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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

> The partisan obsession with coal is cultural, not practical. West Virginia coal miners are a convenient proxy for the image of hardworking Americans being oppressed by unnecessary and burdensome regulation (as if regulation was the source of the woes of the coal industry).

Bang on.

The knock-on effects of this are surprisingly nasty, though. Whole swaths of country identify as mining country. Taking that away from them with economics is an assault on their culture, and the people concerned react like any culture that senses its core is under attack.

You can treat them as something obsolete, a dying beast we can circle like vultures. Or you can find a way to get them off of coal that doesn't involve invalidating how they think of themselves.

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And lots of people who don't live in mining country identify culturally with the miners. They see themselves as the "real Americans", being victimized by shadowy cultural elites and unnecessary regulations. So the coal miners as a political force aren't relevant per se. The coal miners as a symbol are extremely relevant. This only becomes more potent as American conservatism drifts away from a free market ideology and toward a protectionist/nationalist ideology. It doesn't matter that market forces are doing this to the coal miners. Their traditional way of life must be defended! The importance of intergenerational poverty and black lung disease cannot be overstated!

And the miners keep dying of black lung and caveins, and their neighbors have their water poisoned by runoff.

You can tell people that their identity is killing them, and it might actually be true. But most people tend to think of losing their identity as functionally equivalent to not only their death, but also the deaths of everyone they hold dear.

It's not something you can prize people away from readily.

That cultural identification issue is massive.

I was involved in a software project where management kept wanting to define the company as manufacturing, rather than primarily retail. The only way I could rationalise that is because it gave them an inflated sense of importance about their place in the world.

As a result, they ended up with a software system bigger and more complicated than their business dictated, meaning additional on-going admin and support load.

That's small fry, however, compared to a state's or country's cultural identification, which has the potential for far-reaching destruction.

How did countries like England deal with the shutting down of coal mines in the 80s ? Was there any reskilling program.

It did not go well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984%E2%8...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_King...

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