It's clear that no one should be working in a mine without at minimum an N95 mask and probably a PAPR (powered air purifying respirator). I wonder if there is any reason at all, other than preserving corporate profit margins, that the coal industry has failed to adopt simple and well understood industrial hygiene practices.
That's a good point -- why aren't mining companies buying PAPRs for their workers? PAPRs are designed for difficult conditions like hot and damp, and at least in my experience, the constant flow of air over your face cools you down and is a lot more comfortable than a traditional respirator. Mining is a relatively well paid profession. Yes, PAPRs are expensive ($1,500), and depending on how often they need to be changed, the cost of filters can quickly add up, but even for a heartless corporation, wouldn't it make monetary sense to invest a few $1,000 a year per worker to keep your most experienced employees, avoid lawsuits, etc.?
PAPRs also suck to wear. I agree it makes sense to force the issue given the obvious benefit of not being unable to breath at 40, but a short sighted view along with tough guy attitude can go against common sense without robust regulation. I had to wear those in nuclear environments and they limit vision significantly and beep constantly if you bend over and choke the hose at all.
> I had to wear those in nuclear environments and they limit vision significantly and beep constantly if you bend over and choke the hose at all.
These current-day issues and other considerations like them appear, at least to my layman's eye, to be solvable problems.
Now, whether or not they are morally/economically feasible, trivial vs. non-trivial to introduce solutions for, and if they align with both the users' and the companies' producing the units needs are the major challenges.
Surely it's cheaper to provide this kind of protection (I assumed it would be OSHA-mandated honestly) than it is to pay for the healthcare and/or lawsuits that follow?
I admittedly haven't read the article yet, but it's surprising to me that black lung / industrial air quality isn't something that OSHA (or similar) is tasked with ensuring ample worker protections for.
>In the past 30 years, the biggest coal seams were mined out in Appalachia, leaving thinner seams coursing through sandstone.
...
>And because there's no coal, it is considered development mining or construction. So sampling the air for toxic dust is not required, even though it is the most dangerous dust. Former MSHA officials told us some inspectors did it, but most did not.
Hopefully the lawsuits cost them. However the folks that make these decisions never see the consequences; they've taken their bonuses and gone by now.
Furthermore the mine doesn't pay for medicare. We all do.
However the folks that make these decisions never see the consequences; they've taken their bonuses and gone by now.
It's worse than that. There might not be a company left when these guys start needing health care in a big way. (Or the mine's environmental impact is starting to be felt, or whatever)
That's normal: a mine can be structured as a dividend paying company (with one big asset) that gradually becomes less and less valuable until it's worthless at the end. If the company goes bankrupt at that point, no big deal, it's already paid what it was meant to pay for its investors. And yes, management.
In NZ employers with higher risk pay more to the medical pool. Accidents outside work are paid for from common pool. Chronic diseases from unhealthy lifestyle (or bad luck) are not compensated.
The time-lag for the health problems to appear allows current management to take the risk and extract extra profit (and bonuses). That the company may be liable for health care costs of employees or is sued after current management have moved on or retired is an externality for them personally.
Presumably if the coal industry has regulatory capture then the rules are written to allow for easily exploitable loopholes. Not to mention many people simply can't afford a lawyer or have no way of getting to one.
So a lawsuit becomes simply an expected cost of doing business, like how some software companies treat data leaks.
"Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Indeed, and to clarify "clean coal" isn't referring to cleaning the coal, it is referring to increased effort put into trying to reduce released pollutants when using the coal.
There was a hilarious quote from a while back where a politician referred to train loads of "cleaned coal" heading out of Montana which created a misunderstanding about what clean coal technologies are trying to do. There is no "cleaned coal".
(Aside, I believe calling those technologies "clean coal" is quite hyperbolic, but that is a separate issue)
Coal mines vary widely in the amount of impurities in the coal they produce. Low-impurity coal requires less scrubbing to meet a give emissions target. Sulfur is the worst of the impurities -- it becomes sulfuric acid in the atmosphere and is precipitated by rain, causing concrete to erode.
The cleaner coal is called Anthracite [0]. The dirtier coal is Lignite [1]. Lignite is usually cleaned, by heating it up to drive out the water so it burns better (and weighs less during shipping.)
My point was that clean coal can mean a lot of things and sometimes making one part of a product lifecycle "green" just passes the problem down the supply chain.
In this case, scrubbing the flue gasses and recycling the coal ash resulted in toxic drywall. This isn't to say all drywall is toxic but it illustrates one illusion of something being clean or green.
There is no thermodynamically possible way to generate power from burning coal while also removing the primary product of the reaction from the effluent. Clean coal is, necessarily, 100% bullshit.
