I wonder how/if the states of these workers will reemploy them
I'm surprised 1 million people still work in coal. Edit: 1 million globally. Makes more sense
They've tried constantly to transition them but they'd rather starve than learn a new skill. I feel for them but if they only want to go all in on voting for "fascist force the country to run on coal" I don't feel for them once the stopgaps run out.
Some of those communities ARE finding their way into the future though and I support supporting them.
Maybe in America, and that’s with the word maybe doing some heavy lifting.
But if you live in a coal mining town in Columbia or Kazakhstan how many training programs do you think are being paid for to reskill those workers? What other opportunities do you think they are being offered?
And even if you do live in America how realistic do you think “retrain to work in IT” is for a 40yr old coal miner?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support the coal industry at all, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support the workers who get left behind.
"Retraining them to work in IT" is a false argument all together. The plans being referenced (which are real proposals and not whatever you're making up) would be to set up alternative energy in those affected communities and training them for those jobs.
Going with your logic though, it's more feasible to you to ban alternative energy in order to force these mines back open than to train them for free in something new cause they're scawed of change? GTFOH.
Here's free training and support to transition you out of the industry you lost. Take it or starve, your choice. 🤷
Unusual conclusion of my post. I was suggesting that you’re being pretty callous with respect to people with limited options available to them, who are about to experience some hardship.
You didn’t address the many non American workers that are affected (there is a world of people outside America). Even within America, though training for IT might be a slightly flippant example even talking about training for solar or other programs; for the vast majority of workers the retraining is for jobs that don’t exist within their communities, near their families and responsibilities and is often not appropriate for their skills. It’s nothing to do with being scared of change and everything to do with real world material conditions.
Nobody said anything about banning alternative energy, that’s your moon logic, not mine. I was just suggesting a little compassion for these workers who have provided an important service to society (you want your hospital to have electrical power right?) in unpleasant conditions and who are vilified for wanting to keep earning the money that they need to exist when no other option is given them.
No sympathy to those who turn down new industry and free training for that industry. It's not moon logic, it's literally their whole thing - no new industry, reopen the mines or bust.
But you clearly haven't actually followed any of this and just want to run your mouth in a desperate attempt to be right on the internet. So go off king.
Good! That frees those workers up to do something else useful for society!
Suggestion, when the mines close, the workers should be given a golden handshake (not the execs as is usual), generous enough to live on for their lives in dignity.
Ideally this should be paid for by the coal mining companies that exploited the coal workers to extract coal and profit, at the cost of the environment and often their worker’s health, the same companies who having made their buck are now pulling out and leaving their workers high and dry. But even if the golden handshake is paid for by the government it seems to me that compared to the $Bns that it costs for a new generation of nuclear power plants (before even considering running costs, waste management costs and decommissioning costs) paying off a few coal miners is a reasonable investment to prevent sudden decline of the coal mining communities and the types of resentment that decline and abandonment causes towards a greener future and the rise of reactionary politics we see on the back of that.
