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Your last paragraph is something I have been saying all over the forum. Coal from Appalachia is harder to get to now. Wyoming and Montana coal are easier to get to. Few people are listening.
In its heyday which was late as the 1980's the Pocahontas coalfields produced some of the best you could get. That coal was shipped all over the world and at one time powered navy vessels, but again the move to diesel and now nuclear put an end to all that.
Only way to bring back coal mining in any big way to the Appalachia area is to create a huge demand for that product. Just don't see that happening long as there is a vast supply (or glut) of cheap natural/shale gas and or oil. This and or something happens that makes hauling coal from Wyoming or Montana so expensive or is otherwise interfered with.
Location: Just transplanted to FL from the N GA mountains
3,997 posts, read 4,145,129 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WaldoKitty
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And 100 years from now when domestic natural gas is gone, they will still be burning coal.
And the sad thing is, we burn off so much natural gas which is a natural occurrence during drilling that it isn't even funny. The amount of waste is unbelievable in Alaska alone, with no way to transport it currently. I'd love to see them start discussing the Denali pipeline again which would use that waste.....
The issue here is that most people talk about getting rid of the industry but very few have any solid plans to give these workers a different career path.
Hillary woman proposes to bring clean energy like solar into these towns. It’s good but it wouldn’t work for every town, and not everyone wants to work in solar. There should be a lot more effort put into it, more education, more career training, more industries going into these towns.
Cuomo banned fracking to make the "green"/environmental lobby happy and score points that he thought would add to his CV in any potential POTUS run (2016). The Clinton woman and DNC quashed any ideas Cuomo had in that direction, but he still can claim the environmental high ground.
Right so him and his unrealistic armchair libbies crew on the left coast and NY are fine with not contributing to the countries energy needs.
WV/PA/OH produces coal and gas both, yet apparently they don't want either one of them even though natural gas is supposedly better than coal. On top of all this they have no idea how to replace them but they're certainly fine with using the electricity it provides while demeaning the industry and trying to hamstring it.
Awesome. Their logic is sound as always.
02-11-2017, 01:38 PM
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n/a posts
Quote:
Originally Posted by RayinAK
Jason, to extract natural gas from the ground requires drilling, which is not necessarily too far from mining or ground exploration. The same for oil, nuclear energy, and the rest. Again, we have to put politics aside to see the real picture.
Well, it is pretty far removed from the massive destruction that comes with mining, but whatever. Natural gas isn't just attractive for its environmental friendliness anyway.
Quote:
Governments cannot all of the sudden destroy one industry and dump the added cost to the remaining workforce (the 54% above, minus the industry phased out). Certain industries can probably be phased-out gradually as the expense is passed along to other industries. For example, Canada has been phasing out coal while switching to nuclear energy.
Well, then I guess it's a good thing no one has tried to pull off the sudden destruction of the coal industry.
You do realize that mining employment in places like WV has been declining for over half a century now, right?
See, we don't live in a country with a centrally planned economy. The coal industry isn't dying through government fiat. It's dying because there are other forms of energy production that are more attractive, and that's especially true for places like WV with difficult terrain and where decades of mining has made it increasingly expensive and difficult to keep extracting.
This is what Trump and the former miners who voted for him don't get. Government can't just magically reignite a dying industry. Maybe with some relaxed environmental and mine safety regulations a mine will open here and there for a little while, but in a year or two the situation will look just like now - unemployed and snorting crushed up oxy with giant "Friends of Coal" signs stuck in the front yards of their crumbling houses, waiting to cast their next ballot for a politician who tells them they can have good paying steady work without having to learn anything new or adapt at all.
Yes, they do. And in exchange they get laid off routinely and wind up with respiratory illnesses. And that's the lucky ones who don't wind up dead or disabled in a mining accident.
Energy experts give Trump the hard truth: You can’t bring coal back
Coal wasn’t killed by a political “war” — cheap renewables and fracked gas were the culprits.
Maybe it’s not exactly gonna make you rich or famous but earning a decent living and providing for your family is fulfillment in it’s own right. The average starting wage for a miner (when the mines are running) was $60,000 a year in 2010 which is nothing to sneeze at. Not everyone is able to or even cut out to go to college and be a doctor, lawyer, or white collar professional. There are plenty of jobs, many very good paying, out there for people willing to learn a skill or get dirty.
That is why we need jobs back. We need to make things again. Service job, is just that, service. Nothing is made.
As for the danger, because of the amount of regulation and all the reforms pushed through by unions over the last century, I am sure a lot of hard working Americans would rather go into a mine than deliver pizza somewhere.
I have a friend talked about being a contract miner. If I remember this correctly, he said he could be able to make 200 dollars a day. I've been doing research, and one article says that some contract miner can make up to 400 dollars a day.
Why people can not work this type of jobs? Not everybody can be a doctor or a lawyer. Just because you are one of those "elite", doesn't mean you can throw the working class under the bus.
The issue here is that most people talk about getting rid of the industry but very few have any solid plans to give these workers a different career path.
Indeed.
More to the point.....
The many many many billions of dollars of infrastructure that is devoted to generating electricity based burning coal. And it's absolutely stupid to spend all the money it would take to simply change over to a different fossil fuel.
Coal isn't going anywhere. It's leftist nonsense that all of a sudden we will generating it from natural gas.
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