juiceland
6 hours ago
There are around 44,000 coal miners in the US [0]. The article mentions the US government boosting coal by $700m, or about $16k per miner. $700m could pay for a lot of black lung treatments, especially if the prevalence is 33%.
Black lung rates in Appalachia are high as the 1970s
27 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by mooreds10 Comments
maxrev17
12 hours ago
I don’t get how it’s cheaper to dig up and transport coal than install a tonne of solar :s
Rebelgecko
11 hours ago
The problem is the US doesn't have senators whose constituents make solar a key part of their identity (or if we do, those senators arwnt swing votes who need to be appeased and disproportionately porked up)
pibaker
9 hours ago
From the way people talk about American coal miners, you'd think there are millions of them and they all live in the Appalachia. When the truth is there are only 45,000 of them in the whole country. Walmart employs over 10,000 people in WV alone. And it's not just in Appalachia, either — Wyoming produces twice as much coal as PA and WV combined.
Crazy how much of this really just boils down to identity politics for a small segment of coal miners.
NetMageSCW
6 hours ago
In West Virginia alone coal mining drive $21 billion in economic activity and provides for over 36,000 jobs total when you include related fields like power generation. It is an important in more ways than just mining jobs.
pibaker
5 hours ago
You can say this about many other jobs. But they don't get their own Joe Manchin.
im3w1l
7 hours ago
There are two kinds of jobs: export jobs and local jobs. I mean export in a loose sense - not necessarily crossing country borders, but rather something that is transported to other regions.
Export jobs like mining, an industry etc is the base that creates and support an economy of local jobs around them. Local jobs like walmart, hairdressers, gas station, laundromat etc. Every community must have export jobs in order to be able to trade for imported goods. You can't just take the coal mining away and keep the walmart.
Now there are exceptions: a tourist economy exports services that are normally local jobs. And some communities only exist because of subsidies and handouts. But they are exceptions.
klysm
12 hours ago
It isn’t, but the whole night thing is a bit of a problem and storage isn’t there yet at grid scale, but it’s coming.
kadoban
11 hours ago
Coal doesn't even compete with just solar, those aren't your two options.
Coal competes with literally everything else, and it loses to every single one of them. It's a terrible, terrible fuel. Burn natgas instead and you're already magnitudes better off.
Coal only exists today in the US because our politics is broken beyond belief.
toomuchtodo
10 hours ago
Only ~15% of power in the US comes from coal currently, and it continues to decline as each of the last remaining coal generators are retired. Politics props it up, but it will eventually be gone. Five years maybe, ten years tops. Focus on forward looking tipping points for step change death spiral progress (when minimum coal mining, transportation, and generation minimum limits are breached).
https://www.sierraclub.org/coal/coal-plant-map
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-trump-has-overseen-more...