The Future of Coal Country

The Future of Coal Country(newyorker.com)

79 points by ptrptr 8 years ago | 93 comments

Shutting the mine could eliminate more than seven thousand jobs, in a county of thirty-seven thousand people. “Greene County will become a ghost town,” the neighbor wrote.

Isn't that the normal fate of towns built around resource extraction after the resource is economically exhausted? The American West is littered with ghost town remnants around depleted mines. It doesn't make much more sense to stay in a coal mining town in Someplace, Appalachia after the coal is gone than to stay in a silver mining town in Someplace, Colorado after the silver is gone.

I saw similar grievances from dying logging towns when I was growing up in the Pacific Northwest. The flashpoint was government action to protect the remnants of old growth forest that the endangered Spotted Owl lived in. The underlying problem was that loggers were exploiting old growth forest faster than it could regenerate. Deregulation wasn't going to make their way of life sustainable. You can't extract what isn't there any more.

If the residents of these coal-centered towns can find a way to reinvent the local economy to not depend on declining mines, that's great. I wish them luck with that. But most probably won't. We need to prepare to help people transition to other regions and other opportunities when the mines are no longer making money and the towns around them no longer prosper.

opportune 8 years ago | |

I'm originally from an area not in coal country, but right by it and heavily influenced by it. I couldn't agree with you more. Both my home state and the federal government are already essentially subsidizing these people to live in these communities simply because it's where they were born. There is no infrastructure for jobs because there are no industries other than coal and growing marijuana / making moonshine (although these are done on either an amateur level or highly consolidated).

I am normally a big fan of welfare and similar social services, but especially when they empower recipients to get back on their feet. There are plenty of communities in appalachia with sky-high unemployment and a huge percentage of their residents essentially draw SSI for most of their lives. They need to move, because they and their children will just draw welfare in perpetuity at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, there aren't a whole lot of ethical ways to get them to move. Forcing them to move is obviously a terrible idea. Making welfare/SSI contingent on moving could work, but will be absolutely terrible for those with all their wealth tied up in their house. It's a hard problem to solve, especially since a lot of these people are okay with / used to just making enough to get by.

philipkglass 8 years ago | | |

Making welfare/SSI contingent on moving could work, but will be absolutely terrible for those with all their wealth tied up in their house. It's a hard problem to solve, especially since a lot of these people are okay with / used to just making enough to get by.

Most of these people probably need to move if they've still working age. Maybe one way to reduce friction would be to have government buy out homes in economically distressed areas at the old valuation. Sure, that's "not fair" to people who faced similar dilemmas in the past and didn't get that sort of help. But I'd prefer that the government be inconsistently helpful over consistently unhelpful.

ticviking 8 years ago | | |

How is this different from the narratives of "welfare dependence" and "inter-generational poverty" advanced by republicans to advocate for deep cuts to urban welfare?

If there are more people in a city than it provides opportunity for it seems to me to be a similar cruelty to incentivize them to stay in one place because they have "roots" there or something equally vague.

anigbrowl 8 years ago | | |

Of course, there aren't a whole lot of ethical ways to get them to move

Offering people a chunk of money works quite well. If they're likely to be on welfare anyway why not offer them a few years' worth up front, to reflect the costs of their dislocation?

American society is very accounting-driven and wants everything itemized and explained, which seems awfully wasteful to me. It would be more efficient (for the state) and more dignified (for the recipient) to just offer to buy them out for (say) $25,000.

gozur88 8 years ago | | |

Usually what happens is people with extensive social networks and (now virtually worthless) property stay in the area, and their children leave for greener pastures. I have relatives in Western PA in a town that was built around oil and lumber. The oil and lumber are gone, and with them went all the jobs.

The people who live there now must be around 70 on average. At some point that town is just going to die and become unincorporated county land.

maxerickson 8 years ago | | |

If there are really no jobs and the prospects for new industries are poor, offer relief by purchasing the houses.

