.

Perhaps that explains 2016, but what of the state voting GOP in every election since 2000?

[Tribble]

@FireNexus

And so what? You completely missed the point Block made. Elections are about people and emotions, and Clinton completely dropped the ball on that score. When she flat out told the coal industry that she wants to eliminate their jobs without any concrete plans for re-training or replacing those jobs, did you honestly expect the industry to vote for her?

EDIT: Block beat me to it.

[Titan Uranus]

It's also a state that's been going redder since 1996 and the period of the culture wars. People may not have believed in his ability to protect mining, so maybe they liked the Pence parts of the ticket?

Nah. Hillary basically came out and said fuck you to the coal people, everyone who's indirectly reliant on the coal industry, and anyone whoever had family that was in coal. She did a terrible job of talking about economics in general.

Perhaps that explains 2016, but what of the state voting GOP in every election since 2000?

Because the democrats have been outspoken about being anti-coal since the 2000s and they would rather defend their dying industry than throw themselves on the mercy of the democrats and their "job training" programs that will possibly allow them to work worse jobs later on, if they aren't too old for that?

But no, I'm sure they're just Enemies of Progress.

[LadyTevar]

There's deeper problems behinds just the coal jobs drying up. A good 80% of communities in those areas are there BECAUSE there was a coal mine. The houses, the schools, the businesses, they were all there because there was a mine that built the town and brought in the people. One mine supported a community that may have been 2000-3000 strong. But when there's no coal left to mine, what then? What do you do with families, some of them three or four generations worth, have depended on the mine for money?

This started in the 1980s. That was when the first mines ran out of coal, and the young people started leaving, looking for work in other states. The "Hillbilly Highway", I-77, was nicknamed that because of all the young people leaving for jobs in the Carolinas and Georgia. WV took the greatest loss of age 18-25 population between 1980-1990, especially among those with higher education.
For a while, this actually helped those left behind. Jobs were open, because those who could found better jobs outside the state. But more mines closed. More businesses, dependent on miner's income, closed, leaving towns dying. Schools, with smaller classes were forced to consolidate, leaving children with 2hr trips every morning and evening, just to get to classes. Again, those who could, left. Those who couldn't, stayed and suffered.

Those who stayed did everything they could to survive. They got on welfare, they got on job assistance, they did everything they could to keep going. And then, the cutbacks started. Unemployment cuts. Food stamp cuts. Retraining? Cut, or never available in the first place. Even those with jobs were suffering, as they feared the slightest bad day would mean they'd be out of work.

And then came the parasites. Alcohol was always part of the miner's life, as it made a hard life a little sweeter, but now there were drugs. Hillbilly cocaine. Crack. Meth. Towns that once could brag about leaving doors unlocked were now under siege by their own neighbors, desperate for money, desperate for the next high that would make them forget how bad things were. And there's no place to run

So, yes... they voted for someone who promised coal would return, because if Coal returned, the Good Old Days would return. Men could work and provide for their family; not worry every day what bills will have to wait for the next paycheck, and worry if even that paycheck would be enough to cover the debt they're in. They could hold their heads high again. Coal will save them, will save their families, will save their towns.

But they have been blind to the fact that no matter how much Coal might be left in those hills, there has to be a market to buy it.

[Joun_Lord]

LadyTev hit the nail on the head especially about the drugs and desperation that feeds them. I can speak from experience here in Charleston of the drug problems and crime problems. Economically the area is hit pretty hard, entire swaths of the towns business is closed. The West Side of Charleston used to have a whole line of businesses on its "main" st. Very old businesses, brick buildings that are the staple of many main streets in many towns. As of the past few years they were shuttered and as of a few weeks ago they were torn down.

Plenty of stuff had been torn down, abandoned buildings all over the city were torn down because they become drug dens. An entire row of houses near the capitol were torn down a few years back though I'm unsure if that was for drugs or not. Nothing replaces it, just empty lots like missing teeth in a methheads mouth.

Drugs are bad m'kay, druggies are worse. Thankfully I mostly avoid it......so long as I avoid most of my family, I guess I was never one for family tradition. But I still get to see plenty for myself. Terrible looking wrecks of human beings trying to either camp out, cook up, or panhandle at my place of work. Duffle bags and backpacks of used up matches, can of fuel, boxes and boxes of cold medicine that I doubt ever was used to treat a runny nose when I manage to get off my fatass to go hike inna woods. Bikes and lawn mowers and weed eaters and anything else someone can hock for some cash disappearing off porches to the point I either chain my stuff up with a heavy duty actual chain or bring it indoors. The fear of going out at night because gangs of miscreants roam the streets all hours of the night. My nieces and nephews barely able to go outside without their parents watching them like a hawk because of drug pushers and druggies.

Thing have changed round yonder and definitely not for the better. People are very much desperate, tired of being ignored, some are tired of being told they have no problems because they are white, other tired of being told they are all bad people and racists. Just people being tired. That desperation, that tiring of the status quo easily shows why people will latch onto any promise of hope no matter how remote.

