I'm not sure why everyone thinks Obama killed coal. Cratering natural gas prices are what killed coal. So short of artificially raising the price of nat gas, coal is not coming back regardless of who is in charge.
It is a perception issue; apparently coal miners are swayed to believe a people decided to close coal mines.
For some people, it is easier to perceive that a bureaucrat is against your industry, as opposed to find out that the economic value created is exceptionally low.
When a person loses a job, it will be heartbreaking for the person to realise the job performed earlier has low economical value.
Telling someone "We do not need your services anymore" is harder than telling "Well, all those bureaucrats that live elsewhere decided it...".
I do think that economic value of coal is low and it is economically swapped out for other sources.
I think this cause effect is well understood and people who are not impacted can be clinical about it but when your livelihood depends on not understanding something you won't.
What happens to all these people, their families and lives put in disarray. This is what the economic and political system of a society is supposed to address - the well being of all citizens. And we can clearly see this is where globalization and the current economic dispensation falls apart spectacularly.
Wishing it away or washing your hands off is a kind of sociopathy. Are these people to be left alone to form an underbelly of society susceptible to any demagogue willing to exploit their disenchantment for their own ends. This self serving plan of action directly leads to social unrest, breakdown and worse.
This presumes a simplistic model of the market that completely ignores the combination of regulations, tariffs and subsidies.
And, FWIW, Obama did favor natural gas.
Corporate oligarchs have always tried to make the results of their deliberate decisions and the candidates they throw money at sound like the inevitable march of progress. But it isn't. And this election was a repudiation of that.
Wasn't natural gas a byproduct of the shale oil/hydro fracking boom? It seems that perhaps (while oil prices were high) these coal miners should've moved to North Dakota and Texas. Is this not the equivalent of a jQuery developer complaining about lack of jobs when they could maybe learn React or Angular?
> It seems that perhaps (while oil prices were high) these coal miners should've moved to North Dakota and Texas.
Easier said than done when one's entire social structure is rooted in one place, and has been since before one was born.
We forget how lucky we are that we can do our work from anywhere in the world; those of us who've moved around also tend, I think, to forget the real value of staying where one grew up.
What is the value? Whenever I go back home I of course am happy to see old friends and family. But I'm also reminded of all the reasons I'm glad I left, from poorer economic opportunities to poor political decisions manifesting themselves in everyday life.
In the spirit of taking surprising statements at face value, here are some examples.
- Having a kid? Now your whole extended family is available to give you help and advice, to babysit, to be there for you when you need them.
- Need a job? It's a lot easier to find one when you have a personal network in a place already.
- Something terrible happen in your life? You now have a built in set of folks to help you through it.
There's incredible value in having a large local support group. Yes, it's possible to compensate for the lack of it with friends, and those of us who have moved far from home tend to do that, but that's a pretty straightforward second best compared to being with family, people you've grown up with, etc.
Having to move constantly is one of the core grievances people have against modernity and globalism. Some people care about having friends, roots, history, community.
Aren't Americans moving less now-a-days: How to Get Americans Moving Again http://nyti.ms/257a62z? What does having friends and community have with staying put or moving? This sounds cold and calculating, but aren't friends and community fungible? Of course not the individuals themselves, but when we move we find new communities and new friends.
Equating a 45 year old man with minimal education, a mortgage, and generations of family history in an industry with a 20-something software developer with none of those things is... not reasonable.
Oh so after all that time accusing my generation of being lazy and unmotivated, they would rather stay unemployed and vote for a racists than change it. got it.
Just as entropy increases over time, adaptability to change decreases significantly over a person's lifetime. Assuming you are a millennial (based on your claim of your generation being accused), you got an education which prepared you to use technology and learn things on the internet - critical skills for this idea of a "modern employee". Besides, the coal miners in Appalachia aren't exactly known for sitting on their ass.
My father is in the same position as this demographic you mention. Working at large firms, facing regular layoffs due to offshoring and outsourcing, and yet moves around the U.S. when the opportunities are elsewhere. And he has a mortgage, and he's at least 55 years old IIRC.
