Here's a look at the Appalachian coal mining that powers the DC area. It's an very ugly business wreaking some horrible environmental effects even before you start talking about the climate issues. The interest of the mining communities in the coal-related jobs is, of course, understandable. On the other hand, though, one looks at the economic history of this part of the country and becomes skeptical that coal mining has really provided much of a path to prosperity.
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King Coal
20 Apr 2008 03:07 pm
Comments (22)
"On the other hand, though, one looks at the economic history of this part of the country and becomes skeptical that coal mining has really provided much of a path to prosperity."
For the regular people living in coal mining regions, this is true. But it's not true for the owners of coal mines. The coal mining region where I grew up was mostly developed by a man named Asa Packer. And he became fabulously wealthy. Strange as it may seem, he decided to give back to his town of Mauch Chunk, PA (now Jim Thorpe). His proposal was to establish a university there. But the people of Mauch Chunk balked at the proposal, believing education to be a waste of resources. On the other hand, the people of Bethlehem, PA (my home town) thought the university was a great idea. So Asa Packer built Lehigh University there. Try as he might, Asa Packer was never able to bring prosperity to his coal mining town, but he surely did help the non-coal mining town of Bethlehem. And Bethlehem is still prosperous, despite the collapse of Bethlehem Steel. Mauch Chunk is not prosperous, never really has been, and probably never will be.
We took a wrong turn in the 70's, we should (like the French) based our power grid on nuclear power. I'm sure uranium mining isn't a tea party, but its far more energy efficient. One pound of yellowcake can generate the same amount of energy as 10 tons of coal.
Then again, unless we built the new reactors along the Kanawha River I guess that would leave a lot of coal miners unemployed.
Fred - Mountaintop removal is designed to use dynamite in place of miners. When you call it "our coal" I guess you mean you work for a coal company because the proceeds from mining doesn't go into a fund for coal country like Alaskan oil.
The WaPo article isn't about coal in general, it's about coal from mountaintop removal - the mining equivalent of fishing with dynamite. The very process of extracting the coal transforms the community that contains the coal into something unrecognizable. I don't care much whether Casa Blog uses whale oil or cold fusion to power their shenanigans but the Washington Post story is about a specific kind of mining, not simply bashing coal.
More on mountaintop removal mining below
8:23 video opposing mountaintop coal removal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPixjCneseE
End Mountinatop Removal Action and Resource Center
http://www.ilovemountains.org/
Relatedly, this column in today's WaPo, by your Atlantic colleague Sandra Tsing Loh, is worth reading ("Who's Best for Earth? That Would Be Me.").
When you call it "our coal" I guess you mean you work for a coal company because the proceeds from mining doesn't go into a fund for coal country like Alaskan oil.
Good idea, joejoejoe. If the Appalachins had been smart, they would have tied into that idea. But coal mining was originally labor-intensive and supplied millions of good-paying, but dangerous jobs. Now, with labor less(and benefits to citizens from such employment less from less people needing to be emloyed strip mining), a royalty payment to the state and even the Alaska-style direct check to people might be a great progressive law to enact, because the wealth extracted is more and the environmental effects on all state residents greater.
joejoejoe - The WaPo article isn't about coal in general, it's about coal from mountaintop removal - the mining equivalent of fishing with dynamite. The very process of extracting the coal transforms the community that contains the coal into something unrecognizable.
Disagree. In states "blessed" with 70% of the land at inclines of over 10% and so many hilltops and ridges others call "mountains" that aren't even named, creation of more level land, and long as it has preserved the topsoil and can be planted, settled with housing or recreational use - that new, level land is most welcome. Wildlife likes the level, replanted land, too - which adds ecological variety - grassland grazing, edible plantlife, nesting sites to hills covered in low-yield woodlands.
Earlier "strip-mining horrors" were mostly about lands where existing top soil was carted off for profit and the land mined left sterile and bare.
We took a wrong turn in the 70's, we should (like the French) based our power grid on nuclear power.
Agree.