Coal for many is hope. The hope of a better tomorrow because it built a better yesterday. Some believe its the only hope, coal is the only lifeblood places like WV have. Without it there is not hope, comments like Clintons about putting coal miners out of business makes things seem even more hopeless. Alot of coal miners are already out of business, what jobs are left people are fiercely protective of. When some person comes along and says "I'm going to take what hope you have left, what money, what jobs" without articulating what if anything is going to replace them, people because angry, become desperate, do stupid things like vote for a wig wearing New York liberal who atleast gives lip service to them.

If Clinton had rephrased herself, had just said "we're going to create new jobs to replace the coal jobs lost" as she did after her very headline-y comment about putting coal miners out of business and better articulated her plans without seeming demeaning I think there'd have probably been less harshness towards her. I don't agree with much she says but I whole heartedly agreed with everything she said after that. She made good solid points, points many miners with level heads would agree with. Most people know coal ain't coming back, atleast not in the way it was in the past. Most people who support coal want clean coal, don't want mountaintop removals and sludge filled streams and air that is deadly to breath.

But how she prefaced her statement, how she fed into peoples fears and doubts about her, most people aren't going to have level heads. Not because they are stupid or pig-headed or uneducated or any other sort of nonsense that assholes try to use to explain away why WVians and those like them would be so opposed to Clinton but fear.

Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

[LadyTevar]

Joun_Lord, if you're in Charleston with me, why've we never had a meetup?

[FireNexus]

So, essentially, the program we need is one that trains and relocates people from the coal industry to areas with jobs. Maybe Trump's infrastructure bill will be smart enough to just give some kind of fringe benefit to those who hire former miners.

Probably it'll be called a trillion dollar infrastructure bill and accomplish not much.

[Tvpnbb]

So, essentially, the program we need is one that trains and relocates people from the coal industry to areas with jobs. Maybe Trump's infrastructure bill will be smart enough to just give some kind of fringe benefit to those who hire former miners.

Probably it'll be called a trillion dollar infrastructure bill and accomplish not much.

And preferably also programs that generate new jobs in the area, not everyone can move away, after all.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

There's deeper problems behinds just the coal jobs drying up. A good 80% of communities in those areas are there BECAUSE there was a coal mine. The houses, the schools, the businesses, they were all there because there was a mine that built the town and brought in the people. One mine supported a community that may have been 2000-3000 strong. But when there's no coal left to mine, what then? What do you do with families, some of them three or four generations worth, have depended on the mine for money?

This started in the 1980s. That was when the first mines ran out of coal, and the young people started leaving, looking for work in other states. The "Hillbilly Highway", I-77, was nicknamed that because of all the young people leaving for jobs in the Carolinas and Georgia. WV took the greatest loss of age 18-25 population between 1980-1990, especially among those with higher education.
For a while, this actually helped those left behind. Jobs were open, because those who could found better jobs outside the state. But more mines closed. More businesses, dependent on miner's income, closed, leaving towns dying. Schools, with smaller classes were forced to consolidate, leaving children with 2hr trips every morning and evening, just to get to classes. Again, those who could, left. Those who couldn't, stayed and suffered.

Those who stayed did everything they could to survive. They got on welfare, they got on job assistance, they did everything they could to keep going. And then, the cutbacks started. Unemployment cuts. Food stamp cuts. Retraining? Cut, or never available in the first place. Even those with jobs were suffering, as they feared the slightest bad day would mean they'd be out of work.

And then came the parasites. Alcohol was always part of the miner's life, as it made a hard life a little sweeter, but now there were drugs. Hillbilly cocaine. Crack. Meth. Towns that once could brag about leaving doors unlocked were now under siege by their own neighbors, desperate for money, desperate for the next high that would make them forget how bad things were. And there's no place to run

So, yes... they voted for someone who promised coal would return, because if Coal returned, the Good Old Days would return. Men could work and provide for their family; not worry every day what bills will have to wait for the next paycheck, and worry if even that paycheck would be enough to cover the debt they're in. They could hold their heads high again. Coal will save them, will save their families, will save their towns.

But they have been blind to the fact that no matter how much Coal might be left in those hills, there has to be a market to buy it.

Thank you for the summary! As much as we can deride people for believing the claims of a con artist that the Good Old Days will come back, what was the counter narrative? Vote for the people who have definitely been screwing you for decades? In hindsight I don't know why I was so flabbergasted that the orange troglodyte won.

[LadyTevar]

I knew he'd won WV. I had no doubts there. What flabbergasted me was the REST of the country.

[Alyrium Denryle]

So, essentially, the program we need is one that trains and relocates people from the coal industry to areas with jobs. Maybe Trump's infrastructure bill will be smart enough to just give some kind of fringe benefit to those who hire former miners.

Probably it'll be called a trillion dollar infrastructure bill and accomplish not much.

The alternative is to completely replace the coal mining sector in Coal Country with something else that can utilize a similar skill set, with preference for hiring former miners.

If it were me, I would do it with (well-regulated) ore processing and nuclear power buildup. That old coal mining town now exists to support the building and running of a large modular thorium reactor, basically. Big slab of concrete containing a large number of smallish 250 MW thorium reactors that are continuously added to.

[Darmalus]

Throw your ideas at greatagain.gov , if nothing else it can't hurt.