Above is a plot from the following website. It shows the job losses among coal miners in the thousands since 1948 in West Virgina. In 1948, it appears that there were ~130,000 miners employed in the state. This number dropped precipitately in throughout the 1950s, leveling off at a little over 40,000 in the 1960s. The number increased in the 70s, seeing its most significant, but volatile growth in the mid- to late-part of the decade. The 1980s came and the gains in employment in the mines were quickly lost. However, the number of coal miners in WV continued to drop through the 80s and 90s. The numbers would level off somewhere below the 20,000 mark around 2000. There was a general increase in jobs from 2002-2012. This likely reflects a 10% increase from 20,000 to 22,000.
I grew up in WV throughout the 70s, 80s, and the first half of the 90s. During this period of time, we lost 50% of our coal miners. 50%!!! I’ve searched (and searched) the web for instances of the West Virginia Coal Association fighting to keep coal miners from losing their jobs during this time period, but found absolutely zero examples. When the southern coalfields were hemorrhaging coal mining jobs, the WV Coal Association appears to have been quiet on the matter. They did not declare the existence of a “war on coal” or that those responsible for the devastating job losses should in some way be held accountable. They didn’t blame government regulations or elected officials. They quietly let it happen with no resistance. Why? Because the WV Coal Association and now the Friends of Coal are industry groups that represent the coal companies, not the miners. During the time frame mentioned above, coal production was on the rise. Mechanization, which the United Mine Workers Association had tried to prevent or at least manage its implementation, was replacing miners in droves, while increasing the productivity of individual miners several times over.
Today, the coal industry senses a threat to their bottom line. All of the easy to reach coal (read as “cheap to extract”) is gone in the southern coalfields. Combine that with competition from the boom in natural gas, and the coal industry and mine owners in southern WV find themselves in a difficult position. A difficult position mainly driven my market conditions and not necessarily over regulation and environmental protection. However, we must realize that any regulation affects the bottom line of the coal business. Of course, it would be cheaper to produce coal from a mine that had no safety regulations or had to abide by some environmental protections. The industry sees an opportunity to push back against these regulations as a step towards making it cheaper to extract coal and thus making coal more competitive with the natural gas. It is a clever way of trying to extend the life of the industry and make it feasible to go after the harder to reach and often thinner coal seams. In other words, they are fighting against environmental and safety regulations, not to save mining jobs, but to serve their own interests by making coal extraction in WV as profitable as possible until all of the reasonably attainable coal has been mined.
So, this current situation is vastly different than the one the industry faced in the previous decades when cutting thousands of miners jobs positively impacted their bottom line. This is not about miners and their jobs, its about the industry extracting every dollar of profit from southern WV. Profit that is unfairly taken through the exploitation of the miners, the infrastructure, and the environment in places like McDowell, Wyoming, and Boone counties.
I am hoping to make obvious to everyone that the industry’s public relations machine is disguising their desire for continued profit off the backs of the hardworking miners and those that live in the coalfields as “concern for miners, their livelihoods, and their families.” However, history tells us that they don’t really care about keeping miners employed, saying so now only serves their own purposes and self interest.
Let’s not lose sight that if they are successful, this will come at a huge cost. Much of that cost will be borne by the people they are pretending to care about. A decrease in safety regulations will lead to more deaths on the job and higher incidences of black lung. Continued pollution of the local environment will not only affect the health of families of miners, but the rest of the population in the coalfields. Buying in to the rhetoric of the WV Coal Association and the CEOs of companies like Murray Energy will only further undermine the future for everyone in southern WV.
As far as the Supreme Court ruling on mercury emission from coal-fired power plants goes, let’s keep in mind that we are talking about mercury! None of the news coverage that I have heard has even mentioned how toxic mercury is and that we are already in a situation where pregnant women are advised not to eat fish because of a serious risk of birth defects. How can we celebrate the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing us to continue to poison our air and streams at an astonishing rate? I cannot wrap my head around that.
The Hillbilly Astrophysicist 