From the way people talk about American coal miners, you'd think there are millions of them and they all live in the Appalachia. When the truth is there are only 45,000 of them in the whole country. Walmart employs over 10,000 people in WV alone. And it's not just in Appalachia, either — Wyoming produces twice as much coal as PA and WV combined.
Crazy how much of this really just boils down to identity politics for a small segment of coal miners.
There are two kinds of jobs: export jobs and local jobs. I mean export in a loose sense - not necessarily crossing country borders, but rather something that is transported to other regions.
Export jobs like mining, an industry etc is the base that creates and support an economy of local jobs around them. Local jobs like walmart, hairdressers, gas station, laundromat etc. Every community must have export jobs in order to be able to trade for imported goods. You can't just take the coal mining away and keep the walmart.
Now there are exceptions: a tourist economy exports services that are normally local jobs. And some communities only exist because of subsidies and handouts. But they are exceptions.
> Crazy how much of this really just boils down to identity politics for a small segment of coal miners.
The coal and oil industries have a proven track record of paying their bribes on time that stretches back a hundred years or more, and those industries wouldn't exist if they weren't able to move numbers around a ledger at whim.
Modern industries like Solar and Wind don't have nearly the same requirements and, more importantly, started life with modern accounting practices and Excel in an era without functional graft.
Coal is an existential issue for politicians and a very few others.
In West Virginia alone coal mining drive $21 billion in economic activity and provides for over 36,000 jobs total when you include related fields like power generation. It is an important in more ways than just mining jobs.
Crazy how much of this really just boils down to identity politics for a small segment of coal miners.