The Future of Coal Country | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Coal Country

newyorker.com

79 pointsptrptr93 comments

Shutting the mine could eliminate more than seven thousand jobs, in a county of thirty-seven thousand people. “Greene County will become a ghost town,” the neighbor wrote.

Isn't that the normal fate of towns built around resource extraction after the resource is economically exhausted? The American West is littered with ghost town remnants around depleted mines. It doesn't make much more sense to stay in a coal mining town in Someplace, Appalachia after the coal is gone than to stay in a silver mining town in Someplace, Colorado after the silver is gone.

I saw similar grievances from dying logging towns when I was growing up in the Pacific Northwest. The flashpoint was government action to protect the remnants of old growth forest that the endangered Spotted Owl lived in. The underlying problem was that loggers were exploiting old growth forest faster than it could regenerate. Deregulation wasn't going to make their way of life sustainable. You can't extract what isn't there any more.

If the residents of these coal-centered towns can find a way to reinvent the local economy to not depend on declining mines, that's great. I wish them luck with that. But most probably won't. We need to prepare to help people transition to other regions and other opportunities when the mines are no longer making money and the towns around them no longer prosper.

Traditionally in this country, people readily migrated for job opportunities. Maybe that's just a fairy tale, though it happened more than once in my family and with plenty of people I know. Perhaps people in resource extraction and one-factory towns no longer want to migrate for opportunity. Or maybe that's never been a majority inclination to begin with.

It's not a fairy tale. California became a populous state due to the gold rush.

That doesn't explain the ghost towns around the mines.

It does. People migrated there when there was opportunity and migrated elsewhere when there were better opportunities elsewhere.

And, more recently (1930s-1940s) got a got a significant (around 5-10%) population boost due to Dust Bowl-driven econonic migration.

...and this is reflected in the state motto, "Eureka" -- I found it, the it being gold.

Not a fairy tale at all. In the 19th century De Tocqueville commented on how eager Americans were to sell land in pursuit of profit relative to Europeans at the time.

It seems that in the post-war era we settled on this notion that families should largely remain rooted and stable, and that became part of the modern "American Dream". I wonder if all of that is just a long-term backlash against the forced migrations of the Great Depression, made possible by the economic golden age we were going through at the time.

For my part I'm putting off buying a house precisely because it'll decrease my mobility.

IIRC, it was later than post WWII - more like the 70ies.

Or maybe you're right and it's a longer term trend:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/02/american-mobility-has...

Interesting. So maybe it's a Baby Boomer phenomenon? Wish the data went back further, doesn't look like the Census started monitoring this before 1948. With some Googling it looks like federal home-ownership assistance efforts (either through providing subsidized housing or tax relief) started as far back as the Great Depression. Maybe people just wanted houses and prior to such programs it was unattainable for most?

Looks like a good topic for a book for anyone who has the time. I'm sure it's a confluence of several factors. :)

I wonder how much the hectic pace of logging in the US contributed to that difference.

http://geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/rr-logging.html

Land purchased for the timber would be a prime candidate for disposal once it was cleared.

There was a post on HN on US internal migration patterns a while ago. IIRC migration rates have decreased, but it's a fairly recent phenomenon (as in 1990s not 1950s).

On the other hand, it's much more difficult to build lively, supportive, and necessary communities when everybody be moving all the time. Granted, obviously is the one source of income in a town dries up, you should probably move, but seeking out employment by hoping coast to coast does harm to our communities, especially when you aren't involved.

Unlike you, (and I don't mean this in a negative way, it's a complicated discussion) I actually did the opposite and committed myself to the city I currently reside in, less there are 0 economic opportunities to be had, and I volunteer and participate in my community and get to know people. It's easier to build strong communities when you at least know the other people in your condo building.

Yeah just depends on your goals/place in life. I imagine once kids come along I'll start growing more roots, but for now my focus is on my fiancée's and mine careers. And right now I'm at the best software development job that doesn't require a 1-hour commute. So while I could chase pay-grades for the next 30 years and make a decent run of things (plenty of my coworkers have), I kinda see that as a path to career mediocrity.