I think the idea is not to turn the CO2 back into carbon and oxygen, but to store it somewhere other than the atmosphere. That is not thermodynamically impossible.
The ironic thing is that this illness is due to non-coal dust (silicates) in the air which are much finer than coal dust. And because they are non-coal dust, they escaped regulation for a long time.
Are coal mines hot like deep metal mines? In The Deep Dark [0], it started that many of the miners skimped on safety devices even when available because of the extreme temperature and humidity if nothing else.
Respirators are uncomfortable to wear. I know that might seem like silly reason considering the long term health consequences, but in industrial settings it's quite common for workers to ignore or disable any safety equipment that gets in their way.
You've just hit the nail on the head. PPE is an annoyance, especially in the form of devices that make critical bodily functions (like breathing and dissipating heat) difficult. Regulate all you want, workers will voluntarily remove the PPE often enough to incur respiratory damage just like they do with hearing protection in areas that aren't immediately deafeningly loud.
I listened to this on NPR earlier, didn't reread it, so I don't know if this isn't present in the piece, or other posters just didn't read. Miners said that the respirators got clogged quickly, and it would feel like someone had their hands over your mouth. And the respirators that are recommended and provided protect you from coal dust, but not what causes this disease, silica dust.
I think it's a story we're all quite familiar with: in the absence of someone keeping an industry honest, the industry tends to develop honesty problems, because cutting corners makes the decision-makers more money, and the externalities are just that: externalities.
I think in the modern political stage we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly). Regulations exist to incorporate the costs of externalities into the cost of doing business.
This sort of a market correction only receives criticism on an inter-industry level (and possibly with regards to imports if the cost is only applied domestically) because everyone in that industry is motivated to care about the well being of their workers without suffering an economic disadvantage for doing so (in fact, not caring is often a penalty beyond the cost to adhere to the regulation to make adherence an economically sound decision).
> we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly).
My argument is we've replaced a rich set of social controls with a single unitary one; money. And then wonder why we're constantly dealing with mal-externalities.
If you consider that human societies are complex and industrial ones even more so, the idea that you can manage that with a single control input (money) is ludicrous.
Erm, the entire point of a simple metric (money) is so that complex processes don't have to be understood top-down to be managed. From first principles, the more technologically complex a society gets, the more you would expect its priorities to be weighed with money.
Now please, don't take this as an endorsement that we should let externalities go unchecked, or even that governance should shirk basic understanding of processes/industries and expect to replace that entirely with money. Nor do I have love for perverse money-generating yet counterproductive endeavors. I'm just saying the basic trend that you've characterized as "ludicrous" is actually entirely appropriate.
I can't think of a single instance, from the last 200 years, where money alone has achieved the appropriate constraint of a process, product or industry.
All the significant milestones in health and safety have been from hard won regulation and money - not just taxation, but penalties and fines. Usually accompanied by enormous effort and spending from industry to lie, cheat and avoid said regulation being enacted, or having to comply with it once enacted.
Business has become ever more multi-national, taxation is gamed across nations, trade deals have placed commerce above government, and regulation is becoming ever less fashionable. Industry now feels ever more able to simply move things out of sight, overseas to developing nations sub contracted to members of their supply chain. All health, safety and environmental issues can be dealt with via a simple press release expressing disappointment, but they are, after all an "independent" supplier.
I'd say the last two centuries have proved that trend entirely inappropriate for everything except corporate profit.
> I can't think of a single instance, from the last 200 years, where money alone has achieved the appropriate constraint of a process, product or industry.
Money upset the mobile phone business which was a lazy cartel controlled by carriers, who functioned as monopsony customers of phone manufacturers. Europe's market was more dynamic than the the US and Japan due to regulation but still the phones weren't amazing. Then about a decade ago Apple blew up not just the design of phones but more importantly IMHO the relationships between the end users, manufacturers, and the carriers.
I cite this as a proof that it can happen but in general I think regulation to manage externalities is underused due to ideology. Yet as a businessperson I don't consider regulation inherently evil -- in fact, for example, a safety reg which applies to everyone doesn't disadvantage any one company.
It was a tech disruption. NeedMoreTea said a significant disruption requires "regulation and money" and while I agree in the general case, the iPhone is an example that shows that "requires" is overstating it.
An existence proof that it "pure" capitalism can cause positive disruptive change, even if that's a rare case. And I write "pure" in scare quotes because Apple did benefit from a raft of laws and regulations (police, building codes, court system, patents, etc) -- but not to a greater or lesser degree than the other participants in the phone ecosystem.
Plenty of disclaimers I agree with, but I still dispute that reducing anything to a single, monetary measure is a sensible thing to do. The pitfalls are as clear as with other overly simplistic measures it leads to gaming that measure at the expense of everything else. Or encourages belief that some of those externalities are unimportant as they are not in that headline £££ figure.
