A False Choice: Either Jobs or Clean Water, Air, and Healthy Forests

Robert F. Kennedy presents a strong case that King Coal is by and large criminal given the massive amounts of regulatory violations and thus damage to local water, air, and geologic resources it wrecks. To this all one must add coal mining concerns’ repeated and ongoing attempts to mislead and falsely report low to no violations of numerous federal and state laws.

As usual several commenters complain about loss of jobs caused by efforts to restrict and ultimately ban strip-mining. Oh, and subsidies for renewable energy are bad. These arguments are nothing more than a bunch of hot, soot-filled air.

Most mining has been automated over the last decade or so — by the coal mining concerns (which receive tax subsidies and other benefits themselves). So we’re talking about very few jobs — that King Coal would happily eliminate if it could. They should be required to pay for re-eduction/re-location for miners as opposed to plying the line that its a choice between jobs and clean water, air, and intact forests. Its not, at all.

As Paul Krugman wrote the war on coal mining jobs was fought by the mining firms themselves:

“There used to be a lot of coal miners, but not any more — strip mines and machinery in general have allowed us to produce more coal with very few miners. Basically, it’s a job that was destroyed by technology long ago, with only a relative handful of workers — 0.06 percent of the US work force — still engaged in mining.”

Here is the key graph in the Paul Krugman post cited above: