How exactly does one tell another politely to STFU?
This evening, discussing Shelley Moore Capito's victory in the West Virginia senate race, Joe Manchin said, in effect, that the federal government's policies are responsible for the decline in employment in the state's coal fields.
It's understandable that a Democrat from Westbygod might want to show support for an industry vital to his state and address the drastic decline in mining employment over the past 30 years. That decline has been real and devastating, with two-thirds of the state's mining jobs gone since 1980.
Those losses have a number of causes and just about none of them are federal policies. In fact, the single-biggest influence on coal consumption in electricity generation has come from--surprise--the energy industry. As Christopher Van Atten, who has studied power plant economics for M.J. Bradley & Associates told Bloomberg in 2012,
"Natural gas often sets the price of electricity, and wholesale prices are down. That reduces the profitability of a coal-fired generation facility and makes it cheaper to run on natural gas."
And right now, the United States is experiencing a glut of natural gas, making power generators eager to dump older, coal-fired plants.
Commonly-used phrase, that. "Older, coal-fired plants." How old, exactly? Positively geriatric, in fact.
The EPA says the average age of the nation’s coal fleet is 42 years, meaning that most of them aren’t nearly as efficient as new coal plants, although many have been updated. Some were built when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, said Exelon chief executive Christopher Crane.
Of the 983 coal-fired units operating as of December at 523 plants, 63 percent are at least 40 years old, said John Coequyt of the Sierra Club.
Even last winter's spike in natural gas prices only dented the fracked fuel's percentage of use in power plants by half a point.
What's more, while coal producing areas like Powder River basin in Wyoming are experiencing increased production, production in Appalachia is stalling, despite new surface mining technologies.
And those technologies, specifically mountaintop removal, are the real key to continuing job losses in West Virginia's coal fields. In 2009, Drs. Michael Hendryx and Melissa Ahern published an in-depth study of mountaintop removal's effects on Appalachian communities in Public Health Reports. That report studied not only health effects of the technique, but quality of life effects, including economic effects and, as Hendryx bluntly put it,
“Areas with especially heavy mining have the highest unemployment rates in the region; contrary to the common perception that mining contributes to overall employment.”
More mining equals fewer miners? How does that work?
Same way it does just down the spine in Tennessee.
The simple truth is that the decline in coal jobs, whether or not demand and production increases or decreases, will continue in West Virginia. Coal companies will continue to eliminate underground mines in favor of the much cheaper, less labor-intensive surface mining.
And you, Sen. Manchin, if you do not have the communications chops to explain that hard truth to your constituents, then just shut it.
Blaming the federal government, as easy and politically expedient as it may be, does nothing to help the residents in West Virginia cope with the dramatic economic changes they face.