I agree that moving around makes developing strong ties tough. Once I get further along I'll reconsider taking my foot off the gas a little. My standard is essentially: "If I was trying to convince my kid to go into engineering, would I use my job as an example to aspire towards?" Right now, while I'm grateful for my job and the work certainly isn't bad, the answer is no.

My parents relocated cities 4 times before retirement to pursue job opportunities. Out of my 9 aunts and uncles, only one worked all their life in the same town where they grew up. I've lived in three different counties in my adult life. The loss of social ties was hard when we moved during my childhood; I can understand why families would prefer to stay put. But I think that long-term unemployment or underemployment would be even harder on people.

Evidently, many of these people have decided it isn't harder.

Any studies on how effective it would be for the government to subsidize moves?

When I grew up in Germany there was this stereotype that Americans move around a lot for jobs. Industry leaders often put this up as an example for Germans who at that time didn't want to move that much.

So I think there is something to this. Moving around probably got much harder due to rising real estate prices.

Moving is harder because property taxes will suddenly reset to much higher values. Long-term owners are partly protected from tax increases.

We also have high transaction costs for homes. Considering both sides of the transaction, something like 10% of the home's value is eaten up by various fees.

So nobody can afford to move. BTW, this is a huge source of our traffic problems, the other being school districts.

I'm originally from an area not in coal country, but right by it and heavily influenced by it. I couldn't agree with you more. Both my home state and the federal government are already essentially subsidizing these people to live in these communities simply because it's where they were born. There is no infrastructure for jobs because there are no industries other than coal and growing marijuana / making moonshine (although these are done on either an amateur level or highly consolidated).

I am normally a big fan of welfare and similar social services, but especially when they empower recipients to get back on their feet. There are plenty of communities in appalachia with sky-high unemployment and a huge percentage of their residents essentially draw SSI for most of their lives. They need to move, because they and their children will just draw welfare in perpetuity at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, there aren't a whole lot of ethical ways to get them to move. Forcing them to move is obviously a terrible idea. Making welfare/SSI contingent on moving could work, but will be absolutely terrible for those with all their wealth tied up in their house. It's a hard problem to solve, especially since a lot of these people are okay with / used to just making enough to get by.

How is this different from the narratives of "welfare dependence" and "inter-generational poverty" advanced by republicans to advocate for deep cuts to urban welfare?

If there are more people in a city than it provides opportunity for it seems to me to be a similar cruelty to incentivize them to stay in one place because they have "roots" there or something equally vague.

The main difference is that there are at least jobs in cities. They may not all be >$50k solid middle class jobs, but they are there. There are actually almost no jobs in these areas.

I would even agree with urban relocation if one city had a disproportionate number of people trapped in inter-generational poverty and another had extra jobs. I don't think "deep cuts" to urban welfare are ever the solution. I do think that the welfare system should prioritize setting its recipients up for success.

> The main difference is that there are at least jobs in cities.

There just aren't any houses, so their quality of life takes a greater hit than staying put in the form of huge commutes and dramatically increased cost of living. See service workers or teachers in San Francisco.

1. https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/20/15834514/rent-transportatio...

2. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607957/the-unaffordable-u...

3. http://www.sfexaminer.com/mayor-lee-spend-44-million-sf-teac...

While true, this is largely beside the point, and is addressable because it's mostly caused by politics. We don't need to have yet another discussion about Bay Area building constraints.

Additionally, there are other cities that have more opportunity than closed mining towns do. At the bare minimum the people need to relocate to someplace marginally better with ANY economic opportunity, because where they're at now has NO opportunity, not necessarily some place that is the top of economic opportunity.

No, it's not beside the point, and it's actually a huge portion of the point. Those same constraints exist in the majority of major cities in America.

For people on the low end of the earning spectrum, the lack of tangible benefits for moving outside of a vague promise of better job prospects makes staying put a viable option. If you worked at McDonalds, would you move across the country and away from your entire social support system for a chance to commute two hours on public transit to work at Arbys? I wouldn't.