Save the coal, a beautiful resource that we have the world's largest supply of, for the petrochemicals and liquid fuel that no "renewable" or nuclear power can replace. For future generations. Because we neglected to build nuke plants from silly Lefty opposition for 30 years, and embraced the delusion that solar and wind were credible large-scale 24/7 energy sources - we simply cannot make up for the lost 30 years and mass migration accross our borders adding tens of millions of new energy users. It is a bad thing, but we will be wasting our coal by burning it for electricity and polluting the air with radioactivity, CO2 and other (mostly bad) exhaust burn products for at least another 30 years.
Could Chris Ford (or anyone else) point out to me where advocates of solar and wind energy express the opinion that these technologies are, as he says, intended as 'large-scale 24/7 sources' of electricity? I've recently seen this claim pop up as a generic rejoinder to any mention of renewable energy or any derogation of the fossil fuel regime. i just wanted to know the derivation of this particular line in the Al-bot's code.
thanks!
sg
Economies devoted to resource extraction or production, like mining and lumber, are necessarily poor. Firstly because the ownership of the resource is always narrow and the income flows strongly that way but mainly because value added activities never evolve well or at all.
Oil is becoming somewhat of an exception since the money is so gigantic that the trickle down is outsized compared to the norm.
Mining in particular is the path to poverty for an area and an economy. One can throw in agriculture too but there the issues are more complex. In all cases there is a boom to start, then long periods of stagnation, then a mini boom, then more stagnation.
gerrard in the middle - I think we can safely say you are not Frank Lampard.
On the other hand, though, one looks at the economic history of this part of the country and becomes skeptical that coal mining has really provided much of a path to prosperity.
The mountain regions of everywhere in the world have been the poorest areas throughout human history, even when part of the wealthiest civilizations of the time. Beside resource extraction, the only other viable economic base is tourism - which has its own advantages & disadvantages, plus a tendency for an even greater skewing economic benefit distribution. And tourism has only become possible due to electricity and the internal combustion engine.
If you think the prosperity caused by coal mining is questionable, you should check out towns like those in and around Wise county where the coal mines have closed. (note: haven't been there in about 15 years, so things may be different now.)
"Economies devoted to resource extraction or production, like mining and lumber, are necessarily poor. Economies devoted to resource extraction or production, like mining and lumber, are necessarily poor. Firstly because the ownership of the resource is always narrow and the income flows strongly that way but mainly because value added activities never evolve well or at all."
Poor like Canada, Norway, Dubai, etc.?
Resource extraction is economics' runt. The way real economies work tends to make it pay badly and have less emotional return than factory, education, or information jobs.
Tourism now pays better than most resource extraction/creation. Best is to encourage maximization of education a town's citizens get, encourage high-skill immigrants, and try to get a pool of money to help enterpreneurs.
Canada and Norway's economies are hardly dominated by resource extraction. Dubai is way lucky - and they, like much of Texas, have managed their money to be able to survive the end of oil, because they know one downside is that boomtime goes away.
I think what's alot more common than thinking solar/wind are ready for prime time is a denial of thinking about the consequences of opposing ALL kinds of big power.
Poor like Canada, Norway, Dubai, etc.?
Canada and Norway were never founded on resource extraction. Dubai was but realized it had to get away from that kind of economy or face terrible consequences. Saudi Arabia leveraged its oil wealth into turning itself into a national where its greatest intellectual/academic output is expended on producing PhDs in Islamic Studies.
Michigan, for all its claims of being the center of the auto industry, actually rose up as a leader in the timber industry, which pretty much set the stage for the creation of an auto industry and entire economy based primarily on interchangeable, unskilled labor.
Norway and Canada are amusing counter examples, but it is really stunning that Fred is so stubbornly hostile to the bare admission that an economy based on resource extraction is a losing proposition. If has corrosive effects on the culture as well as the economy.
Re "Resource extraction is economics' runt. The way real economies work tends to make it pay badly and have less emotional return than factory, education, or information jobs."
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1) This is a crock of shit. It's true today but only because the US Government rewards con artists while sucking the PRODUCTIVE segment of the US economy dry with taxes.
If "Value-added" was made an evaluation criteria for federal action, Washington DC would be a fucking desert.
2) I am probably the only commenter here who has actually worked in a coal mine. I did it to earn money for college -- worked as an underground surveyor for a coal company's engineering office
back in the early 1970s.
Coal is boom and bust. Always has been. When it is booming, people who didn't finish high school earn better than college graduates elsewhere.
