193
Oh, no!!! Anyway....
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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How can you be so cold? They've barely had decades to prepare for this eventuality.
They are so cold because there is no coal to keep them warm… much sadness indeed.
It's not about being cold, the workers that are working in coal are not at fault. Imagine you being a mid thirties guy in Indonesia, when you were in early twenties looking for a career in a couple try with sever lack of jobs that pay high enough to sustain a life that allows you to own a house and a car near some urban area, when world is still warming up to the idea of Global warming, you will take the coal mining job because it pays well, allows your kids to study in English medium schools. Allows you to save to send them to university. They are only trying to get what a lot of people in developed have taken it for granted. And it's a legitimate problem on how to re-employ people from early retirement of coal plants.
Prison industry faces thousands of layoffs as Allies liberate Nazi concentration camps!
I hear that solar companies are hiring.
coalminers: just making money, making sure my children have no future
World faces ALL job losses if no global energy transition (not to mention lives)
Good. That's what you get for trying to go backwards in time
Remember one of Trump's first moves was to subsidize coal mines in west Virginia? Instead of paying for miners to retrain for a new skill with that money he kept an industry everyone knew was dying running. And everyone says "he's a business man" no "business man" would keep an unprofitable industry in business.
German CDU did similar bullshit.
They cut funding in renewables, costing those sectors >100k jobs to protect around 20k jobs.
One might think it wasn't about jobs at all, but that sweet sweet lobby money
Hey you forgot we were also leaders in those fields technology wise. And iirc they only protected only 10k jobs.
Leaders in lobbyism cough~~legal bribery~~cough?
Yeah i think the 20k was an estimate of a total of jobs in the affected sector, not all of which would be cut? I'd have to look into the source again but yeah, it was pretty clearly cxu bullshit.
No actual leaders our solar panel industry was quite good afaik. And of of the day it doesnt matter if it was a 5:1 or 10:1 ratio bullshit is bullshit. And if you want to have high blood pressure look up who of the NRW Landtag espacially CDU has a job at RWE.
Ah yeah true, sorry i was caught up im memeing on the party.
I know, in general its fucking crazy how they can claim to be unbiased in these decisions.
Club Deutscher Unternehmer checks out
lol that fellas a clown
The same businessman who is such an utter business failure that he has resorted to declaring bankruptcy SIX times. Checks out.
Pretty sure Trump's companies aren't profitable either. So kinda makes sense.
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.
I’ve got absolutely zero sympathy for anyone in the coal industry who refuses free retraining. Go ahead. Go bankrupt. See if the rest of the world gives a shit.
The people who want to move on from coal move out, thus a sampling bias exists where the diehards live off promises that can't be fulfilled
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.
It would be cheaper to pay them $2000/mo for life and a one way ticket to anywhere that deal with the climate consequences of keeping a dead polluting industry going
"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.
👍
Friendly reminder that nearly all currently operating coal plants have been built scine the sixties, as before that it was often unprofitable to use for electricity production.
That’s right, we could have gone straight to nuclear and created the economies of scale necessary to bring down costs if we haven’t needed to find jobs for all the miners and poor lobbyists who had mined coal for home heating and industrial use.
We’ve also settled the science about the whole carbon killing us thing since the seventies, so there should have been plenty of time in the last fifty years to get rid of them.
der tekin 'er jerbss!
Indeed. I'm very unhappy with how things have turned out.
Only if Russia didn't fuck up chernobyl neuclear would have more support. Fukushima never did that much to hurt public confidence in nuclear.
Good! That frees those workers up to do something else useful for society!
It’s almost like there could have been another industry similar to this that existing workers could have gotten training for. ☀️
Nope... competing industries had to get killed to keep coal alive because that's what lobbyists would reward politicians for with lucrative jobs after their political career. For this reason the former German government for example killed an once world-leading solar industry via massive overregulation... 100k jobs gone to keep 10k coal miners in their job.
*worldwide.
There are nearly four times as many fast food employees in the US alone.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
SINGAPORE, Oct 10 (Reuters) - The global coal industry may have to shed nearly 1 million jobs by 2050, even without any further pledges to phase out fossil fuels, with China and India facing the biggest losses, research showed on Tuesday.
Hundreds of labour-intensive mines are expected to close in the coming decades as they reach the end of their lifespans and countries replace coal with cleaner low-carbon energy sources.
But most of the mines likely to shut down "have no planning underway to extend the life of those operations or to manage a transition to a post-coal economy," U.S.-based think tank Global Energy Monitor (GEM) warned.
Dorothy Mei, project manager for GEM's Global Coal Mine Tracker, said governments needed to make plans to ensure workers do not suffer from the energy transition.
GEM looked at 4,300 active and proposed coal mine projects around the world covering a total workforce of nearly 2.7 million.
China's coal sector has already undergone several waves of restructuring in recent decades, with many mining districts in the north and northeast struggling to find alternative sources of growth and employment following pit closures.
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