It's easy to claim coal miners could transition to another mining industry, but what mining industry in those regions could absorb that many miners? None I think. It's not as though a secession of coal mining would create a boom in other mining industries.
> We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2].
Maybe if they were offered that deal for real, they'd take it. But without such a deal, can you really blame those workers for not wanting their careers erased in America of all places? Their families would become destitute and there would be little sympathy for them. Instead of a buyout, they'd receive little but 'learn to code' jeers. They'd be told they're expected to move away from the communities they've live in for generations, leave their families behind and scatter with the winds. I know this doesn't seem like a big deal to a forum full of rootless cosmopolitan tech workers who often live thousands of miles away from where they came from, myself included, but people don't often wish this sort of radical uncertainty and instability on themselves and their own families. So of course they elect politicians who advocate for their interests. If you think this is about politicians duping coal workers, you've got it backwards. The tail doesn't wag the dog.
I don't think this is about politicians duping coal workers, no. And that $1M bonus idea is just a comparison of scale. It's a comparatively tiny industry, which is extremely harmful to the environment and its workers. There are certainly coal-mining towns that exist solely because of what's in the ground, and of course you can't just dig up something else there.
I'm not a "rootless cosmopolitan tech worker," I'm one of the only cousins in my family who isn't blue-collar or in deep poverty. I don't expect this to be painless, but we need to get off of coal for the good of the species.
I don't think the coal workers are being duped. I know that they're in a really tough spot. I think that the coal (and more generally fossil-fuel) executives are lobbying politicians hard, with complete disregard for the long-term impact that we've known very clearly for _decades_ now. Follow the money: politicians and executives are raking it in, and the small population of front-line workers' lives depend on it. Blame the politicians, blame the executives, who make their decisions for personal benefit at great cost to humanity.
Quitting tobacco, as a person, is hard in part because of withdrawal symptoms. The analog for quitting coal, as a nation, is that an industry needs to die. We need good policies to take care of the people whose jobs are impacted, but we techies are in large part responsible for automating away entire industries -- way more than 40k jobs -- and who's there to take care of _those_ workers?
We could simply give the coal workers a sort of "pension".
40k people at $60k a year is $2.4 billion/year, which is a tiny fraction of the annual $4.8 trillion federal budget. You can structure parts of this in different ways outside of a blanket cheque, such as ways to incentivize starting businesses, credits for free education, or whatnot. It's still a lot of money, but the benefits are probably worth it, IMO. If $24 billion/year in student loan forgiveness is possible then I don't see why this isn't.
Politically it's a non-starter so I don't expect anything like this will happen. The GOP seems more concerned with simplistic "culture war" chest-beating and the Dems don't seem overly concerned with the plight of the working class and have their own style of simplistic culture war chest-beating (albeit less egregious).
> We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2].
Maybe if they were offered that deal for real, they'd take it. But without such a deal, can you really blame those workers for not wanting their careers erased in America of all places? Their families would become destitute and there would be little sympathy for them. Instead of a buyout, they'd receive little but 'learn to code' jeers. They'd be told they're expected to move away from the communities they've live in for generations, leave their families behind and scatter with the winds. I know this doesn't seem like a big deal to a forum full of rootless cosmopolitan tech workers who often live thousands of miles away from where they came from, myself included, but people don't often wish this sort of radical uncertainty and instability on themselves and their own families. So of course they elect politicians who advocate for their interests. If you think this is about politicians duping coal workers, you've got it backwards. The tail doesn't wag the dog.