(Although the current boom is leading to use of illegal immigrants, unlike the past)
When Coal busts you have 40 percent unemployment -- which only improves because people leave and move elsewhere for work. (Usually Detroit).
3) The Wash Post article about strip mines providing jobs is a crock of shit. It provides a few jobs -- for truck drivers. But strip mines provide a small fraction of the jobs provided by underground mining.
4) The arguments above about reclamation are also a crock of shit. EVERY strip mine I've ever seen looked like the fucking surface of Mars a decade later. Yes, you can plant a wiry type of grass and locust trees --about the only things that can live in the highly acidic soils you get when you dump high sulfur coal/slate out in the open air and let rain make sulfuric acid.
EVENTUALLY nature will return. maybe in 50 years. But what's irrevocably fucked is the water supply. Bambi won't skip around ye strip mine because there's no streams. any water there is badly polluted from seeping through a big "valley fill" consisting of coal, high sulfur slate ,etc. Wildlife can't live if there's no drinking water.
5)Re the politics of coal, first note that a rural area like Virginian has produced very few billionaires. Or even millionaires
One or two in Northern Virginia real estate --like Til Hazel -- who referred to Senator John Warner as MY distinguished Senator. But those guys basically feed off the federal tit --build office buildings for federal agencies, usually intelligence or defense.
But by and large Virginia is still a low-income rural area suffering from that fucking it got in 1865.
6) EXCEPT in the coal mining region of southwestern Virginia -- where such "entrepreneurs" as Jim McGlothlin and the Streets formed a PRIVATE corporation (United Coal Corp ) and made hundreds of millions of dollars in the coal business in the 1970s and 1980s. They then up and moved to Hilton Head and Florida when things turned to shit circa 1990 but are now moving back.
Incidently, the Wiki article is misleading -- United Coal Corp may have held its postal address in Bristol Virginia but its real wealth and operations were always in a small Appalachian town called Grundy Va.
7) Last I heard , Jim McGlothlin is now a billionaire. Made it the hard way -- married a Dupont heiress who sent accountants into Grundy in the 1980s to verify that Jim had a little money.
I mention Jim only to point out that he and his fellow investors never contributed shit to the people and Appalachian county that made their fortune. Any politician stupid enough to propose taxes on coal revenues for a rainy day was exterminated.
Consequently, the people whose hard work --and in some cases, deaths -- created Jim's fortune are among the poorest in the country. That's NOT a matter of economics -- it was a political decision. It worked the same way when Westmoreland Coal here in Philadelphia was exploiting Appalachia before native sons like Jim get in on the act.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Coal_Company#Founder.2C_James_W._.22Jim.22_McGlothlin
Damn Don, great comment. Your last two paragraphs exemplify why our grandchildren will be speaking Mandarin.
"Canada and Norway were never founded on resource extraction."
Canada was largely founded on resource extraction; the French and British didn't colonize it because of the climate.
"Michigan... actually rose up as a leader in the timber industry"
So did Washington State, which ought to be worse off, according to you and Rapier, for having timber resources.
"Norway and Canada are amusing counter examples.."
You and Rapier are so dogmatic about this that you keep missing the point. Having natural resources and extracting them are good things for an economy, all else being equal. Does that mean that an economy should be totally dependent on resource extraction? Of course not. The common denominator of successful resource-rich countries like Norway, Canada, Chile, Trinidad & Tobago, etc., is that they've had good governments which have sought to diversify their economies and (at least in the cases of Chile and Norway) set up stabilization funds as a buffer against periodic declines in demand and the eventual depletion of their resources.
No one is arguing that America should have an economy based solely on resource extraction -- we have the largest and most broadly-diversified economy on earth. What I am arguing is that we ought to make intelligent use of the resources we do have, and not eschew them in favor of more imports while we wait for sources of energy that will get Ed Begley, Jr.'s blessing.
Fred, there is much less to your examples than meets the eye. Canada, Norway, UAE, etc. have resource extraction industries geared towards oil, which others have pointed out is a bit of an exception to the whole pattern of resource extraction not being to contribute to wealth. In places like the US and Canada, the natives were killed off right around the beginning of the industrial era and the beginning of the modern mining industry, so that bit of conjecture is a bit of an exception. Norway was actually rather wealthy by the time oil was discovered and actually caused a bit of social problems before they decided to funnel their oil wealth into their educational system. When it comes down to it, your only real example is Chile (whose wealth also predates Pinochet, whose policies were more of a corrective to the problems of the Allende years than ushering in an era of wealth that Chile had never even contemplated before).
