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kleinbl00  ·  2553 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The New York Times’ Coal Miner Interview Is Why We Won’t Stop Climate Change

rd95 had a post a couple days ago in which I bold-texted "fuck you, 'The Midwest'" because it was an entire article about a town seeking external help for external problems. I've been feeling bad about that off and on because hey - it isn't the coal miners' fault that people aren't burning as much coal.

But the issue is this:

- if you could have learned new skills, you would have by now.

- if you could have retrained for a similar amount of money, you would have by now.

- if you could have relocated to where the jobs are without achieving refugee status, you would have by now.

- if you could have solved the problems yourself, you would have by now.

Kids move away. Parents try to pay off mortgages, take care of ailing parents and hope they'll still have a pension when they reach retirement age. Your average tradesman doesn't think things like "this job I've been doing for 20 years probably doesn't have 10 years left in it, I oughtta start over while I can" because you don't casually throw away a career, a home and a life.

These are dead-enders - they've made the assessment that their quality of life is going to be better if they hold onto that which is slipping through their fingers than it will be if they flail out and grasp at a passing chance but they know they're falling. You know they're falling, I know they're falling, Democrats know they're falling Republicans know they're falling but they're falling because Capitalism and that is a tough fucking lesson to internalize in Central Murica especially because there is fuckall they can do about it.

Wiki says there are 77,000 coal miners working in the US. It also says that 60,000 have lost their jobs since 2011.

Here's some perspective. Let's say we give everyone who had a coal job in 2011 a hundred thousand dollars to walk away from coal, pay off some debts, figure out some retraining and STFU about saving their dinosaur industry. We'd be out about $13 billion. That's the equivalent of 150 F-35s, so no big deal... which would also be a 10% reduction in orders to Lockheed, who directly employs 97,000 people not including subcontractors.

Yeah. There are more people with Lockheed badges in the United States than there are coal miners.