Quote:
Originally Posted by thecoalman
The history of coal prices going back at least half century are quite stable especially compared to the natural gas market. It's not even comparable.
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If you average it out, I suppose you could have an argument. But if you look at employment patterns in the coal industry, there is undeniably a long history of boom and bust.
I can take you to abandoned coal company towns in eastern Kentucky where trees are growing up through the floors of the identical wooden houses, standing in long ghostly gray rows. During the good times, the boom periods such as World War II, several thousand people lived here. Once the market dwindled, the mines closed and the mine workers and their families were thrown out. In a few coal camps, out of work miners were allowed to purchase their homes when the mines closed and company moved out. Few could afford to do.
I could also write about scrip, the fake money usable only in the company-owned general stores which could be found in every coal camp. Prices were jacked up - and town was miles away, sometimes only accessible by rail, Passenger train travel to the nearest town with privately owned stores cost additional money and was inconvenient. So the scrip, which miners received in lieu of cash, was paid out to the company store, where customers were encouraged to run up accounts. Nice way to ensure a steady labor force - but woe betide any miner who got sick or became injured to the point of being unable to work. Out they'd go: no house, no money, no resources.
The typical coal camp schools only went through eighth grade, and were also company owned or heavily influenced, though technically part of the public school systems. High school education required travel and often the schools were almost inaccessible from the coal camps. So most kids either couldn't afford a daily train ticket, or the trains weren't even available to get them to school, school buses were not around, and no one carpooled as the mountain roads were often the creekbeds and almost no one had cars or available drivers anyway.
A few boarding settlement schools - Red Bird, Hindman, Pine Mountain and others - provided excellent education for those kids whose parents were determined to educate them regardless of the difficulties, but most boys joined their fathers in the mines as soon as they legally could. Fourteen, in many cases.
Conditions such as these led to the formation of the United Mine Workers of America, the UMWA, which fought for health care and better living conditions and pay. But those boom and bust cycles continued, with the resulting weakening of the union and great outmigration to the industrial cities of the northern Midwest, Detroit in particular but also Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Chicago.
New, greatly destructive methods of mining became common: both strip mining and mountaintop removal require far fewer workers than does deep mining. Lax state and federal regulations allowed tremendous destruction of the land in order to get at the coal, with resulting degradation of water, forests, wildlife, and the land itself.
So while you may be technically correct regarding the market cost of coal over the years, it doesn't appear that you are factoring in the true costs, the social and environmental costs of its production.
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