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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31535 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Those jobs' days are only numbered if the side numbering them wins.

Environmental legislation etc. will obviously have an impact, but I don't see any plausible scenario under which America's coal mines stay open indefinitely. What policies could produce that outcome without imposing intolerable costs on the rest of society?

The same policies that allowed coal plants to be built and coal to be burned in the past. The minimum is to roll back environmental legislation just that far.

I don't think that would achieve such a goal. Oil, gas and foreign completion killed coal mining, not the EPA. Hence why the decline of coal mining in Britain preceded concern about carbon emissions by decades.

The US isn't Britain; even with all the regulations the US is a major coal producer. For electricity, coal got supplanted mostly by gas, but gas would be far more expensive even with fracking, if it weren't for environmental regulations.

Upon some further skim reading I think I do stand corrected that removing environmental regulations could probably arrest the decline in coal mining (though I'm not convinced it's going to get any mines re/newly-opened). In any case though I'm not sure that it's very important for the WWC as a whole. It looks like the number of people employed in coal mining is well under 50,000, pretty negligible in the grand scheme, especially when one considers that the decline of coal has surely opened up jobs elsewhere. Indeed, when one considers the domestic environmental effects it's hard to see that the decline of mining is really a bad thing for the entire WWC at all.

Except there are no sides, at least not in the traditional sense. I live in Western PA and coal mining had a brief resurgence in the mid '00s as oil prices shot up and "clean coal technology" became the new buzzword. We were the "Saudi Arabia" of coal. Turns out we were also the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, and as soon as the shale boom happened coal mines were closing left and right, and coal power plants were either converted to gas or razed completely. A lot of people tried to blame Obama and stricter environmental regulations for the closures, but long-term the economics were against them. Had the shale boom not happened the coal operators would have simply paid the costs of compliance, and had Obama declined to increase regulation the mines would have closed a year or two later, since cost wasn't the only consideration when it came to power plants switching to gas. The only thing that could have realistically saved the coal industry was increased regulations on natural gas development, but it's not like political alignments are set up as pro-coal anti-gas v. pro-gas anti-coal. It's more like pro-fossil fuels vs. pro-renewables, and this made the laid-off miners in PA, OH, and WV get pissed off at Obama but not equally pissed off at their respective state governments for not putting the screws to the gas industry. Quite the contrary; most of these people were in favor lowering the tax burden on gas development and minimizing regulation.

A lot of people tried to blame Obama and stricter environmental regulations for the closures, but long-term the economics were against them.

"The economics" and environmental regulations are not separate issues.

And now cities and states are banning natural gas well. These cities and states have a political party in common. There are indeed sides.

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