The Rutland Herald (Vt.), Aug. 8: Travelers in the Midwest are often astonished at the sight of train after train lined up with hopper after hopper of coal. Vermonters are not generally confronted with the massive scale of America’s industrial infrastructure and the energy required to keep it going. Much of that energy, especially for the generation of electricity, comes from America’s abundant coal deposits.
And yet the coal industry in America is reeling. According to a report in The New York Times, the fourth-largest coal company declared bankruptcy earlier this week. Other large companies filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, and the price of the stock for one of the largest remaining companies, Peabody Energy, has fallen from $16 a share to 99 cents.
One of the main reasons is that coal prices have fallen about 70 percent in the last four years. Coal is not worth enough to make mining it a winning proposition. One consequence is that the number of coal miners has fallen about 10 percent this year; there are now only about 80,000.
The main reason for the falling prices is the abundance of natural gas, which is the result of the fracking revolution. Natural gas is cheaper and produces about half the carbon emissions that coal does.
Politicians from coal country, such as Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, blame the problems of the coal industry on President Barack Obama’s “war on coal.” But as the Times report suggests, it is the working of the capitalist economy that is doing in the coal industry. Natural gas is more plentiful and cheaper than coal, and consumers are making the decision you would expect them to make.
Also, the reality of climate change is affecting the marketplace, as it should. It turns out there are more than twice the number of workers in the burgeoning solar energy industry than there are coal miners.
A certain nostalgia about our industrial past clouds our vision of the present and future. We remember the day when our great industrial cities were steel makers for the world, and vast armies of workers filled factories, smelters, mills and coal mines. Old industry probably reached its zenith in the 1950s, when unions were strong and factory and mining jobs provided a middle-class income for millions of Americans.
But what has mining done for West Virginia? Coal mining is an exploitative, extractive industry that has left West Virginia and Kentucky among the poorest states. Some workers have well-paying jobs, but their number is dwindling. The industry, meanwhile, has invented new methods of environmental despoliation. Mountaintop removal is a travesty that never would have happened if the political will had existed to stop it.
In fact, a new energy era is dawning. Vermont is a small corner of the nation, but it is pioneering ways to produce and consume energy that do not depend on massive central power plants fueled by coal or natural gas. We can’t afford to continue that model of energy production. The coal that exists in the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky is best left where it is, unburned. If we burn it, we burn up the future. The same goes for the oil beneath the Arctic Ocean.
There is economic dislocation and poverty in coal country as people figure out what comes after the demise of a dying industry. These changes occur in a capitalist nation. Rust belt cities – Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Buffalo – have had to reinvent themselves. The fate of 80,000 coal miners must not hold American energy policy hostage. (About that many workers in journalism and publishing lost their jobs during the Great Recession. America survives.)
Obama’s new regulations on power plants and carbon emissions will put further pressure on the coal industry, but the real significance of those regulations is that the true cost of coal is being taken into account. The coal industry is no longer being allowed to dump its pollutants into the atmosphere for free. It’s about time.
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