Instead of trying to prop up obsolete mining communities with hopeless economic support, it would be better to 1. focus on retraining/re-skilling and 2. send fully-subsidized moving vans to help people physically get away from the misery.
Most of those people either a) commute a long distance to scrape by and lose a significant chunk of their earnings on gas because they own a 30 year old hoopty of a truck or b) live off of welfare. That’s how a lot of these small communities continue to exist. People can’t afford to move out and obviously don’t want to commit suicide (nor should they).
Having come from a small town, I don’t think these people will move even if it’s paid for. Many rural folk have these warped views of more populace towns and cities because of the warped political rhetoric and constant bombardment of negative news coverage.
It’s an extremely difficult problem that I don’t personally believe has a solution because you have to have willing participation (some will, but most won’t).
Why not? There are good-paying jobs in financially functional towns and cities reasonably close by. The people who grow up in those towns can afford to live there.
Sure, they're not going to be able to upsize without a mortgage by selling the 1400 sqft 100-year-old house on a lot in a decaying ghost town. But most people don't start out with an already-paid-for home.
People are often dumb, but they're not insane and over years they do respond to incentives.
What you call misery, others call home, and have an attachment to the land.
Go for a stroll through San Francisco and see people living in tents and defecating on the sidewalk. Maybe everyone should move to California to commute hours to work (because you can't afford to live anywhere near your job). That sounds awesome!
Okay, so now what? Not say the quiet part out loud about how the area has economically failed? What you typed is a retort, but I don't hear a lot of solution, unless the suggestion is that a solution is not needed. I guess what I am saying is that I don't understand what point your driving toward with your comment.
My large, tightly knit family emigrated in the last generation (to Canada, the US, and Australia) and it was devastating. We went from living in the same city to living on three different continents. Life is materially better, but there’s no replacement for kinship ties.
I think my mom never really perceived it as an upgrade. My dad did, but as he gets older it’s getting tougher. Professional networks disperse, and he doesn’t really have family in the country. His relationship with his brother (who actually immigrated to NY recently) didn’t really survive 30 years of separation. My kids will probably never meet all of their cousins.
I totally get the folks in rural Ohio that don’t want to emigrate to the coasts for jobs. They’re going to be facing significant disruptions in their family networks. And it’s not like they’ll enjoy a quantum leap in living standards and social status elsewhere. They’ll just be at the bottom of the totem pole somewhere unfamiliar.
This is understandable, but does not always make sense. After all, these towns were created by European immigrants who left their homeland of hundreds of years, their language, customs, foods, climate etc for a better opportunity. These towns had sizable black populations who left southern towns for the same reasons.
Before Europeans, north america was settled by many different tribes who had migrated from eurasia . Not to mention different groups of humans also migrated from Africa all over the world, because they saw good reason to do so.
At some point you have to cut your losses, or seek a better life. Not saying it is easy, but this option should be pointed out to anyone in untenable situations.
Mostly, people aren't moving to better communities because they can't.
In a good year, a typical relocation requires stacks of available cash and jobs waiting at the other end for every working member of the household. And those jobs need to add up to the living expenses at the destination.
If you're a household that needs to move to survive, the odds are quite low you have the resources at hand to make that happen.
I'm not a fan of holding the economy and the environment hostage because they have a traditional "attachment" to something that makes the world a worse place.
Indeed the desire to stay near home is probably strongest for those with the fewest resources. For skilled, educated people, emigration is often an adventure. Exciting opportunities await you in the new place. But if you’re a low skill worker in Ohio, what does moving to San Francisco get you? What do you get for leaving your friends and family behind? Better chances to get a service job waiting on some Facebook engineers?
I don't, because I know over half the federal budget is spent on welfare: social security, medicare, medicaid.
It's the same thing that has happened in lots of rural areas of Texas.
Then these towns get older and older until eventually they won't be viable anymore (or find something else to still attract young people).
So the trends are happening, they are just delayed by a couple of decades. As the average life expectation grows the cycles get longer however.
This is very easy to say if you don't live there. There is no reason to think that a town that exists because it has a coal deposit is going to be a logical place for any business to put a clean energy plant of some sort.
If you are going to be for phasing out coal very quickly then you have to be willing to bite the bullet and accept that certain regions of the country are just going to be completely effed over.
Pieces of countryside do not suffer. People are potentially more mobile than that.
But most people do not move and do not want to move and I think people on here underestimate the political difficulty of telling people they will have to sell their house for close to nothing and move to life an adequate life.
See: the deindustrialization of New England in the 1920s, the Dust Bowl and its migrations, the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt
You are correct, in some cases they go back 2-4 centuries. From when their ancestors settled in the colonies there. Settlers. Colony. 2-4 centuries, short term by European standards. It is hypocritical to expect it to be eternal now. There was no guarantee that it would last past when they milked out all the non-renewable resources. As noted, the US tends to be fairly institutionally indifferent to e.g. a Dust Bowl.
I hope that they better than that this time, I really do. But not at the expense of keeping coal mines and coal-mining-towns with no other viable way open. It never was a good job anyway (see "black lung").
What do you think happened to Appalachia? It sucked for a while, and it's still not a bustling tech hub and never will be, but people are adapting and in a few generations it will be a good (if less populated) area.
I would generally agree that if as national policy we are going to do something like shut down an industry we should try and help people including maybe just buying them out (reskilling/learn2code is extremely difficult), but it’s kind of like what Elon said once which was good which was when we lower the price customers don’t want to pay us the higher price and when we raise the price they want the lower price they initially agreed to (it wasn’t that exact thing but you get my point) and when it comes to subsidizing industries like we do for oil and gas for example I think the same mentality applies.
The one difference is manufacturing hasn't been lost in the US - by most measures we make more stuff in the US than ever. There are less jobs though because of automation, but those jobs have been replaced by engineering. Coal mining by contrast is a death industry and won't come back. What people in the coal industry need is someone to setup a factory in their town. A factory making some weird widget in a small town tends to make a rural town.
That might be the only way wind can be done because of the size.
But for solar, it seems like there could be a local crew that installs a row of panels every day. Or week.
Currently the landowner gets rent, the area gets taxes but the locals don’t see much from renewables. Truck in racks and panels a month ahead of when they’re needed. Try agrivoltaics.
https://www.iea.org/news/the-world-needs-more-diverse-solar-...
"China’s share in all the key manufacturing stages of solar panels exceeds 80% today, according to the report, and for key elements including polysilicon and wafers, this is set to rise to more than 95% in the coming years, based on current manufacturing capacity under construction."
Given the current state of US-Chinese politics, coal is seeming like a very 21st century solution for the US.
You’re joking if you don’t include nuclear energy into the green new deal.
Every person from a state with lower population than the median is overrepresented in the Senate, every state with higher than median is underrepresented.
This isn’t a question of the decision’s influence in the future or its likelihood. It’s about the decision’s effect today. Either way, as far as I could find, the text of the ruling does nothing to convey concern for the measurable effects that Montana’s coal industry could have on you or your children elsewhere. That’s what we’re talking about.
By law, your self interests were not referred to at all. The "good news" is that your country is governed by self interests, and I’m inclined to believe that The Powers That Be ® are catering to yours this time around.
And people wonder how Jim Crow became a household name…
The courts are not infallible or all-knowing.