After 4 Years Of Shitstain's Lies & Photo-Ops, Coal Jobs Down 5,000 To Half Of BHO's First-Term #s
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“We are still feeling the effects of the damage from the Obama administration,” said Jason Bostic, vice-president of the West Virginia Coal Association. “The social devastation in mining communities has been breathtaking. The support for Donald Trump is as strong if not stronger than in 2016. West Virginia is a Democratic state that has been dyed deep red because of the last administration.” But while Appalachia will largely stick with Trump in 2020, more coal capacity has been retired under Trump than during Obama’s second term. “Coal’s not back,” as Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, glumly conceded last year. “Nobody saved the coal industry.”
Coal production fell so sharply last year that renewable energy such as solar and wind overtook it in electricity generation for the first time since at least 1885, the year Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, America’s first skyscraper was erected in Chicago and people were burning more wood than coal. Last year also saw Murray Energy file for bankruptcy, one of half a dozen coal companies to do so that year.
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There are about 45,000 coalminers left in the US, half the number employed during Obama’s first term. Plenty of political rhetoric surrounds a workforce that is actually quite small – there are double the number of flight attendants in the US than coalminers, for example, and roughly the same number of chiropractors. Whole communities sprang up around mining, however, meaning several dependent jobs are lost for each miner put out of work. The long decline of well-paying mining jobs, through machinery automation and now creeping obsolescence, has left deep scars in Appalachian towns now blighted by unemployment and opioid addiction.
“People drank Trump’s Kool-Aid and he hasn’t done it for them,” said Blair Zimmerman, a former coalminer who is now commissioner of Greene county, Pennsylvania. “I’m very worried about the future because without mining, our tax base would go and we couldn’t survive. People are leaving the area, it’s tough. We should have looked at other options a long time ago.” Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has outlined a $2tn plan to generate millions of jobs in renewable energy, potentially providing a new path for threatened coal workers. But coalmining has deep roots in communities that many are unwilling to relinquish. “It’s a damned joke,” said Bostic, of the West Virginia Coal Association. “It’s an affront to a coalminer to say: ‘We will take your job away for one that pays less well, and by the way, you have to pack your family up and move.’”
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/24/donald-trump-coal-miners-us-election
