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Comment by spicymaki | Hacker News Reader

Good! the Luddites had a choice to transition their skill sets to renewable energy. They were warned, but they hemmed and hawed, and then they turned belligerent. They willfully choose to follow the pied pipers into unemployment.

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I used to work at a coal plant. The skillsets(mechanic, electrician, boiler, welding, labor, tech) have plenty of overlap with other types of plants. Workers regularly transferred to hydro and nuclear plants when necessary or for better opportunities. The majority of workers will be fine if they're willing to move to another region. The co-op or owner will oftentimes pay for the move

Below is a great example of a model to soften the blow to those impacted by these fossil generation closures.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/judge-oks-vistra-coal-plant... (Judge OKs $8.6M Vistra coal plant closure settlement seen by NGOs as model for helping impacted communities)

Should we, though? Those communities have spent decades voting people into power on the basis of fueling their economic prosperity by poisoning the rest of us. We owe them nothing.

Many of these areas are also chronically under-educated, and we don't do anything to prevent politicians from lying to them. If all you see and hear tells you "clean coal" is a real thing and you've also been convinced that without the power plants you have no future, it's easy to keep going to work and keep electing the same garbage politicians into office.

We owe them a better education system (as frankly we owe the whole country), and we owe them a political landscape where liars are not just taken to task by their opponent but removed from the electoral process.

You’re not incorrect. However, with that attitude we’ll always be divided and controllable/manipulable. So I’d rather we show some empathy instead or hold off from saying it...

Compassion never goes out of style. We owe it to ourselves to be better. And in the long run, it's cheaper versus people becoming destitute.

To be fair it isn't a matter of 'compassion or not' so much as triage. I try to do the opposite of a 'faceless million are less important than a single named character' trope. While preventing destitution for all would clearly be the best morally and practically there is an awkward unasked questions whose only answers would be even more uncomfortable from cognitive dissonance.

"Why do they deserve this special treatment over everyone else already destitute?" "Why not existing already funded programs that everyone else is expected to navigate?"

To play devil's advocate, perhaps we'd get more bang for our buck in this case.

This particular group of people are very homogenous; same place physically, similar skills, similar experience. I would hazard that these similarities would make a program to assist them cheaper than helping the same number of other people who are much less homogenous. Cheaper and more effective to help them now than dropping them into the general purpose help mechanisms.

You happily used the power they produced though.

No, we use their power because we have no choice. Most electrical utilities are monopolies in their respective service areas.

That seems to be more of a political problem and should be solved with a nationwide power strategy.

Assuming there are hydro or nuclear plants nearby. Coal mining and power generation is a massive percentage of the income for the Navajo. With the coal going away they can't dam the non-existent rivers in the desert to build a hydro plant.

Turn the mine into pumped hydro. A lot of mines will fill with water once you stop pumping it out.

The cooling pond would become the upper reservoir but may need to be enlarged for more potential as a battery.

That keeps jobs in the area.

EDIT: In the case of the Navaho the mine isn't next door to the plant but it does have water. Maybe a thermal plant would make sense with natural gas backup/overnight reheat and repurpose the current plants steam turbines.

AFAIK nasty stuff often leaks into mine water. Also it's questionable if the mine passages could sustain meaningful flow over long oeriods without collapsing. But worth a try. :)

There are multiple projects in Queensland, Australia building this now.

Everyone needs power though. There is some form of energy generation going on and they are qualified to work on it with a little training for the specifics

Maybe massive solar deployment then ?

Hmmmm..... what form of green energy production might one be able to build in a desert where there are no rivers to dam for hydro. Let me think about this one for a while...

Yes, and they could also lobby for better and cleaner sources in their own backyard as well. They do not have to break up existing communities. Coal country has the ear of the president and most of the senate currently.

This attitude is part of why there's a huge urban/rural divide that's blowing up politics in this country. And the structure of our political system gives outsize weight to rural voters, so we do need to overcome that divide if we ever want to have government action on climate change, not to mention a whole host of other issues.

Edit: I wanted to add that we shouldn't just care about people in coal country because we have to for political reasons, but because basic human decency and empathy require us to.

Don't get me wrong I care about these people. I support anything we can to transition them out of a failing industry. However let's not forget the harm being done to the next generation, because previous generations are failing to act.

The satire is a little imprecise here, but this is literally why there's a Green New Deal being proposed. We can address climate change AND make sure everyone has a livelihood while society undergoes the massive changes necessary.

Arby's employs more people than the entire coal industry.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-sur...

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