‘Massive’ environmental damage? Since this was a new rule, how do you know that? If you assume every environmental regulation prevents widespread ecological devastation, you can justify anything. What if what it was preventing is just a slight increase in pollutant levels in a few small streams? What’s your threshold for cost-benefit when it comes to trading environmental damage for economic activity?
Unshackle business, shackle people. The Republican mantra.
Black lung will kill you, but being unemployed and not having money for food and shelter will kill you quicker. There aren’t a lot of jobs up in coal country. You either work for the mines or something that services the mines or the miners, or you don’t work.
The Democrats will retrain them to become Bitcoin Miners !
The Democrats have a plan for that too: The guaranteed national income. Turning people in vast swathes of the country into government dependents after regulating away their jobs and lifestyles. Because fairness.
That’s just a smokescreen for the Democrats’ plan to round up white Christians into camps and brainwash them, and execute the ones who resist. :rolleyes:
I think the reality is that it’s going to suck for those in Appalachia either way. I think this is all stupid but those people voted for it so let them have it. Isn’t that what a democracy is about? I know that there is a chance that they blow it environment wise down there, and I as a tax payer in Oregon will have to foot the bill to clean it up. But at some point people are going to understand that you only have one environment, and even if it’s way more fucked up than right now, I just feel it’s going to be way easier to start to fix it with the people that actually live there being on board with the plan. There are two ways to learn. Let’s try the hard way so the environmentalists don’t keep sounding like Chicken Little to the Trump voters. I don’t think these people are truly “fuck the planet.” The scientists have done shitty PR.
The number of actual jobs lost is controversial as the government estimated several hundred and the National Mining Association estimated tens of thousands. As mining jobs get more scarce in these impoverished communities the ones left become more valuable. So people in those states are more concerned about job lost then those in more prosperous states.
What is happening is that on top of that uncertainty, unless we artificially increase the cost of natural gas, most of those jobs will not come back.
IMHO all this is really a powerful argument for a Guaranteed Basic Income.
I agree that those jobs are leaving and not coming back for the most part but I can also understand the difference emotionally between losing a job because the industry is no longer competitive and losing one because the government you pay taxes to has decided your job is no longer important.
Is that what happened? The govt just up and one day decided that their jobs were no longer important?
It had nothing at all to do with automation, where the company they worked for decided that their jobs were not important, it had nothing to do with black lung, where the company they work for decided their lives were not important, it had nothing to do with a change from underground mining to surface mining, because the company that these people worked for decided that neither their jobs, not mountains were important.
I really don’t see how you even get close to that statement.
Let us not pretend that they’re not going to be government dependents either way. It’s just the current method is to break their bodies first and then put them on very expensive medical care and disability while destroying the environment. My preference is finding some other way for people to earn money & provide for their families. But if that’s not possible and we’re going to be paying either way, I’d rather skip that middle, highly destructive, wasteful step.
When the government propagated this rule it had to do cost benefit analysis. It found that the jobs lost are not worth the benefits to the environment. I would expect those who make their living mining coal would feel differently.
Yeah…all those damn liberals like the Libertarian Charles Murray and notorious liberal weenie Milton Friedman.
Freaking hippies. Damn conservatives trying to give free money to layabouts!
Been over this a few times, and the jobs lost range from 300 to 75,000.
The smart money is on the 300 possible jobs lost.
So, do you feel that when thousands of jobs are lost because the company that the coal workers work for made a cost analysis that said that they could make more money if they fired a bunch of their employees, they should maintain their loyalty to the coal industry?
(Emphasis added.) Or you move away from coal country to where there are jobs. :smack: When jobs appear in a new area – the oil jobs in North Dakota, for instance – people move there in droves. But somehow when jobs disappear, moving is not an option?!
People can and do. The population of West Virginia, for instance, has been steadily shrinking. But moving is, for lack of a better word, hard, especially when you don’t have savings, education, or disposable income, and are dependent on friends and neighbors for economic and social support. See for instance, this New Republic article Why the Poor get Trapped in Depressed Areas
But aren’t the Republicans the ones who always say, ‘Well, just get a better job! Just move to where the better jobs are!’?
Well, now there seems Democratic-Republican consensus !
What’s your point? Republicans say a lot of dumb things.