Thread by @emilygrubert

Alright friendos. I'm procrastinating and my heart is hurting for the Gillette area folks who found out their coal mines closed and they're out of work (gillettenewsrecord.com/news/local/art…) so I am embarking on:

A Thread

About Why Caring Disproportionately About Coal Jobs Makes Sense

So here's the reality of it. The Powder River Basin in Wyoming (where the shutdowns are) has <6k coal miners (probably <5k now).

eia.gov/coal/data/brow…

The US as a whole has like 50k coal miners.

For my earth scientists: that's like 2 @theAGU fall meetings.

There are almost 100 football stadiums that could fit all the coal miners, and about 780 US towns with a population that big.

Point being: coal jobs are a rounding error, numerically.

(Yes, more people work in the industry overall...but you'd probably be shocked at how few people it takes to run a power plant).

So: if
1) We're not talking about *that* many people and
2) It is almost certainly a net very positive outcome to shut down fossil fuel infrastructure...

Why is it such a Thing when coal miners lose their jobs?

I'd submit a couple of explanations.

1) The US has a particular relationship with coal mining that is very personal and somewhat historically fraught with feelings of betrayal. (Want to hear more? Check this out, with @Mark_A_H:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…)

2) The coal industry is super concentrated in particular places. The number of miners might be small, but they are often financially holding up their communities. In plenty of mining communities, there's not a lot else that pays well and lets you stay.

3) We know from experience that coal miners tend to get very hosed by their former employers when they lose their jobs. It's a pretty long term pattern that mining cos will spin off units or break up and re-form in ways that eliminate pensions, health care, etc.

But more generally: Coal miners are kind of the canaries in the coal mine, so to speak -- the situation is not that different in lots of other industrial settings. Most specifically: the overall fossil fuel industry is much bigger than coal mining.

As fossil departs our energy system, we'll probably see more of these patterns around oil, gas, power plants, refineries, etc.

E.g: using natural gas the way we do now will be basically illegal in California by 2045. But people are still talking about PG&E selling its gas assets. Who would buy those?

Are those the people likely to be super honorable about workers' futures? Environmental liabilities?

So if you want to see fossil infrastructure shut down asap, esp. for environmental reasons: here is why you should care about the fate of, realistically, a tiny number of coal mining jobs.

1) This is much bigger than coal mining and

2) Companies bankrupting their way out of worker commitments are *probably doing the same thing with environmental commitments*

Carbon is important. But tons of these sites have a whoooooole lot else going on. If the company disappears, this becomes a socialized externality.

So: yes, job losses are hard to watch at an individual level. But these issues aren't one-offs that go away after 50k people lose their jobs.

Coal mine shutdowns are a harbinger of how future fossil legacy issues might be handled--both for workers and the environment.

It's a tiny-to-small number of people at the end of the day, and those jobs do need to stop existing at some point. But *how* that transition gets handled is, at a very fundamental level, a huge deal that is lurking behind the "shut it down" conversation.

We need to plan.