As somebody who has been on both relatively low and high ends of the earning spectrum, I'd say that the vague promise of a better job is far better than some of the alternatives. Very little is stopping these people who live minutes away from the "Paris of Appalachia" from pursuing education and improving their chances elsewhere in a manner they couldn't reproduce even in the presence of their "entire social support" systems, which I might add seem to be coming up short in the first place.

What's stopping them from pursuing online education or skills training in their current location? That's what I did when I supported myself at a minimum wage canvassing job that really sucked. Why are they only worth helping if they live in cities?

> "entire social support" systems, which I might add seem to be coming up short in the first place.

I doubt very much you'd make the same statement about the urban poor.

> That's what I did when I supported myself at a minimum wage canvassing job that really sucked.

Good on you, mate. I've had similar experiences myself.

> Why are they only worth helping if they live in cities?

Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's reading a bit much into what I'd said. I don't think I said anything that could even remotely merit such an interpretation.

There is, of course, a spatial proximity of learning centers to population centers but that is just a byproduct of practicality.

> I doubt very much you'd make the same statement [about social support systems coming up short] about the urban poor.

Is there some reason you think I wouldn't make similar assertions about the urban poor? If people live in systemic poverty, then their social support networks have largely failed them. I would argue such a point remains true regardless of a person's origin.

I think perhaps you've misread tone. I was born and raised in a rural resource community, one of the most remote in the U.S. I'm not anti-rural, by any measure.

> What's stopping them from pursuing online education or skills training in their current location?

Insofar as telecommuting for education, I'd wager connectivity leaves something to be desired in some rural areas. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for distance education.

That said, some skills are best taught in a hands-on fashion. Add to that such learning approaches are more easily adapted to by some than others.

Virtual reality. Telerobotics. Initiatives for improved rural internet access. All of these problems are addressable without forcing people to move.

Addressable, at cost. VR requires pretty high-end hardware in most cases. Telerobotics doesn't sound inexpensive, either. Surely solutions can be found to various problems, but that doesn't unto itself make something a sound decision. Just because one can doesn't mean one should.

Rural telephone service and electricity both required subsidization by those who've opted to lead more practical lives i.e. lives where phone and electricity and other various utilities don't have to be directly subsidized by others.

Is it fair to force people who make reasoned and informed decisions about their own lives and where they live to pay for the decisions of those who prefer the country life?

I'm not advocating forcing people to move, under any circumstances.

This is often true on the coasts, but not particularly true in Appalachia or Appalachia-adjacent urban areas.

A basic house is $65k in Morgantown: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Morgantown-WV/22898744...

And a nice house with a 10 minute funicular commute to Downtown Pittsburgh (the Paris of Appalachia) isn't too much more: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/11363350_zpid/globalre...

And one can pay much less if one wishes: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2040-Lowrie-St-Pittsburgh...

Scarcity-driven housing costs are one of the biggest problems in a few coastal cities— but in much of the country, the problem is poverty.

How many people in Appalachia can afford a down payment on any house? From a quick search of the addresses you linked, all are in places with high rates of property & violent crime. None of them seem like better options than being poor in your home town, and avoiding the myriad risks associated with big moves when you're a low earner who can't take any hits at all to monthly income without major sacrifices.

Neither Troy Hill nor Duquesne Heights nor the South Side Slopes nor the entire city of Morgantown are terribly crime-ridden, by either personal experience or any statistics that I know of. Troy Hill is the 'worst' area but mostly has low-level quality of life crime. High crime neighborhoods generally have $30k houses, which are too cheap to mortgage and bought by investors that rent them out until they're falling apart, then abandon them.

Both Pittsburgh and Morgantown are pretty prosperous, yet remain affordable enough for blue-collar workers to own homes close enough to the center of the city to commute by foot, bus, streetcar, funicular, PRT pod, or bike. The neighborhoods I posted are a bit rundown, but perfectly livable— I'd live in any of them.

The schools aren't necessarily great in the Pittsburgh neighborhoods but they usually aren't in rural Appalachia either.

I don't disagree that moving is hard when one is poor and one relies on one's social connections for a lot of support. It's just not because of a lack of houses in the prosperous parts of Appalachia.