Right. Because only 20 year old software developers relocate for work.
Anyone is capable of moving. It's hard and it's disruptive but it's possible. And increasingly it's going to be a necessity if you want to have long term prosperity.
It's not like Obama did nothing that effected coal. The industry lost over 83k coal mining jobs during the last 8 years. Hillary lost Pennsylvania, a big coal mining state, by 68,236 votes.
Obama did some things, but the main driver was the market. In politics it makes sense to take credit/blame depending on side. Trump can remove whatever Obama did and the jobs are not coming back for market reasons.
It's the same thing with factory jobs. The US produces more than it ever has (at least the last time I checked), but many of those jobs were automated away.
Same thing for gas. Obama did nothing to lower gas prices. But imagine if for whatever reason (say a hurricane came through and knocked out US refining capacity two months before the election), he would've got the blame for high gas prices. And not just Obama, the same situation kind of happened to Bush when Katrina knocked oil infrastructure offline.
I am of the opinion that the reasons the industry lost jobs, are primarily:
1. Price of natural gas is very competitive.
2. Automation. Mechanisation inside coal mines becomes more effective.
3. As old coal plants are retired, their replacements require exceptionally high capital expenditures. While running an already built coal plant can be feasible, competition for building new plants is not economically competitive.
In the end, it is the free market that took those jobs. In the end, the market always wins.
Doesn't really matter 83k unemployed people aren't going to care about the nuances of which factors contributed how much.
If the industry was already on it's way down the smart thing to do would have been to let it run it course instead of pushing regulations that wouldn't matter any ways and swung the state against you. Similarly if the factors killing coal really are not driven by government regulation than installing a pro-coal guy at the EPA shouldn't have any effect.
Coal was regulated before concerns of climate change became mainstream because it kills people. The pollutants it releases poison people not just in the state where the plant is located, but in neighboring states.
None of the costs of medical treatment or loss of life were borne by the coal industry itself prior to regulation.
um... Pennsylvania hasn't been reliant on coal since the 60's. it's all natural gas now. go visit Pittsburgh and compare it to pictures from the 50's and 60's.
The EPA's Clean Power Plan rule--a major priority of the Obama administration--has the implicit goal of closing hundreds of coal power plants. Although the EPA has not said so out loud, plenty of other people have.
It is currently stayed by court order; a Trump administration could decline to defend it, and thereby permit it to die in court.
Low natural gas prices are in part because the Obama administration has strongly resisted any significant restriction or regulation of fracking. They have resisted it because they want gas prices to fall and displace coal.
When it comes to energy development, it's hard to think separately about technology and policy; they are both factors in every change.
Lower gas prices certainly did not help, but if not for regulations introduced during the Obama administration, many coal plants would still be running. I worked, as an engineer, for a company that made equipment pretty much just for coal fired power plants from 2002-2014. Starting with the ammendments to the Clean Air Act in 2009, then the CSAPR, then MATS, we watched utility after utility make the decision to close plants rather than install the required emissions control equipment. So maybe if natural gas was more expensive they would have chosen to install the equipment, but if not for those regulations they would have just kept running.
> I'm not sure why everyone thinks Obama killed coal. Cratering natural gas prices are what killed coal. So short of artificially raising the price of nat gas, coal is not coming back regardless of who is in charge.
What the Coal industry wants is even more federal handouts. We already give them a ton of money to keep going on the grouds that it's a transition economy and a bridge for the US economy. But the Coal Industry is really damn greedy as a whole.
Even with high profile failures like Solyndra, in general green energy runs at a fraction of the cost. This of course hurts workers, because the labor involved is less well compensated as part of that cost reduction. However, as far as I can tell we're already turning the corner to where (for _generation_, ignoring environmental costs), solar and wind already outperform coal on a cost basis.
People who want to preserve bulk coal generation do so for ideological reasons. From a more "green" perspective, there are more important things we should be doing with our coal and natural gas then burning them to heat water.
