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As with manufacturing, certain coal jobs will not be coming back, so once again, we will need to reinvent our way of thinking and find our people in these sectors other means of employment. :
" "TRUMP: ‘We’re going to get those miners back to work … the miners of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week, Ohio and all over are going to start to work again, believe me. They are going to be proud again to be miners.’
Well, no, they’re not, for three very good reasons. Firstly, clean coal doesn’t work and there’s serious doubt that it ever will. And even if clean coal can be made to work it will always be easier to perform the same trick with the CO2 emissions from using natural gas instead. But perhaps technological explanations aren’t convincing.
Secondly, there’s easier coal out there than those Appalachian mines like the strip mining out west for example. Once mines have closed you don’t reopen them if cheaper alternatives exist. You might keep running them because of sunk costs, but you don’t start again when cheaper alternatives are elsewhere. But okay, maybe technical stuff from the world of mining also isn’t convincing.
The third reason is the killer: economics. Fracking has made natural gas cheaper than coal for power generation. Thus new generations of power plants are going to be gas ones, not coal. And refurbs and life extensions of coal plants aren’t going to happen for the same reason. There’s just not going to be anything like the same market for thermal coal in the future.
We’re not going to use as much coal in the future and the coal that we will use isn’t going to come from the Appalachian mines. Trump simply isn’t going to bring back all those mining jobs. They’re gone, gone forever. Just like those assembly line jobs in electronics. And pining for the lost blue collar jobs isn’t going to help in the slightest. The thing to do now is to work out what other task that same labor can do.
We cannot plan our economic policy on the basis of nostalgia, on what people used to do. The only practical thing we can do is turn our minds to what people might usefully do in the future. It might be trade, as with China, that kills old jobs or it might be technological advance, as with coal, that kills employment, but we’re not going to stop either of them. Looking to the future is the only sensible course. - Tim Worstall, Contributor, Forbes Magazine, May 5, 2016
" "TRUMP: ‘We’re going to get those miners back to work … the miners of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week, Ohio and all over are going to start to work again, believe me. They are going to be proud again to be miners.’
Well, no, they’re not, for three very good reasons. Firstly, clean coal doesn’t work and there’s serious doubt that it ever will. And even if clean coal can be made to work it will always be easier to perform the same trick with the CO2 emissions from using natural gas instead. But perhaps technological explanations aren’t convincing.
Secondly, there’s easier coal out there than those Appalachian mines like the strip mining out west for example. Once mines have closed you don’t reopen them if cheaper alternatives exist. You might keep running them because of sunk costs, but you don’t start again when cheaper alternatives are elsewhere. But okay, maybe technical stuff from the world of mining also isn’t convincing.
The third reason is the killer: economics. Fracking has made natural gas cheaper than coal for power generation. Thus new generations of power plants are going to be gas ones, not coal. And refurbs and life extensions of coal plants aren’t going to happen for the same reason. There’s just not going to be anything like the same market for thermal coal in the future.
We’re not going to use as much coal in the future and the coal that we will use isn’t going to come from the Appalachian mines. Trump simply isn’t going to bring back all those mining jobs. They’re gone, gone forever. Just like those assembly line jobs in electronics. And pining for the lost blue collar jobs isn’t going to help in the slightest. The thing to do now is to work out what other task that same labor can do.
We cannot plan our economic policy on the basis of nostalgia, on what people used to do. The only practical thing we can do is turn our minds to what people might usefully do in the future. It might be trade, as with China, that kills old jobs or it might be technological advance, as with coal, that kills employment, but we’re not going to stop either of them. Looking to the future is the only sensible course. - Tim Worstall, Contributor, Forbes Magazine, May 5, 2016
The rise and demise of a West Virginia coal mine
Posted from reuters.comPosted in these groups: State of West Virginia
Mining and Metals
Office of the President (POTUS)
Donald Trump
Election 2016
Mining and Metals Office of the President (POTUS) Donald Trump Election 2016
Posted 9 y ago
Responses: 3
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I am from WV, not coal rich southern WV, but there are quite a few mines within 30 minutes of me. To an extent, I can agree with his sentiment, technology will drive the ability to bring back all of the jobs lost. Think about it, garment manufacturing experienced a radical change when technology introduced computer ran machines that cut, sized and assembled the garment, just as in the automobile industry. That's as far as my agreement goes, however. Strip mining is not a preferred method, at least here in WV, fracking is going on within miles of existing mines, at least here. And as for power plants being ran cheaper on natural gas, that may be true, but that would require the coal power plants to be abandoned, destroyed and rebuilt, or retrofitted. Far too costly, building new ones and fazing out the old,,,,,,a possibility as something will need to happen to the aging power plants. This post was written by someone that was probably trained in college, which was drilled in to his mind that it was the only thing that mattered. A problem with our society, as a whole. I believe we need to bring back vocational training as mainstream importance as college. Start training our young to prosper with their hands. This would create a growing work force and economy. Check out "Mike Rowe Works".
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something is going to have to happen... and being thrown to the clean air and ecology environmental hacks and wolves is not the answer...
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I'm from western KY, so I see this happening everywhere. My county is extremely dependent on coal, and is is drying up SO fast.
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