Housing shortages on the coasts are a huge issue, and a huge issue for national inequality— but overbuilding and inner-city abandonment remain a bigger issue in a lot of cities in the middle of the country.

To answer the question, I would stop phrasing it in terms of jobs and instead in terms of productivity and imports / exports. These small communities require a good amount of imports, especially if they want something resembling a modern life with modern technology. They thereby need balancing exports to pay for them. There is very little opportunity for these people to do productive work and export it. So instead there is a reliance on government subsidy for the required imports.

This equation isn't typically true for urban areas, so there's no reason for people to move. (See Detroit for details on exceptions.)

Good point.

I know folks on the right screamed about the 'welfare queens' living on the tax payers' dime in the inner cities for generation after generation. In reality, this was a coded attack against blacks, and the majority of the claims were hyperbole.

But now the left has begun making the same mean-spirited attacks on uneducated whites from Appalachia, the Midwest, and the south.

Both types of stereotypes are annoying to hear repeated again and again.

I'm not making a mean spirited attack. In fact, I think in the long run moving would even be beneficial for these people

I think in the long run it won't matter. For the most part, the jobs they could get in the cities are starting to vanish as well. In 10-20 years, the cities will have it even worse at the lower economic end. People might as well stay where they want to live.

This economic transition will eventually effect everyone. Everyone. These people are just at the front end of it.

Why do you think this? Can you provide some evidence? There was a lot of hand wringing during the recession about the end of work--"we're all losing our jobs to the robots," etc.--but it seems like there are as many jobs as ever and more good jobs. This is especially true from a global perspective. While many blue collar workers in the US are suffering from competition from foreign substitution, there are literally billions more people joining the middle class globally. It doesn't sound like the end of human work when you zoom out.

Also, if you compare the rate of job displacement right now with technology compared to say the early 20th century where a majority of the jobs that existed 50 years prior were "destroyed", then it doesn't seem like we're at much of an inflection point.

More likely, because we have development policies that make it hard/expensive to move, we're not putting people in the new jobs like we used to--this has down the line effects of slowing growth because the workers who are also consumers aren't spending what they could have.

> It doesn't sound like the end of human work when you zoom out.

Say that in another thirty years, though. You're referring to billions of people in countries that haven't yet entered a post-industrial economic situation. Are those billions any safer than the millions in the U.S. who've fallen out of it?

I agree that people should remain compassionate. I understand why some people experience schadenfreude when it's rural Republican voters failing to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" after hearing that advice given to urban Democratic voters, but tit-for-tat shaming is not humane. These people largely don't vote how I vote but they are still my fellow citizens. They have dependent children and elders. Some degree of suffering is probably unavoidable, because relocation is painful and many of these towns don't have long term futures. I don't want their residents to experience unnecessary suffering as some sort of lesson. We should try to help the people transition to better opportunities in other regions.

If the residents refuse that sort of help and instead demand that the government somehow make the old mines profitable again, then one may indulge in some exasperated eyeball-rolling and mockery, but I'm trying not to do that preemptively.

Sorry, this is just Democratic voters tearing themselves apart. Appalachia used to be a democratic stronghold. These are people don't want to live on welfare generation after generation, and that's what they tried to vote for.

https://thinkprogress.org/appalachia-used-to-be-a-democratic...

Shaming is an important part of society. It's how we incentivize positive behaviors and discourage negative ones.

Like slut shaming, gay bashing, nerd bullying? Or maybe you'd like to better qualify or narrow your assertion? Because multiple generations did this, for exactly the reasons you state: it was good for society.

It's like saying "law is an important part of society." You don't need to qualify that statement by expressly disavowing laws that protected slavery, made homosexuality illegal, etc.

"Shame" is defined as "a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior." Teaching people to feel shame for conduct like lying, cheating, and stealing is an important tool societies use to enforce social norms in situations (such as with young people), where resort to legal action would be excessive and harmful.