Try to “charge” people in any other resource, and they’ll just convert the extra profits they make from the operation into that currency and then pay you in it.
For example: stores that require people to wait in line to get a limited-availability thing on a first-come-first-served basis. Rich people just pay someone to wait in line for them. Entrepreneurs serve these rich people by putting a bunch of people in the line and then auctioning off the resulting purchases to make a profit. Now you’ve got scalpers, a loss of profits to middlemen that could have gone to the original seller (and thus subsidized production), and people wasting time in lines for no reason (because nobody is now getting the thing that wasn’t previously.)
We internalize externalities using monetary penalties, because higher profits are what drive businesses to favor these strategies in the first place. If you cancel out the profit (with a tax or fine), you remove the motive, rather than simply redirecting it.
There is an incredible number of norms you and most everybody else adheres to every single day. Some of them even obviously ridiculous and without any objective basis, like "don't wear white socks and sandals". Nobody charges you money, not even if you ignore such norms. And yet you comply - and the corset of cultural norms is far tighter than you realize (unless you start thinking about it, but even then it's hard to see from the inside how many rules you actually follow, by now quite voluntarily).
The human world outside "money" is far larger and the bonds also far stronger than inside of it, I would claim. It's just that one is mostly subconscious and the other one very often requires conscious attention, so guess which one you always notice.
The rules you mention are very localized, and granular on sub-social level. Me & my friends across the country may follow similar rules, but my next-door neighbours will follow different rules.
Alas, money is always an overriding concern. Your adherence to local cultural regulations may or may not buy you good karma, but that karma is not redeemable beyond your current social group. You won't pay for supplies out of it, and you won't build your house with it. But you can do that with money, regardless of where you are. So money tends to displace everything else out of sheer utility. Of course it can't substitute for every social interaction, but then you also don't want to run scarcity economy on karma.
> but my next-door neighbours will follow different rules.
Some rules are different, many are not.
> Alas, money is always an overriding concern.
No it isn't, see what I wrote.
Your entire comment is an amazing display of cluelessness about the forces acting on you. Cultural norms are a FAR bigger factor. Yes you don't realize it, see what I wrote.
You are also quite confused about what is being discussed. What is that about building houses and buying stuff? If the topic is too difficult for you, just don't comment, posting incoherent random thoughts is useless. Yes, we indeed use money in the economy, great insight.
Humans care about norms. Corporations as aggregate entities just care about money. You can influence the people in a corporation with norms, but that doesn’t mean that you can influence the corporation itself with norms.
Corporate boards are elected by their shareholders specifically to optimize for profitability above and beyond any other criteria. (Which is hard work! That’s why “corporate board-member” is a paid gig—it requires hard mental self-trickery to get into that mindset, plus a lot of cognitive dissonance to stay in that mindset, and those both take a lot out of you, emotionally.)
A good example of this: recycling. Social norms have caused people within corporations to favour recycling, and so, for example, office managers will implement recycling and waste-reduction programs, where employees must sort their waste into bins, etc.
But this is entirely uncoupled from whether the corporation itself will implement recycling on an industrial scale. Most of the corporations that have recycling bins in their hallways, don’t have any recycling or waste-reduction programs going for their products or services, or for the manufacturing and logistics pipelines serving them. If norms were enough to influence corporations to do so, they’d have long done so; society has been pushing corporations to care about the environment, in every way we can think of, since the 1970s.
But look at it from the corporation’s perspective: a few bins for the office, and a contract with a recycling company to empty them, just makes the “offices” line-item cost a tiny bit more. It’s an eensy-weensy operational expense. But doing something like Apple does, where they design their phones to not include non-recyclable materials, and accept them back for trade-in specifically to recycle the components? That’s something that requires large capital expenditures to implement, and so that’s something you have to convince your shareholders is worth doing.
And, if you’re a public company, your shareholders probably aren’t humans themselves, but rather other corporations like mutual-fund management houses. And those companies are operating under the principle that their goal is to make their fund participants high returns—not to invest in ways that those fund participants would prefer, or even find ethical.
The social more is never going to take effect, because (public) corporations have boards of people who are paid to only think about money, and shareholders who are also mostly corporations with boards paid to think solely of the profitability of their investments. Never do human preferences or human norms enter into the board’s equation for “what should the corporation do, from a top-down perspective.” Public corporations are about as able to be influenced by human norms as an alien or an AI. (They can be influenced if their workers form a union and then that union strikes to express its disagreement with the corporation over some social norm. But that’s less about the corporation “understanding” or “appreciating” the norm, and more about how an organism under threat will do things it doesn’t want to do to appease a predator.)
