The Future of Coal Country (opens in new tab)

I'm originally from an area not in coal country, but right by it and heavily influenced by it. I couldn't agree with you more. Both my home state and the federal government are already essentially subsidizing these people to live in these communities simply because it's where they were born. There is no infrastructure for jobs because there are no industries other than coal and growing marijuana / making moonshine (although these are done on either an amateur level or highly consolidated).

I am normally a big fan of welfare and similar social services, but especially when they empower recipients to get back on their feet. There are plenty of communities in appalachia with sky-high unemployment and a huge percentage of their residents essentially draw SSI for most of their lives. They need to move, because they and their children will just draw welfare in perpetuity at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, there aren't a whole lot of ethical ways to get them to move. Forcing them to move is obviously a terrible idea. Making welfare/SSI contingent on moving could work, but will be absolutely terrible for those with all their wealth tied up in their house. It's a hard problem to solve, especially since a lot of these people are okay with / used to just making enough to get by.

Traditionally in this country, people readily migrated for job opportunities. Maybe that's just a fairy tale, though it happened more than once in my family and with plenty of people I know. Perhaps people in resource extraction and one-factory towns no longer want to migrate for opportunity. Or maybe that's never been a majority inclination to begin with.

Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There's still copper. It just couldn't compete with the open pit mines, overseas, etc., at subsequently depressed prices.

Now that copper prices have risen, in recent years (not sure about at the moment), there's been intermittent talk of starting some of the UP mining back up.

Probably won't happen -- my guess. Too much investment, given current global volatility. And the relevant people are largely gone.

More recently, foreign paper products production has been inflicting a further hit. The local town near where I stay lost its paper mill (for paperboard products) a few years ago. As one example.

Don't forget those logging towns in the Pacific Northwest were able to luckily benefit from global trade expansion. Many of those cities became port towns creating a lot of opportunity and wealth where many other places suffered. Factor in they haven't had to deal with the USA's past like places in the Midwest and Appalachia. They're living high on the hog today by simple luck.

You don't just reinvent the economy and deal with the baggage of your past (due to ancestors and norms of the time but have effects today) overnight. I mean, what can they do? They won't fall into the lap of becoming a port town with extreme growth due to the proliferation of global trade.

Article covering interesting re-purposing of old mines [1].

If you believe in extinction-level global climate change, then another possibility is raised: use the mines as the starting point of new Civil Defense shelters. Except instead of built against nuclear fallout, they are for housing the tens of millions we hope survive and make it to them when our species' inaction enables extreme consequences of catastrophic weather changes. This puts the entire local economies back to work at underground construction, renewing and reinforcing the mines to much higher civil engineering standards, and building them out with dormitories, underground farms, cisterns, etc., for long-term stays. These would be multi-decade projects, and gives us a chance to offer the jobs with strings attached to gradually move out all but a skeleton crew as the build-outs gradually taper off. At best, a massive infrastructure project to re-establish our Civil Defense, that we re-purpose in a few decades as underground business parks and cheap residences. At worst, we actually need to use them if climate change causes mass crop failures or the like.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/22/striking-paydirt-innovative-n...

Right. For people in Greene county, the obvious answer is transitioning to Pittsburgh, which is only 60 miles away, doing decent economically and still affordable.

I think it comes down to how we're educated in a very monolithic way still, with the idea of "a job" and "a career" and "a path". It's very much like all eggs in one basket, no diversification investing to me.

Students need to learn basic things, but that includes what is diversification, adaptation, how to learn, how to self-learn, and continuously integrate.

Because they don't learn this, there's a coal worker that only understands that task, and thinks it's tragic and someone's fault when it goes away. "I can't do anything else. Coal is all I know." And then they lobby and vote to protect specific job tasks, rather than some sense of a right to earn a living by contributing to society. Nope - it's all about 'the job'.

Imagine if more specialized jobs were suddenly easily automated, like say accounting. Uh ok that's a lot of people displaced from a job, 1.3 million in accounting an auditing. If even 25% were obsolete that's more than all of coal.

How much would these people lose out? Let's say they bought property there during a boom, and now face having to give it up at a huge discount (if they're even able to sell), before buying in a more expensive regional centre or big city.

With time, the situation only gets worse - their property price is driven down as the demand drops, they can't justify renovating, house falls into disrepair, etc.

If the settlements are disparate, rail links would be too expensive, and are there enough remote jobs that people in these situations could be trained for?

How do other countries deal with this? Or do they have the same problem of local communities extracting federal subsidies for their unsustainable, selfish, local desires?

That excess value was captured by a select few, rather than by the government (as in Norway).

This reminds me of Kodak, who was given advanced warning that digital would disrupt the film industry. Kodak did little to prepare, and that blunder ultimately led to its decline. I fear the US is also blundering in the areas of energy and infrastructure policy.

I feel like we're in a similar position in Australia. Ruling party is over-reliant on coal when we are in a great position to go in harder on renewables, especially solar. Our solar-pickup is amazing, you see panels on so many houses, and we have loads of space and sunlight.

The geography is special and we're kind of the "Saudi Arabia" of world coal production. As the worlds best producer (or one of the best anyway) we should be the one place in the world still digging coal.

Kind of like how wheat is not quite as sexy as javascript frameworks. However, the midwest has the unique geological feature of being the "Saudi Arabia" of wheat production, so despite wheat not being as sexy as SV startups, we are one of the best places on the planet to grow it so you'd think we'd grow a heck of a lot of wheat compared to, say, Ecuador or Hawaii.

Imagine as a thought experiment that javascript frameworks were not cool and not the future, yet, SV remained the best spot on the entire planet to grow new javascript frameworks. If something (politics? regulation of programmers?) prevented SV from actually being the world capital of javascript frameworks, it would be a valid question to ask why and then fix it.

USA is a big country. We do all kinds of stuff, not just SV stuff. Also obviously 99.99% of the countries population isn't going to sit down and quietly die because they can't participate in SV tech scene, luckily they have plenty of economic activities to perform.

I wouldn't say we are going technologically backwards if you take a systemic look at energy, manufacturing, & infrastructure.

Steel is needed to rebuild existing infrastructure (roads, bridges, railroads) that have been falling apart over the years.

Steel is also needed to new infrastructure (buildings, electrical grid, solar panels (including those which will line the Mexican border wall), walls, housing, equipment, manufacturing).

Coal power is also inexpensive, transportable (power generation can be localized), & cleaner than ever. There's also a lot of coal left to be mined (> 260 bn short tons; 200 years).

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Energy.html

Coal can also be converted to diesel allowing states to create their own energy & reducing our need for foreign fuel sources. This will have geopolitical ramifications. Even if we decide to move toward renewable resources, having this coal stockpile in our back pocket will give leverage in acquiring the rare earth minerals needed for batteries & solar cells.

Also note that China & India burn a lot of coal, even though they could leap frog to a new energy infrastructure, giving more evidence that there must be compelling reasons to do so.