It works at a macro level too. Consider this article: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-25947984 ("Child Labor: India's Hidden Shame"). The word succinctly captures the international community's disapproval of certain practices that are common in certain places, with the implication that continuation of those practices will meet with continued disapproval from international peers. Again, that's an important social tool at the international level.

Except for the crucial difference that progressives generally don't think sluts, gays, or nerds are engaging in negative behaviour.

The point is that society can be confused on what is positive and negative behavior, and end up scapegoating. And it is effective only in a reptilian brain context.

It'd be similarly ignorant to praise murdering your enemies. Sure no doubt about it, it's really effective. Doesn't mean it's legal or ethical.

These things are brute force hammers. If you really think shaming has value, read the Scarlet Letter.

Of course shaming can be abused or misguided, just like almost everything in this world we live in. The idea that we shouldn't use something just because it can possibly be abused is ridiculous. Like everything, it has a degree of risk that we weigh and judge as moral agents.

And we all live in a "reptilian brain context". I'm not sure what other context there is. It makes no sense to reason about society as if we weren't all half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee.

Your idea of shaming works only because you've had success bullying weaker opponents who back down, and appear to learn the "lesson" you're generously handing out.

Find an on par opponent and you'll get escalation of shaming, get your ass handed back to you with wit, or the person will just ignore you.

So I refuse that it's effective. It's perhaps been effective for you, self selective bias. You probably don't shame people you've sized up who won't respond to shaming the way you want.

In case you've forgotten, this discussion thread is about societal shame, not individual bullying as you seem to imply. Societal shame isn't individuals engaging other individuals in some kind of shame battle. It actually consists of collective exclusion and isolation. Society (and the institutional structures that comprise it) doesn't get its "ass handed back" by people who buck its pressures; at most, these pariahs ignore society and get ignored in return.

But yeah, I totally only believe this because I'm a successful bully (◔_◔)

I have no sympathy for people that vote against their own interests.

If you're living off of government assistance and vote Republican while Republicans are constantly talking about stripping away said assistance programs, you absolutely deserve whatever happens to you. I have zero sympathy for you. You made your bed, now you get to sleep in it.

The only people I will have sympathy for are the children who have parents that are too dumb to see through the bullshit spewed by Fox, InfoWars, Breitbart, etc, and people that vote Democrat because they know better, but end up getting screwed by the Republicans that don't.

Except it's still the left that is expanding support and assistance for the "uneducated whites from Appalachia..." and the right that is taking it away.

This isn't a case of both sides do it at all.

Disability is more insidious than welfare.

States like disability because it is 100% federally funded and determinations are made by administrative law judges based on local standards. Temporary assistance (aka welfare), Medicaid, and other programs have a administrative and program cost sharing with the state and/or county.

Urban poverty has a lot of disability cases too. Welfare phases out in a few years and chronically poor folks end up labeled disabled.

I call it insidious because once you're on disability, there is an incentive to not try to re-enter the workforce. Most welfare recipients are off the rolls pretty quickly.

Making welfare/SSI contingent on moving could work, but will be absolutely terrible for those with all their wealth tied up in their house. It's a hard problem to solve, especially since a lot of these people are okay with / used to just making enough to get by.

Most of these people probably need to move if they've still working age. Maybe one way to reduce friction would be to have government buy out homes in economically distressed areas at the old valuation. Sure, that's "not fair" to people who faced similar dilemmas in the past and didn't get that sort of help. But I'd prefer that the government be inconsistently helpful over consistently unhelpful.

If there are really no jobs and the prospects for new industries are poor, offer relief by purchasing the houses.

Then tear them down.

Of course, there aren't a whole lot of ethical ways to get them to move

Offering people a chunk of money works quite well. If they're likely to be on welfare anyway why not offer them a few years' worth up front, to reflect the costs of their dislocation?

American society is very accounting-driven and wants everything itemized and explained, which seems awfully wasteful to me. It would be more efficient (for the state) and more dignified (for the recipient) to just offer to buy them out for (say) $25,000.

Is there remote work these people could do using the internet?

Maybe mechanical turk, but that would probably only pay like $1-$5/hr at most if done at a regular rate (e.g. a 40 hour work week). Other than that, no. The vast majority of the US, including unemployed people in Appalachia, do not have the luxury of having such an in-demand skill that employers are willing to let them work remotely.

