Comment by walthamstow
Comment by walthamstow 4 hours ago
I read recently that there are more people working as yoga teachers in the USA than are employed in the coal industry as a whole.
Comment by walthamstow 4 hours ago
I read recently that there are more people working as yoga teachers in the USA than are employed in the coal industry as a whole.
I mean, assuming it's true, the obvious conclusion would be that there should be reasonable limits on what is done to save such a small industry. Looks like there are 40-45k people employed in coal mining in the US, depending on who you ask. _Even if there was no downside to keeping it going_, that would probably only be worth modest government action to keep it on life support; it's simply not a big industry.
I mean, it's definitely caught up with climate change denial, but a lot of the _justification_ for supporting what is increasingly an economically unviable industry is jobs.
(It wasn't even solar or wind or nuclear that killed coal. Really, it was _gas_; the writing was on the wall for the industry some time ago.)
Which politician is campaigning to save school shooter jobs?
When entire industries are automated, and one CEO can mine and sell millions of tons just by clicking buttons on a computer, it raises the question what incentive governments have to protect that industry.
There is no longer the "voters don't want to lose their jobs" argument. Now it becomes purely a "these guys pay lots of taxes" argument - but with most big companies being very efficient at tax planning, a huge mine might pay next to no taxes too. Then it becomes politically far easier to ignore them, and eventually maybe shut them down on a whim, eg. to appease green voters.
There is no such logic going on in the political calculus. It’s a fallacious call to a past where an uneducated man could get a good job in the mines, and by fallacious implication the entire ecosystem of work for uneducated men, that existed 50 years ago and does not now. It’s a symbol of something lost to “liberal” political ideology - something people who have never worked in a mine but also feel disenfranchised can get behind. There is no real belief coal is coming back into style, no one anywhere wants a coal plant operating near them and even if we built more, no one else on earth would buy our excess coal. It’s a canard and a red herring to distract disenfranchised under employed under educated and under skilled Americans, just like the anti-immigrant agenda, and all the other fallacies the modern conservative movement is built around. The goal isn’t to solve a single actual structural problem - it’s to appeal emotionally with things that sound like they could solve problems, despite the fact they wouldn’t if implemented and would make many other things worse.
There was once a time the conservative movement was built on pragmatic rationalism, and people keep looking for it in modern rhetoric. But it’s become built on fallacious populism recently as a short term way to grab power, then overwhelm the system to “rig” it towards their favored people. It’s not about conservatives or liberals, ideology or political goals are the foil. The goal is the appropriation of power and the blocking of democratic change in favor of cronyism.
So there’s no point in trying to find a rational explanation for the policy. There is none in the policy itself. It only exists to garner enough votes to do what’s happening in real time with the goal that with enough shenanigans voting won’t matter next time.
Searching online, it seems to be comparing to coal miners specifically, not the industry as a whole. In any case, what conclusions are you drawing from this?