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Tangent: The only reason Apple “gets away with” having an industrial recycling program, is that they’ve made it into a feature of their product, part of its marketing, in a way that appeals to their particular user-base (i.e. upper-middle-class people who usually have some guilt over how their purchasing affects the environment.) They used this “increased appeal to our customer-base -> increased sales” argument to convince those corporate share-holders to okay the program.
That situation, though, is pretty unique. Most companies in the world aren’t selling expensive, “trendy” items, with the kind of customer-base that “we implemented a recycling program for our product” or “we reduced our factories’ emissions” would appeal to. And even the ones that are, aren’t necessarily selling the majority of units into cultures with norms like our own; Chinese manufacturers, for example, might be able to establish a recycling program for goods sold abroad, but they likely won’t get much uptake for a recycling program for goods sold domestically in China. If that’s where their board and their shareholders reside, then that recycling program (and associated CapEx) is just not gonna happen.
As others have pointed out, this is not wrong. It can be argued, and I (currently) believe it to be true, that industrial societies only happened because of money. The scale at which humans operate seems to be related to the scalability of their monetary system.
Reputation/social karma as a currency is hyper-localized and isn't able to cover all your needs; without modern technology, it doesn't even scale beyond Dunbar number-sized villages. Barter is O(n!) with respect to amount of things you might need, so it doesn't scale well with progress of technology. The abstraction of money was the (in retrospect) obvious solution.
I think that may indeed be a problem, but I'd like to hope it isn't one. I think non-translatable social controls are too mysterious and arbitrary which leads to the ability for various social biases to be unaddressable. Ideally codifying these social controls into monetary penalties should allow easy verification of the fairness of the system and comprehensibility of the system to individuals who are not already well versed in the system.
Nobody has forgotten anything, it was a carefully orchestrated effort by people that understand the consecuences perfectly well and doesn't care. Everything else is propaganda carefully created to make dumbasses scream "job killing regulations" without understanding that regulation is good for them.
Well said, I couldn't have put it better myself. I see all these people clamoring for the return of coal and coal miners, yet the amount of miners dying due to entirely preventable causes is infuriating. We're willing to throw away anything and everything for the sake of making slightly more money for people that already have too much to count.
It's disgusting how coal mine owners doesn't even want to admit that it's a problem. It's only a "potential" problem and the science isn't conclusive. What a load of shit. Silicosis is a well studied health hazard. What do you expect when you mine the earth and silica is everywhere in the ground?
Humans, all humans, are prideful. What you are talking about is admitting that the job they have been doing for years and is their best hope of a decent standard of living is literally killing them. That the red meat beliefs they are fed about the evils of government regulation built on the threats of a loss of that income.
On top of that you pile evidence about one thing. Sure it's true but this isn't about a single fact or outcome or causality, it's about conceptual change[0] which is about changing one or more of the schema that frame how we see the world. That is significantly harder and a lot of studies show that evidence contrary to a belief not only is ineffective at creating it, it can reinforce it.
long story short...the attitudes and reactions have very little to do with the chain of evidence related to disease.
We've seen these kind of lung problems crop up with many mining companies in Southeast Asia and Africa as well. Currently working on chest X-ray + AI solutions to provide fast, affordable screening since the biggest factors seems to be cost and slow turnaround time for radiologists. Feel free to test out our AI algorithms below:
I file this one under memories are short, and dust masks are a pain in the arse. Sure labour laws are wanting for your Appalachian thin seam coal miner, but the union strong Australian industry had had a similar revelation, albeit with reportable cases in the tens, not thousands).
Dust masks are totally effective. The main problem is convincing miners to wear them, all shift, in the heat, and the humidity. The only effective motivator I've seen for the industry are miners getting sick.
In my fifteen years of underground coal I've seen it go from crews where none wore dust masks, to everyone wears them, and it's not like black lung or silicosis are new to mining. And what's interesting is most wear them purely out of self concern, the minority due to workplace health and safety rules.
I've long had a rule in my life: "When someone can only accept a conversation or submit to an idea if it is framed in ways that specifically impact them, then they're most likely not in possession of any idea or perspective worth sharing in the first place."
If you're angry that a publication addresses a human problem on a human level because, it seems, you're upset about what fractional cents of cost it would have added per ton of coal on the market? You're not only frighteningly devoid of empathy, but you're also doubly wasting your time by reading the article then complaining about it here.
The misguided belief that "if it can't be counted, it doesn't count" lies at the heart of all structural social conflicts. When complex reality is overcompressed into digestible, uniform units of account, whatever values fall outside the perception model is discounted to zero and lost.
Clean coal indeed.