Usually what happens is people with extensive social networks and (now virtually worthless) property stay in the area, and their children leave for greener pastures. I have relatives in Western PA in a town that was built around oil and lumber. The oil and lumber are gone, and with them went all the jobs.

The people who live there now must be around 70 on average. At some point that town is just going to die and become unincorporated county land.

How do other countries deal with this? Or do they have the same problem of local communities extracting federal subsidies for their unsustainable, selfish, local desires?

The latter, at least in Norway -- small settlements propped up by government spending.

http://www.idlewords.com/2010/07/mission_burfjord.htm

Search for "The social center of Burfjord" and read that paragraph and the next. Something like this might be necessary if the US government wants to keep Appalachia populated; I genuinely don't know if I'd support that goal or be indifferent to it.

They do. But other countries are often not as concentrated as the US is becoming.

concentrated in terms of what?

I know the situation in east Germany a bit. The "solution" is complete denial.

The discussions I observed happen in a way that I can hardly describe otherwise than that coal is some kind of replacement religion for those areas. For a long time (and for some even today) talking about anything beyond coal was considered some form of heresy. By now denial gets increasingly hard, because except one minor expansion all plans for further mines have been cancelled.

Don't forget those logging towns in the Pacific Northwest were able to luckily benefit from global trade expansion. Many of those cities became port towns creating a lot of opportunity and wealth where many other places suffered. Factor in they haven't had to deal with the USA's past like places in the Midwest and Appalachia. They're living high on the hog today by simple luck.

You don't just reinvent the economy and deal with the baggage of your past (due to ancestors and norms of the time but have effects today) overnight. I mean, what can they do? They won't fall into the lap of becoming a port town with extreme growth due to the proliferation of global trade.

Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There's still copper. It just couldn't compete with the open pit mines, overseas, etc., at subsequently depressed prices.

Now that copper prices have risen, in recent years (not sure about at the moment), there's been intermittent talk of starting some of the UP mining back up.

Probably won't happen -- my guess. Too much investment, given current global volatility. And the relevant people are largely gone.

More recently, foreign paper products production has been inflicting a further hit. The local town near where I stay lost its paper mill (for paperboard products) a few years ago. As one example.

Lower peninsula too, though for a slightly different reason: Detroit, Flint, etc. have become ghost towns as automotive manufacturing has moved out and automated.

It's not a natural resource, but if an industry moves then it, too, leaves people behind. And when it's a ghost city not a ghost town, it can take a long time to realize the money is gone, and it can leave a lot of people in the lurch.

Right. For people in Greene county, the obvious answer is transitioning to Pittsburgh, which is only 60 miles away, doing decent economically and still affordable.

How much would these people lose out? Let's say they bought property there during a boom, and now face having to give it up at a huge discount (if they're even able to sell), before buying in a more expensive regional centre or big city.

With time, the situation only gets worse - their property price is driven down as the demand drops, they can't justify renovating, house falls into disrepair, etc.

If the settlements are disparate, rail links would be too expensive, and are there enough remote jobs that people in these situations could be trained for?

I think it comes down to how we're educated in a very monolithic way still, with the idea of "a job" and "a career" and "a path". It's very much like all eggs in one basket, no diversification investing to me.

Students need to learn basic things, but that includes what is diversification, adaptation, how to learn, how to self-learn, and continuously integrate.

Because they don't learn this, there's a coal worker that only understands that task, and thinks it's tragic and someone's fault when it goes away. "I can't do anything else. Coal is all I know." And then they lobby and vote to protect specific job tasks, rather than some sense of a right to earn a living by contributing to society. Nope - it's all about 'the job'.

Imagine if more specialized jobs were suddenly easily automated, like say accounting. Uh ok that's a lot of people displaced from a job, 1.3 million in accounting an auditing. If even 25% were obsolete that's more than all of coal.

Article covering interesting re-purposing of old mines [1].