Going back as far as Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu, many have noted that another problem with having land that is rich in resources or good for farming tends to mean that people want to conquer your land. Northern China came rather close to starting industrialization via coal mining during the Song Dynasty, but that ended when the Mongols invaded. Montesquieu liked to point to the example of Corsica, where farming should be good but it kept on being invaded and much of its infrastructure destroyed to reach its potential. The British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese Empires were all partly based on invading foreign lands and taking their resource wealth. In addition, many of the societies sitting on potential resource wealth have either been run by despots without much foresight (Saudi Arabia) and/or have been rather diverse and thus have their countries torn apart by fighting over control of resources and good land (Nigeria, especially during the Nigerian Civil War / Biafran War being an obvious example, along with Iraq and Darfur today).
Also, there is a reason why the majority of Canadians live within 50 miles of the border besides the cold. Canada's wealth has been driven largely by trade with the US. Commerce and banking, after all, has been much more profitable historically than farming or mining.
As for the mining industry, it is the last type of mining you want to be in if you want to get wealthy. Talking to some respected mining engineers, they really look down on coal mining and deem an engineer who works in coal mining as a failure who couldn't cut it in a copper, gold or diamond mine.
The mountain regions of everywhere in the world have been the poorest areas throughout human history, even when part of the wealthiest civilizations of the time.
That would be the Swiss...
Re Don Williams
How about the Kluge family? I understand that they are the wealthiest family in the State of Virginia. The matriarch of the clan was a big supporter of former Governor Doug Wilder, an alleged Democrat.
Re SLC's comment "How about the Kluge family?"
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Note, SLC, that I said Virginia has PRODUCED few billionaires/millionaires. There are a number of wealthy residents who have made fortunes elsewhere and have purchased large estates/horse farms around Middleburg, Facquier County, and Charlottesville, Virginia.
John Kluge made most of his money with Metromedia via TV stations in Wash DC, New York and other locations outside Virginia. He sold those properties to Rupert Murdoch and they became the basis for Fox News.
Speaking of ..er..entrepreneurs, John took a sizable hit when he married a big-titted British belly dancer named Patricia. The plucking he took in that divorce would have killed a lesser man, but it just seemed to have gotten John's blood stirring. He's on his fourth wife, apparently.
See http://www.readthehook.com/Stories/2005/02/10/coverLoveHurtsBreakingUpIs.html and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/12/15/feat15.xml&page=2
I recall reading years ago about a little faux pas on John's Albemarle estate. Patricia evidently thought they should set up as European aristocracy and ordered the installation of pheasants so as to support Europeans style shoots.
Unfortunately, a massive number of hawks migrate south every fall down the slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and those raptors loved Patricia's pheasants whether they were served under glass or not.
Patricia's gamekeeper was arrested for shooting a few (which is a serious federal crime.) Whether he was acting on orders from Patricia was, if my memory serves, carefully left unexplored by the police. No doubt Virginia's Afro-American Governor, Doug Wilder, discussed the serious nature of the offence with Patricia when they went on those long vacations together.
Chris Ford, you are breathtakingly ignorant. Wildlife likes the flat land? Then why is the Appalachian forest the most bio-diverse temperate forest on the whole planet?
And mountaintop removal never preserves any of the biomass of the disrupted environment. It is all buried and replaced with non-native grass monoculture.
Furthermore, there is not a single ridge, creek or hollow that isn't named where they are doing this mining. You don't even just have to ask locals for reference- these names are usually on any detailed maps as well.
Where do you get your information? It sounds like you just created convenient sounding rationalizations out of whole cloth.
Comments closed May 04, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Why don't you and your house mates go off the grid then, until you find a prettier business to supply your energy. Would this be pretty enough for you? If they institute something like that in the D.C. area, it will probably increase your electricity costs by at least a third, but I'd prefer that to not using our coal.
Posted by Fred | April 20, 2008 3:52 PM