The Coal Industry Offers Jobs

A reader notes: The L.A. Times had an editorial today about the obvious need to abandon coal as an energy source, and yet what to do about the coal miners and others whose jobs directly exist because of that industry…..It gets down to the workers who become impoverished due to their industry going away.

Personally, I don’t see this as a big deal.  There are about 80K people involved in the U.S. coal industry, which is about 0.12% of the workforce (about half of whom are the miners themselves, i.e., 0.06% of the workforce). Training these people to go into the wind industry or whatever sounds pretty non-traumatic for all concerned. If you’re looking for trauma, check out the byproducts of coal: the lung disease and the long-term environmental damage from the CO2, methane, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, mercury, radioactive isotopes, etc.   Add in loss of biodiversity, climate change and ocean acidification.

You could ask: What if it were your job that was going away?  To which I would answer: What if it were your health that was going away?  (13K+ people die and hundreds of thousands get sick each year from breathing the aromatics of coal in the U.S. alone.)

The argument that we need a coal industry because of jobs is totally unsupportable, IMO.