Then tear them down.

wmeredith 8 years ago | | |

Is there remote work these people could do using the internet?

phil248 8 years ago | |

Traditionally in this country, people readily migrated for job opportunities. Maybe that's just a fairy tale, though it happened more than once in my family and with plenty of people I know. Perhaps people in resource extraction and one-factory towns no longer want to migrate for opportunity. Or maybe that's never been a majority inclination to begin with.

scottLobster 8 years ago | | |

Not a fairy tale at all. In the 19th century De Tocqueville commented on how eager Americans were to sell land in pursuit of profit relative to Europeans at the time.

It seems that in the post-war era we settled on this notion that families should largely remain rooted and stable, and that became part of the modern "American Dream". I wonder if all of that is just a long-term backlash against the forced migrations of the Great Depression, made possible by the economic golden age we were going through at the time.

For my part I'm putting off buying a house precisely because it'll decrease my mobility.

philipkglass 8 years ago | | |

My parents relocated cities 4 times before retirement to pursue job opportunities. Out of my 9 aunts and uncles, only one worked all their life in the same town where they grew up. I've lived in three different counties in my adult life. The loss of social ties was hard when we moved during my childhood; I can understand why families would prefer to stay put. But I think that long-term unemployment or underemployment would be even harder on people.

maxxxxx 8 years ago | | |

When I grew up in Germany there was this stereotype that Americans move around a lot for jobs. Industry leaders often put this up as an example for Germans who at that time didn't want to move that much.

So I think there is something to this. Moving around probably got much harder due to rising real estate prices.

WalterBright 8 years ago | | |

It's not a fairy tale. California became a populous state due to the gold rush.

acchow 8 years ago | | |

Any studies on how effective it would be for the government to subsidize moves?

pasbesoin 8 years ago | |

Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There's still copper. It just couldn't compete with the open pit mines, overseas, etc., at subsequently depressed prices.

Now that copper prices have risen, in recent years (not sure about at the moment), there's been intermittent talk of starting some of the UP mining back up.

Probably won't happen -- my guess. Too much investment, given current global volatility. And the relevant people are largely gone.

More recently, foreign paper products production has been inflicting a further hit. The local town near where I stay lost its paper mill (for paperboard products) a few years ago. As one example.

LeifCarrotson 8 years ago | | |

Lower peninsula too, though for a slightly different reason: Detroit, Flint, etc. have become ghost towns as automotive manufacturing has moved out and automated.

It's not a natural resource, but if an industry moves then it, too, leaves people behind. And when it's a ghost city not a ghost town, it can take a long time to realize the money is gone, and it can leave a lot of people in the lurch.

nemo44x 8 years ago | |

Don't forget those logging towns in the Pacific Northwest were able to luckily benefit from global trade expansion. Many of those cities became port towns creating a lot of opportunity and wealth where many other places suffered. Factor in they haven't had to deal with the USA's past like places in the Midwest and Appalachia. They're living high on the hog today by simple luck.

You don't just reinvent the economy and deal with the baggage of your past (due to ancestors and norms of the time but have effects today) overnight. I mean, what can they do? They won't fall into the lap of becoming a port town with extreme growth due to the proliferation of global trade.

yourapostasy 8 years ago | |

Article covering interesting re-purposing of old mines [1].

If you believe in extinction-level global climate change, then another possibility is raised: use the mines as the starting point of new Civil Defense shelters. Except instead of built against nuclear fallout, they are for housing the tens of millions we hope survive and make it to them when our species' inaction enables extreme consequences of catastrophic weather changes. This puts the entire local economies back to work at underground construction, renewing and reinforcing the mines to much higher civil engineering standards, and building them out with dormitories, underground farms, cisterns, etc., for long-term stays. These would be multi-decade projects, and gives us a chance to offer the jobs with strings attached to gradually move out all but a skeleton crew as the build-outs gradually taper off. At best, a massive infrastructure project to re-establish our Civil Defense, that we re-purpose in a few decades as underground business parks and cheap residences. At worst, we actually need to use them if climate change causes mass crop failures or the like.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/22/striking-paydirt-innovative-n...

