Old King Coal

It's good to see that at least some of the coal miners that Trump catered to bullshitted in 2016 are seeing the light. Better late than never. Welcome aboard the reality train.

What's important for them to understand is that coal employment has not declined because of inconvenient environmental regulations (as if the people who, you know, live in those areas should either go in pocket to move or wait to die young of cancer), it's because of rapidly dropping EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Because "mining" is now more blowing tops of mountains and excavating the giant hole, rather than sending hundreds of doughty dwarves and their lanterns and pickaxes and lusty "Heigh-ho" shanties into narrow shafts [giggity]. It's simply not as labor-intensive as it was back in the day, even twenty or thirty years ago. It takes fewer work-hours to produce the same amount of coal. More than twice as many people work for Best Buy than in the entire coal industry.

Fracking and low oil prices took care of the rest of it. Natural gas and oil are simply cheaper per workforce unit to procure. As with most things, once you start looking closer at them, it's not politics, it's math.

That's why it's really important for these folks in Kentucky and West Virginia and Pennsylvania to really think clearly about whom Trump was actually talking to, when he was reaching out to the coal industry. He was not talking to the workers; he was talking to the owners, telling them he would stand aside while they busted their own industry out -- letting them pollute to their hearts' content, take profits, declare bankruptcy, and leave the workers jobless and empty-handed.

What a coincidence that West Virginia's governor, the Pynchonesquely-named Jim Justice, is a billionaire who's profited mightily from Dear Leader's gutted enviro policies, while simultaneously cashing in on "distress" loans that will never be paid back, and screwing over the workers all at the same time. Pretty neat trick. These companies literally ripped these workers off for thousands of dollars each at Christmastime. That's who we're talking about here, people for whom Monty Burns is a rather weak role model. That's who Trump was really talking to when he made his appeals to coal country.

There are always going to be a few who won't get the picture right up to the moment they get pink-slipped and hosed out of their severance pay. I don't what you can tell them or do for them; they have resolved to ignore common sense and a clear pattern of empirical data. They'll die younger than they should, in more pain than they should be, and angry at the climate change "hoax" that took their dream job away.

The path to the Green New Deal -- and to getting coal workers' support for it -- is this:  subsidize the fossil-fuel companies to switch over to manufacturing renewables -- solar panels, windmills and armatures, etc. It will not be easy and it will not be pretty -- oil companies in particular long ago got used to steamrolling their way through things by showering decision-makers with cash and/or women, and then laundering the profits.

But it can be done. These guys may not want to "learn to code," and frankly, even of they did and could, you wouldn't want all of them to do the same thing in the first place. But if you pitched it to them that they could be making the same amount of money working above ground, either in a manufacturing warehouse or outdoors installing, instead of breathing filth in a back-breaking hole and dying before the age of sixty, and leave a cleaner planet for their kids and grandkids, well, they just might listen to that.

The thing they really need to take seriously is that ultimately their "way of life" is not going to be around much longer, again for economic and productivity reasons much more than because of regulations. That's just a fact, and the sooner they start preparing themselves for that eventuality, the better off they'll be. And if not, the outcome will be the same regardless, just on a slightly different schedule.