If you believe in extinction-level global climate change, then another possibility is raised: use the mines as the starting point of new Civil Defense shelters. Except instead of built against nuclear fallout, they are for housing the tens of millions we hope survive and make it to them when our species' inaction enables extreme consequences of catastrophic weather changes. This puts the entire local economies back to work at underground construction, renewing and reinforcing the mines to much higher civil engineering standards, and building them out with dormitories, underground farms, cisterns, etc., for long-term stays. These would be multi-decade projects, and gives us a chance to offer the jobs with strings attached to gradually move out all but a skeleton crew as the build-outs gradually taper off. At best, a massive infrastructure project to re-establish our Civil Defense, that we re-purpose in a few decades as underground business parks and cheap residences. At worst, we actually need to use them if climate change causes mass crop failures or the like.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/22/striking-paydirt-innovative-n...

So, when I look at what Norway has done with its oil money, I wonder what prevented communities like these from doing the same thing. Removal of the coal from the ground generated excess value, otherwise the mines would have lost money and been closed already. Where did this excess value actually flow? Did the community actually capture enough of the value flow to change its fate? Or did it only capture enough to survive, and now since that value flow is ending so does its survival?

That excess value was captured by a select few, rather than by the government (as in Norway).

And Norway was basically warned about the problem by an Iraqi that had experienced it once before.

Not that the oil fund is perfect. Using it can drive the currency haywire.

The problem is that extractive industries drive Dutch Disease. A Sovereign Wealth Fund can fight it, but Dutch Disease will have an effect. (The other thing that can be done is to have the entire country save more, by running a budget surplus and encouraging individuals to save more as well. This is... somewhat hard to do, in practice, without incredibly strong social cohesion.)

It's a lot easier to do when important sectors of your economy aren't addicted to consumer credit. People don't buy tankers full of oil on credit cards, but they do buy Fords.

Blaming debtors for indebtedness is like blaming heroin addicts for drug-running. It's a two-sided market, and savings gluts can and will drive down the price of credit until the market clears.

Any references on that?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/iraqi-farouk-al-kasim-behind-n...

Thanks!

Trump says he is going to bring back coal as a part of his program to make America great again.

But the reason America was so great is that it was at the leading edge of technological change. That is relevant because in the 19th century, coal was the hot new technology. It was used for powering factory machines, electric generators, railroads and steam boats, heating, and producing steel.

But technology continued to advance, and coal has gradually been replaced. It survives today only for steel production and part of electric generation, and even there it is being replaced by gas and renewables.

So when Trump wants to revive coal, he is going backwards technologically, and that would mean losing out in the global economy, too.

Any Trump defenders want to disagree?

I feel like we're in a similar position in Australia. Ruling party is over-reliant on coal when we are in a great position to go in harder on renewables, especially solar. Our solar-pickup is amazing, you see panels on so many houses, and we have loads of space and sunlight.

I wouldn't say we are going technologically backwards if you take a systemic look at energy, manufacturing, & infrastructure.

Steel is needed to rebuild existing infrastructure (roads, bridges, railroads) that have been falling apart over the years.

Steel is also needed to new infrastructure (buildings, electrical grid, solar panels (including those which will line the Mexican border wall), walls, housing, equipment, manufacturing).

Coal power is also inexpensive, transportable (power generation can be localized), & cleaner than ever. There's also a lot of coal left to be mined (> 260 bn short tons; 200 years).

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Energy.html

Coal can also be converted to diesel allowing states to create their own energy & reducing our need for foreign fuel sources. This will have geopolitical ramifications. Even if we decide to move toward renewable resources, having this coal stockpile in our back pocket will give leverage in acquiring the rare earth minerals needed for batteries & solar cells.

Also note that China & India burn a lot of coal, even though they could leap frog to a new energy infrastructure, giving more evidence that there must be compelling reasons to do so.

How is coal cleaner than ever ?

China and India burn a lot of coal... because they have a lot of inhabitants. But they have also got much more renewables than the US.

"Cleaner than ever" still ain't clean.

"I murdered fewer people last year!" would be a terrible defense for Jack The Ripper.

> "Cleaner than ever" still ain't clean.

