Black lung rates in Appalachia are high as the 1970s | Hacker News Reader

Black lung rates in Appalachia are high as the 1970s

text.npr.org

31 pointsmooreds12 comments

There are around 44,000 coal miners in the US [0]. The article mentions the US government boosting coal by $700m, or about $16k per miner. $700m could pay for a lot of black lung treatments, especially if the prevalence is 33%.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/pdf/table18.pdf

I don’t get how it’s cheaper to dig up and transport coal than install a tonne of solar :s

It isn’t, but the whole night thing is a bit of a problem and storage isn’t there yet at grid scale, but it’s coming.

Coal doesn't even compete with just solar, those aren't your two options.

Coal competes with literally everything else, and it loses to every single one of them. It's a terrible, terrible fuel. Burn natgas instead and you're already magnitudes better off.

Coal only exists today in the US because our politics is broken beyond belief.

Only ~15% of power in the US comes from coal currently, and it continues to decline as each of the last remaining coal generators are retired. Politics props it up, but it will eventually be gone. Five years maybe, ten years tops. Focus on forward looking tipping points for step change death spiral progress (when minimum coal mining, transportation, and generation minimum limits are breached).

https://www.sierraclub.org/coal/coal-plant-map

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-trump-has-overseen-more...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64924

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67405

The problem is the US doesn't have senators whose constituents make solar a key part of their identity (or if we do, those senators arwnt swing votes who need to be appeased and disproportionately porked up)

From the way people talk about American coal miners, you'd think there are millions of them and they all live in the Appalachia. When the truth is there are only 45,000 of them in the whole country. Walmart employs over 10,000 people in WV alone. And it's not just in Appalachia, either — Wyoming produces twice as much coal as PA and WV combined.

Crazy how much of this really just boils down to identity politics for a small segment of coal miners.

There are two kinds of jobs: export jobs and local jobs. I mean export in a loose sense - not necessarily crossing country borders, but rather something that is transported to other regions.

Export jobs like mining, an industry etc is the base that creates and support an economy of local jobs around them. Local jobs like walmart, hairdressers, gas station, laundromat etc. Every community must have export jobs in order to be able to trade for imported goods. You can't just take the coal mining away and keep the walmart.

Now there are exceptions: a tourist economy exports services that are normally local jobs. And some communities only exist because of subsidies and handouts. But they are exceptions.

In West Virginia alone coal mining drive $21 billion in economic activity and provides for over 36,000 jobs total when you include related fields like power generation. It is an important in more ways than just mining jobs.

You can say this about many other jobs. But they don't get their own Joe Manchin.

Jobs in power generation will exist whether you are using coal, gas, solar, wind or hydro.

> Crazy how much of this really just boils down to identity politics for a small segment of coal miners.

The coal and oil industries have a proven track record of paying their bribes on time that stretches back a hundred years or more, and those industries wouldn't exist if they weren't able to move numbers around a ledger at whim.

Modern industries like Solar and Wind don't have nearly the same requirements and, more importantly, started life with modern accounting practices and Excel in an era without functional graft.

Coal is an existential issue for politicians and a very few others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com