francisofascii 8 years ago | |

Right. For people in Greene county, the obvious answer is transitioning to Pittsburgh, which is only 60 miles away, doing decent economically and still affordable.

cmurf 8 years ago | |

I think it comes down to how we're educated in a very monolithic way still, with the idea of "a job" and "a career" and "a path". It's very much like all eggs in one basket, no diversification investing to me.

Students need to learn basic things, but that includes what is diversification, adaptation, how to learn, how to self-learn, and continuously integrate.

Because they don't learn this, there's a coal worker that only understands that task, and thinks it's tragic and someone's fault when it goes away. "I can't do anything else. Coal is all I know." And then they lobby and vote to protect specific job tasks, rather than some sense of a right to earn a living by contributing to society. Nope - it's all about 'the job'.

Imagine if more specialized jobs were suddenly easily automated, like say accounting. Uh ok that's a lot of people displaced from a job, 1.3 million in accounting an auditing. If even 25% were obsolete that's more than all of coal.

prawn 8 years ago | |

How much would these people lose out? Let's say they bought property there during a boom, and now face having to give it up at a huge discount (if they're even able to sell), before buying in a more expensive regional centre or big city.

With time, the situation only gets worse - their property price is driven down as the demand drops, they can't justify renovating, house falls into disrepair, etc.

If the settlements are disparate, rail links would be too expensive, and are there enough remote jobs that people in these situations could be trained for?

acchow 8 years ago | |

How do other countries deal with this? Or do they have the same problem of local communities extracting federal subsidies for their unsustainable, selfish, local desires?

clock_tower 8 years ago | | |

The latter, at least in Norway -- small settlements propped up by government spending.

http://www.idlewords.com/2010/07/mission_burfjord.htm

Search for "The social center of Burfjord" and read that paragraph and the next. Something like this might be necessary if the US government wants to keep Appalachia populated; I genuinely don't know if I'd support that goal or be indifferent to it.

hannob 8 years ago | | |

I know the situation in east Germany a bit. The "solution" is complete denial.

The discussions I observed happen in a way that I can hardly describe otherwise than that coal is some kind of replacement religion for those areas. For a long time (and for some even today) talking about anything beyond coal was considered some form of heresy. By now denial gets increasingly hard, because except one minor expansion all plans for further mines have been cancelled.

maxxxxx 8 years ago | | |

They do. But other countries are often not as concentrated as the US is becoming.

jdmichal 8 years ago |

So, when I look at what Norway has done with its oil money, I wonder what prevented communities like these from doing the same thing. Removal of the coal from the ground generated excess value, otherwise the mines would have lost money and been closed already. Where did this excess value actually flow? Did the community actually capture enough of the value flow to change its fate? Or did it only capture enough to survive, and now since that value flow is ending so does its survival?

mmanfrin 8 years ago | |

That excess value was captured by a select few, rather than by the government (as in Norway).

digi_owl 8 years ago | | |

And Norway was basically warned about the problem by an Iraqi that had experienced it once before.

Not that the oil fund is perfect. Using it can drive the currency haywire.

woodandsteel 8 years ago |

Trump says he is going to bring back coal as a part of his program to make America great again.

But the reason America was so great is that it was at the leading edge of technological change. That is relevant because in the 19th century, coal was the hot new technology. It was used for powering factory machines, electric generators, railroads and steam boats, heating, and producing steel.

But technology continued to advance, and coal has gradually been replaced. It survives today only for steel production and part of electric generation, and even there it is being replaced by gas and renewables.

So when Trump wants to revive coal, he is going backwards technologically, and that would mean losing out in the global economy, too.

Any Trump defenders want to disagree?