If they didn’t factor in health costs due to air pollution they are lkkely underestimating the savings.
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Well, they definitely changed my mind on the subject…
/s
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There already is a HUGE displacement of jobs and they ARE NOT coming back. Folks pining for the good ol’ rollin’ coal days are out of luck… and health. They had better accept whatever viable training is offered and if needed, move. I have had to move three times for my job. They’ll survive, just like I did and millions of others who have had to move for their job. We can’t hold back clean energy and the future of our nation because of folks living in dead and dying towns.
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I’m not sure why you consider building highways and a ‘god damn’ radio telescope pork. I certainly don’t.
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I’m 64 and was born in Tulsa. I vividly remember seeing small refineries (or something) all over the place having huge controlled gouts of fire spewing out. Naturally, being a kid, I asked Dad about it. He worked in the industry (albeit as an office manager), and he told me that they were burning off natural gas. ??But why not use it in cars?? Well, that’s gasoline and it is different. ??Can’t they use it for something else?? Not really. I never believed that and am pleased, in a depressed way, that I was totally correct.
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Or even just building sustainable energy infrastructure instead of unsustainable energy infrastructure.
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Someone once said about government, ours at any rate, was of the people, by the people, for the people. The Republicans have willfully forgotten this person.
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Trying to save the coal industry in 2018 is like trying to save the whale-oil industry in the age of petroleum. Short-sighted, dangerous to the workers, economically and environmentally unsustainable and utterly destined to fail anyway.
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I’m going to start calling it the ghostly hand of the free market. It just passes over and no one ever notices it.
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Really? Like Okies moving to California? That worked out well. /s You had the privilege of moving that others might not have.
A reply to Dioptase 1:
Thank you. I was a math major. Took calculus in HS. Graded for an introductory analysis class which is basically calculus on steroids. Took a class in tensor analysis (vectors gone wild). Took a class in topology which is algebra on heavy hallucinogens. But some parts were beyond me, and these are the parts that most heavily inform economics as a science. You don’t really know bafflement until you come face to face with probability and statistics.
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Well in these specific cases the spending was directed by Byrd himself, through earmarking (i.e., pork) and generally using his position as chair of the Appropriations Committee.
And just to be clear, I support the bulk of that spending. (Especially the radio telescope, given my overly extensive astrophysics training.) There’s no reason WV needs to be bridled to a dying, polluting industry. It’s a damn sight better than building jets the Pentagon doesn’t want in 43 separate states.
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Can anyone tell me if the US currently has a ‘Carbon Tax’? I thought that was proposed in the last years of the Obama administration (bet y’all miss no drama Obama now, amirite?)
If we priced the externalities of the current energy production pie chart, coal would be considerably more expensive. Nuclear would mean some significant debate, but a waste product that must be stored for millennia seems like it might incur some costs down the road? GHGs should be up-priced and allow the market to bring them into line with smart science based policy (like the SO2 exchanges, which were also decried as the end of civilization etc etc)
Most of ‘big coal’s’ decline came before Obama and will continue after the reign of error that is Nostradumbass’ installation by a foreign power. Retrain, retire, reinvest. Extraction industries are generally not sustainable (or sustainability can be crushed by the other guy who doesn’t give a fig for sustainability and (fart sound) externalities). I hear Agent Orange is preparing a big push to bring back whale oil, buggy whips and passenger pigeon service! Wow! Sign me up for… uh, well… anything else.
I would thank you for not dismissing my difficulties so easily.
On the one hand, yes, obviously we should shut down as many coal plants as possible as quickly as we can manage. In many cases, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions do have net positive economic effects even in the near term, even before you account for secondary and long-term effects.
On the other hand, there is a small part of me that sees headlines like this and thinks “Interesting that BB publishes this the same day as the Occult Defense Agency Budget Simulator.” We need to be mindful about both the costs of delayed action and the risks of making a complex system we all depend on more fragile if we make changes without thorough understanding. Honestly, that’s the main reason I most often prefer a carbon tax based system over more targeted efforts.
Part of the problem here is: how do they move? These are extended families in established communities that are dying as the industry underpinning them goes away. How does one sell one’s home to make a move when one’s home has become totally worthless? Middle age people training for entry-level jobs (that may or may not even exist) apparently hasn’t gone well so far, either (which has discouraged a lot of unemployed miners from making use of existing programs).
Of course coal jobs have to go away (and should have gone away a long time ago), but telling people that they can just move and take another job is blindered privilege speaking. The human cost for these communities is going to be significant, even in the best-case scenario. This is the situation that government-run social safety nets were invented for.
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it’s a good thing that none of the political parties here in the u.s. have worked desperately for 40 years years to dismantle it and transfer the wealth to the top 0.01% of the people . . . oh, wait . . . rofgmao.
(the “g” stands for grieving)
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