re: #97 iossarian

This may be true in some sense but left-wing parties and people need to find a way around it. You couldn’t just write off the inner-city black population as only having poverty and crack ahead of them, and we shouldn’t do it for rural low-income whites either.

I posted about this last week. The energy markets have decided that coal is going the way of whale oil. There is no going back to coal, and the jobs created by the coal industry aren’t going to ever return. That’s the market forces at work. This has little to do with the environmental costs (though they play some role). The reality is that natural gas is the reason coal is on the decline. Natural gas is in oversupply due to fracking, and the power producers know natural gas is easier to deal with - transport is via pipeline, and the gas turbines are easier to spin up or shut down to match power demand. You can locate gas powered electric generating facilities in smaller locations closer to where the demand is. Coal powered facilities need more land, mostly to store the coal on site, and need more environmental emissions control, adding to those costs.

What does this mean for those communities that have coal and little else? I suggested following the steel industry model in Pittsburgh, where they transitioned to medicine and tech, but the coal towns aren’t dense enough w/the demographics to make that work easily. You could turn those towns into satellites for Pittsburgh tech/med, but that’d require new education/tech opportunities (which could take advantage of the lower costs of living and help lessen the sting of the lost jobs).