Isn't that the normal fate of towns built around resource extraction after the resource is economically exhausted? The American West is littered with ghost town remnants around depleted mines. It doesn't make much more sense to stay in a coal mining town in Someplace, Appalachia after the coal is gone than to stay in a silver mining town in Someplace, Colorado after the silver is gone.
I saw similar grievances from dying logging towns when I was growing up in the Pacific Northwest. The flashpoint was government action to protect the remnants of old growth forest that the endangered Spotted Owl lived in. The underlying problem was that loggers were exploiting old growth forest faster than it could regenerate. Deregulation wasn't going to make their way of life sustainable. You can't extract what isn't there any more.
If the residents of these coal-centered towns can find a way to reinvent the local economy to not depend on declining mines, that's great. I wish them luck with that. But most probably won't. We need to prepare to help people transition to other regions and other opportunities when the mines are no longer making money and the towns around them no longer prosper.
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.
Most of these people probably need to move if they've still working age. Maybe one way to reduce friction would be to have government buy out homes in economically distressed areas at the old valuation. Sure, that's "not fair" to people who faced similar dilemmas in the past and didn't get that sort of help. But I'd prefer that the government be inconsistently helpful over consistently unhelpful.
If there are more people in a city than it provides opportunity for it seems to me to be a similar cruelty to incentivize them to stay in one place because they have "roots" there or something equally vague.
Offering people a chunk of money works quite well. If they're likely to be on welfare anyway why not offer them a few years' worth up front, to reflect the costs of their dislocation?
American society is very accounting-driven and wants everything itemized and explained, which seems awfully wasteful to me. It would be more efficient (for the state) and more dignified (for the recipient) to just offer to buy them out for (say) $25,000.
The people who live there now must be around 70 on average. At some point that town is just going to die and become unincorporated county land.
Then tear them down.
It seems that in the post-war era we settled on this notion that families should largely remain rooted and stable, and that became part of the modern "American Dream". I wonder if all of that is just a long-term backlash against the forced migrations of the Great Depression, made possible by the economic golden age we were going through at the time.
For my part I'm putting off buying a house precisely because it'll decrease my mobility.
So I think there is something to this. Moving around probably got much harder due to rising real estate 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.
It's not a natural resource, but if an industry moves then it, too, leaves people behind. And when it's a ghost city not a ghost town, it can take a long time to realize the money is gone, and it can leave a lot of people in the lurch.
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.
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...
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.
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?
http://www.idlewords.com/2010/07/mission_burfjord.htm
Search for "The social center of Burfjord" and read that paragraph and the next. Something like this might be necessary if the US government wants to keep Appalachia populated; I genuinely don't know if I'd support that goal or be indifferent to it.
The discussions I observed happen in a way that I can hardly describe otherwise than that coal is some kind of replacement religion for those areas. For a long time (and for some even today) talking about anything beyond coal was considered some form of heresy. By now denial gets increasingly hard, because except one minor expansion all plans for further mines have been cancelled.
But the reason America was so great is that it was at the leading edge of technological change. That is relevant because in the 19th century, coal was the hot new technology. It was used for powering factory machines, electric generators, railroads and steam boats, heating, and producing steel.
But technology continued to advance, and coal has gradually been replaced. It survives today only for steel production and part of electric generation, and even there it is being replaced by gas and renewables.
So when Trump wants to revive coal, he is going backwards technologically, and that would mean losing out in the global economy, too.
Any Trump defenders want to disagree?
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.
But Trump isn't just saying that the US should remain #1 in a shrinking industry. He claims that he can get coal employment back to where it was decades ago. That's crazy.
Your corn example isn't a good story also, because without subsidies the "Saudi Arabia" of wheat production wouldn't exist.
How about concentrating on stuff which actually generates money?
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.
"I murdered fewer people last year!" would be a terrible defense for Jack The Ripper.
It's going backwards because we need to be at the cutting edge, which is renewables. Trump is facing the past, when the US was great partly because of coal, rather than looking to where things are going in the future.
>Coal power is also inexpensive
But natural gas is even cheaper, and wind and solar are becoming so.
>cleaner than ever
But it is still much less clean than renewables, or even natural gas.
>Coal can also be converted to diesel allowing states to create their own energy & reducing our need for foreign fuel sources.
That's expensive, diesel pollutes, and besides fracking is already replacing foreign oil.
>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.
I assume you mean getting rare earth minerals from China, but that wouldn't work because China already has all the coal it needs, and besides is moving fast to get off of coal and onto renewables.
China and India burn a lot of coal... because they have a lot of inhabitants. But they have also got much more renewables than the US.