Ok, less dirty. Happy?

> "I murdered fewer people last year!" would be a terrible defense for Jack The Ripper.

By that logic, solar & wind are not clean either. You still have to mine for & process rare earth minerals for solar cells & batteries. Not to mention the poor Chinese workers who process the electronics in poor working conditions. How about the extra infrastructure needed to support solar cells & wind turbines everywhere, as you have power loss with power transmission over a distance.

Neither is fission clean. Perhaps Thorium is relatively clean?

> China and India burn a lot of coal... because they have a lot of inhabitants. But they have also got much more renewables than the US.

China & India are also building infrastructure, which uses steel. I don't think there's any qualms about using renewables in the US. It's a matter of letting the technology mature in the free market & reducing the Federal Budget & lowering taxes. When renewables are more mature, the US will adopt them more.

Note that there are several alternative technologies being developed. Thorium, Biogas, Fusion, etc. When these technologies mature, we can use them all in combination; taking "the right tool for the right job" approach.

Coal will only become more expensive as it becomes more difficult to extract. The easy to access coal is gone. That is why in the article, they are resorting to destroying the county's state park. Everywhere else is either depleted or hard to access. All the more reason to use renewable, non depletable energy sources. Even China is beginning to moving away, producing a ton of solar panels.

>I wouldn't say we are going technologically backwards if you take a systemic look at energy, manufacturing, & infrastructure.

It's going backwards because we need to be at the cutting edge, which is renewables. Trump is facing the past, when the US was great partly because of coal, rather than looking to where things are going in the future.

>Coal power is also inexpensive

But natural gas is even cheaper, and wind and solar are becoming so.

>cleaner than ever

But it is still much less clean than renewables, or even natural gas.

>Coal can also be converted to diesel allowing states to create their own energy & reducing our need for foreign fuel sources.

That's expensive, diesel pollutes, and besides fracking is already replacing foreign oil.

>Even if we decide to move toward renewable resources, having this coal stockpile in our back pocket will give leverage in acquiring the rare earth minerals needed for batteries & solar cells.

I assume you mean getting rare earth minerals from China, but that wouldn't work because China already has all the coal it needs, and besides is moving fast to get off of coal and onto renewables.

The geography is special and we're kind of the "Saudi Arabia" of world coal production. As the worlds best producer (or one of the best anyway) we should be the one place in the world still digging coal.

Kind of like how wheat is not quite as sexy as javascript frameworks. However, the midwest has the unique geological feature of being the "Saudi Arabia" of wheat production, so despite wheat not being as sexy as SV startups, we are one of the best places on the planet to grow it so you'd think we'd grow a heck of a lot of wheat compared to, say, Ecuador or Hawaii.

Imagine as a thought experiment that javascript frameworks were not cool and not the future, yet, SV remained the best spot on the entire planet to grow new javascript frameworks. If something (politics? regulation of programmers?) prevented SV from actually being the world capital of javascript frameworks, it would be a valid question to ask why and then fix it.

USA is a big country. We do all kinds of stuff, not just SV stuff. Also obviously 99.99% of the countries population isn't going to sit down and quietly die because they can't participate in SV tech scene, luckily they have plenty of economic activities to perform.

China is Nr.1 world producer by far. Then comes the US, Europe, India, Australia with more or less the same output each. Sure you could try to compete with China by removing all environmental regulations but even the Chinese slowly understand that drinkable water might have its use also.

Your corn example isn't a good story also, because without subsidies the "Saudi Arabia" of wheat production wouldn't exist.

How about concentrating on stuff which actually generates money?

>The geography is special and we're kind of the "Saudi Arabia" of world coal production. As the worlds best producer (or one of the best anyway) we should be the one place in the world still digging coal.

But Trump isn't just saying that the US should remain #1 in a shrinking industry. He claims that he can get coal employment back to where it was decades ago. That's crazy.

This reminds me of Kodak, who was given advanced warning that digital would disrupt the film industry. Kodak did little to prepare, and that blunder ultimately led to its decline. I fear the US is also blundering in the areas of energy and infrastructure policy.

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