So, this article showed up... " Logan Officials Message to Clinton Campaign: After the Clinton campaign staff attempted to use the City of Logan Fire Department facilities for the Clinton upcoming visitations to the area, fire department officials contacted the Mayor of L... " yada, yada. Hillary and the horrible Obama are "killing" coal.
Whether you like or agree with or dislike and disagree with Hillary Clinton, a little truth-telling is in order. Yes, Ms. Clinton did say "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." But, context matters; the context in this case matters a lot. Ms. Clinton wasn't saying that she or her administration would put the companies out of business but that economics, chemistry and physics would put them out of business.
Something else is killing coal jobs and it isn't the EPA, it's the coal operators themselves. The number of coal jobs in West Virginia and Appalachia was cratering long before any imagined war on coal was declared in the halls of the EPA. Whether from greed or hard-edged business decisions, coal operators decided that employing people as they had in Coal's golden years, is not a good investment. Why should they employ shifts when a couple of men with a humongous Caterpillar can produce as much coal by slicing off the top of a mountain and scooping out the contents?
And if you are betting on "clean coal" to bring back to good old days, bet again. The cost of "cleaning" coal in order to reduce harmful emissions will have to be paid for somehow. It will either happen by raising the price of coal, which makes coal more expensive and less attractive than alternatives like natural gas. Or, savings will be achieved by cutting labor costs, which means that workers will increasingly be replaced by equipment, pay will be cut further and conditions will worsen (these last two due to the neutering of the UMW).
Companies like Peabody and Massey have been screwing West Virginia miners for decades and when the miners pushed back the companies sent in the head-breakers, whether they were Baldwin-Felts "detectives," Pinkertons, or the West Virginia National Guard and the Army Air Corps. Today they send squadrons of lawyers but the effect is the same.
What no one seems to have a stomach for is telling the truth. Those jobs are going and there isn't a thing we can do about it. Coal isn't as efficient a source of power as gas or nuclear or -- increasingly -- renewables. So the pressure is on to phase it out. Coal is no longer West Virginia's number one industry, having been replaced by tourism decades ago. But in an effort to wring the last quarter's worth of profit out of coal, the operators have switched to mountain-top removal, which is directly impacting tourism and further killing the goose that is trying to lay a golden egg.
Companies like Peabody could act like good citizens and explore opportunities to build new industries here in West Virginia, whose people have made their owners, managers and stockholders unbelievably wealthy. Instead they spun off a a subsidiary called Patriot Coal, sold it the pensions that miners had invested their futures in and then declared Patriot bankrupt.
Politicians in places like Logan County and in the State Capitol have done the bidding of Peabody, Massey and others for too many years. Their cozy world is collapsing as coal fizzles and now it's Hillary's, or Obama's or the EPA's fault. Look in the mirror boys, and look behind you because justice will -- eventually -- catch up.
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