Coal Industry's Black Heart, and Ways to Move Forward

Here Coal mining madness... from one of history's most profitable and polluting industries to unable to clean up their mess? Huh? Where's the beef, profits shuttled off to Mitt Romney's Caribbean tax-dodging caves, leaving tax payers to clean up their mess???

Better, below is a very thoughtful look at the transition off of coal, from a friend, Robert.

Op-Ed Who should pay the price of clean energy?
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-tasini-the-realistic-cost-of-ending-the-carbon-economy-20150716-story.html

Just Transition issues


"While it is easy to agree that displaced coal workers should be helped to get new good paying jobs--the numbers for the economic value of coal jobs in this article are wildly inflated. 

Coal mining has not employed 700,000 people since the 1920s; current estimates range from 73,000 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics) to 154,000 (coal industry PR, which probably counts the pizza delivery person). 

The idea that these can be characterized as high paying union jobs is also bogus; the US Dept. of Energy data shows less than 18,000 coal mining jobs are union; meaning somewhere between 77% and 86% of coal mining jobs are not union. And the claim of $80,000 per year "standard" income is much higher than the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure of about $55,000. 

Thus, using multiplication, total coal mining income is probably somewhere between $4 billion and $8 billion per year, based upon government data. Inflated coal industry numbers could push this up to a range of $14 billion to $17 billion, using the assumption that the average coal miner makes 60% more than the federal government reports. The OpEd claim of $56 billion in coal mining wages per year is off the map.

Also off the map is the idea that every penny of lost wages due to lost coal jobs should be repaid by the public for decades into the future. One has to take into account that the historical 80% to 90% loss of coal jobs after the 1920s had absolutely nothing to do with recent public environmental policies about climate. The biggest factors were huge increases of mining efficiency due to modern technology, and the much lower labor intensity of open pit mining in the western U.S. which has been providing an increasing share of the nation's coal. Since the 1960s, electrical generation from coal has mirrored the up and down changing market share of natural gas, and recent flooding of the US energy market with cheap fracked natural gas has been eating coal's lunch. The 2008 Great Recession was also not friendly to coal.

In relation to recent environmental policies, coal mining employment in the U.S. has been relatively flat over the past 20 years, floating between 70,000 and 80,000 jobs. After many years of decline, jobs in Appalachia stabilized in the 1990s, and actually increased in some states over the most recent decade. 

In my opinion, the author's main point should be given serious consideration: a just transition to clean energy should ideally not leave behind a trail of many thousands of people who lost their jobs due to changing public policies, without any gesture of help from the public that imposed those policies. 

The claim for a trillion dollars in restitution is obviously not based upon any reality. And, if the discussion turns on who owes what to whom, one could make a much stronger case that fairness demands restitution to society from the coal industry, which over the past century may have killed more Americans than all the wars in our nation's history, and has been estimated to impose up to $100 billion per year in economic damages--many times the value of the wages it pays. 

His suggestion of putting a small surcharge on the electricity bill, to help with job retraining and fill in for some of the lost wages, appears to be far more viable if one starts with the real numbers. Addressing this problem in a valid way may become increasingly important over the next 15 to 20 years if the Beyond Coal campaign is successful in meeting its goals,"

Robert