It is interesting that the people who are losing jobs aren't retraining. What exactly is Trump/Republican party going to do to help with that? Bring back Coal when renewable is cheaper?
I was a carpenter, I retrained at 28 and it was rough. I can't even imagine being older. Most of the guys I worked with out in the field didn't even own computers. They were just getting real phones. It's a brain rewiring not just picking up a couple new skills.
People are good with technology grew up with it their entire lives. There are exceptions, but if anything, they prove the rule.
You're not going to go to school and retrain to be a programmer or some type of professional in a small town where there are 2 web devs and a little ISP two towns over.
You're not going to move a family to a tech hub at that stage of your life so you can start over in an entry level job.
What was done then, and it's still in progress in the few mines that are already open, was to provide amazing early retirement deals: Instead of laying off young workers, anyone over 50 gets to retire with full pay. While that minimized the pain to secondary industries, as the retirees still kept their income, The region ultimately produced less, and massive emigration followed. This doesn't make me wish for this solution on anyone.
The best solutions, which I don't think are practical in US rural communities for cultural issues, is to incentivize replacement industries: For instance, St Louis hollowed out for decades, just like Detroit, but the city is doing better lately by fostering technology startups near its universities. This is revitalizing areas of the city that were slums for decades.
It seems difficult for American rural areas to do this though, if just because of the big culture clash between the old school America and people that create companies imitating San Francisco culture.
In the Uk these social ties are too much to break away from, its easier to stay put and look for work. Unemployment creaps up, zero hour contracts drive wages down. Deprivation sets in. Its a slow downward spiral.
it's tough to retrain. now add kids, low savings, and a mortgage. then you re-start at the bottom of the salary ladder. now it's time to retire.
my prediction: trump does nothing to address this problem whatsoever.
So no Solar is not cheaper when looked at in total cost to supply useable power to people 24/7
Further the cost of Coal is higher today largely because of artificial fees places on it in the form of Carbon Taxes, EPA regulations, etc. While I agree many of these are needed and benifitial to the long term it is this has to be factored in to the statement that Solar is "cheaper"
if the government adds all kinds of fees to everything but solar of course solar will be cheaper, but that is an Artificial Result created by government intervention in the market place not technology. The draw back of this is that increases the price of power for everyone and that hits poor people the hardest when their power bills double because of some new EPA Regulations
Depends. Fees that exist to influence direction of growth for opinionated reasons definitely represent a bias, but to NOT price in the shared impact (i.e. environmental impact, use of a globally limited resource (coal), etc) represents a bias in the opposite direction. I'm willing to bet (purely personal opinion) that fossil fuel costs do NOT fully include those common costs, and thus more than wipe out any bias represented in other fees.
I perfectly acknowledge that using "renewable" resources all have shared costs as well, and likely involve some sort of non-renewable impact. I'm just saying you need to include those costs to have an even remote chance of a fair comparison.
Not permanently, but considering that coal was our biggest power source in 2013, that is an enormous change.
few countries have effective carbon taxes. the EU emissions trading system isn't doing its job for example because they handed out too many credits which deflated their price.
Regulations also apply to renewables. especially wind and the necessary cross-country powerlines suffer from nimbyism.
If we take the opposite hypothesis, which is that we can't afford living here because we're limited by actual resources, it means there are too many people on Earth. If USA were strictly equally divided, each person would have 32,000 square meters to produce wealth. While that seems enough to grow carrots for one person, it may not be enough to grow enough of them to exchange with televisions, meat, health care, education and store for retirement. The average human's footprint is higher than their share. In this case, it's not too much mechanization or automation, it's that both the rich's footprint and the poor's footprint are distortedly higher than the goods they've produced. Here you go: The money we have isn't worth what we believe, USA can only exist through the slavery of Chinese workers, and we shall see some sharp adjustment for the rich in the future. Unless they keep on distorting the economy in their favor.
A side issue is recent history over the past couple centuries has revolved around replacing old forms of energy with new ones orders of magnitude cheaper. So far its worked out well. Because we haven't collapsed yet isn't a justification for it always working in the future. And now we're pretty well done with oil and coal with nothing to replace them, certainly not something orders of magnitude better to continue the trend of growth.
Another interesting exponential is the economy seems to do better with exponential growth in native population. Those aren't growing because economic conditions are awful. That leads to even worse economic conditions, leading to even lower population birth rates...