Fund the build out of solar production without worrying too much about profits. Not at a loss, just choose to fund factories that will build solar panels as an investment in the future rather than from a portfolio of competitive investments as an attempt to maximize profit.
Please don't kill information simply b/c you disagree with it; otherwise there can no dialogue and ycombinator becomes little more than a billboard for the current dominant political whim.
Is news.ycombinator.com a "real news source"? Should it be renamed to "notnews.ycombinator.com" or such?
Who decides what is and isn't a "real news source"?
Perhaps the judgement:
"breitbart.com is not a real news source."
is an example why so many people were astonished at the election results. After all, if you only talk to people who agree with you then you'll certainly be unaware of those who don't. And when there's a vote, you'll really be surprised!
I've seen this "is not a real news source" on both sides. From the right it's often cast as MSM or liberal media bias.
This attitude is destructive as it's making it so difficult for us to come to any agreement on what we accept as a trustworthy third-party. Where do we start to give people some benefit of the doubt? As it is, even "trust but verify" can appear impossible. I'm not advocating some "can't we all be friends" platitude. As a practical matter, how do we move forward from here?
Edit: minor wording changes to remove generalization and grammar improvement
While we can ask these interesting theoretical questions, we don't want to read all news from all sources. A little of it is real, serious, quality journalism; a bunch is middling; another large bunch is lies and propaganda; another bunch is bad for many other reasons.
There's no way to prove objectively which sources are better but we still have to make judgments. The judgment about Breitbart is not a difficult one.
Slate.com does not describe themselves as a news source, so apparently not. I've certainly never thought of them as informative.
I can't personally comment on Breitbart's content, but apparently a number of their employees quit earlier this year, believing that the site has lost its journalistic integrity since the death of Andrew Breitbart.
Your post got me searching: I found a Washington Post article with a nice analysis and a left-right scale of common news sources. Both slate and breitbart are outliers:
Some of those surprise me. I would have expected to see sources like NYT and NPR as more popular with the right than sources like MSNBC and Huffington Post.
edit: I suppose there might be a selection effect. The large networks are watched by everyone, and the smaller ones are sought out.
I can see you had another larger discussion around this, but I will also add one other thing.
This website has a higher bias towards both people interested in running a business (and the economic climate around it) and interested in disruptive businesses. We see many articles about Tesla, alterantive energy, energy research, and updates to gas and coal based technology.
As such, the article linked really won't fall on receptive ears. We've got a lot of other sources pointing out how very subsidized the coal industry is and we're all well aware that every time an industry risks losing subsidy it immediately performs a football flop to try and stop that, as it's really quite nice to have the taxpayer help bolster your bottom line.
In general, most Americans polled believe that alternative energy is in fact a good thing to pursue and we have evidence of other first world economies making it work and turning a profit while doing so. When we then put slick and popular corporate branding on alternative energy (Tesla's latest offering, but we could name others if you please) then it gets even more popular.
The denial of coal-based power as a harmful and inefficient industrial revolution technology is a minority opinion in the US, but it gets amplified by groups either losing employment or groups hoping to leverage the fact that people are losing employment.
That's why I think you got downvoted. I am ratelimited on this site, so I couldn't spend one of my few daily posts to respond to you yesterday. I apologize for the delay. But very few people here would go, "Oh, I see!" at that article, as it conflicts a lot of other diverse and less partisan sources that pass over this website daily.
The amount of political heat that the Obama administration took for, the amount of effort that they poured into, their new coal regulations makes me skeptical of your claim.
In fairness, quite often we see examples of "political heat" being driven by wilful ignorance and disingenuous outrage. In order to "score points" with the people who are watching them yell at their opponent. A politician might pretend their opponent has a position on something (A) and get very angry about that publicly, while knowing the whole while that actually the truth is (B) or sometimes they might even know that (A) was actually the only viable choice the whole time.
http://reason.com/blog/2016/10/11/natural-gas-ambush-killed-...
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Cheap-Natural-Gas-...