While Donald Trump is planning an extraordinary, unprecedented intervention into the energy market to benefit coal mine owners, coal miners are getting something else: black lung. What they’re not getting is enough money to fund the cost of a debilitating and ultimately fatal disease that comes from inhaling coal and rock dust over years on the job. The under-funding of black lung costs is great enough that payouts to disabled miners could drop more than 50 percent by the end of the year.
As CNN reports, the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund is deep in debt, and long-term trends predict it may need a $15 billion infusion from the government to keep going. The fund borrowed $1.3 billion this year alone, and already owes $4.3 billion. That’s after the government already forgave a $6.8 billion debt. And the rate of the shortfall is continuing to increase.
That gap between what comes in and what is paid out is money that the coal companies were supposed to provide in support of their workers. But the funding from companies has never been adequate. First, there’s been a long term, deliberate undercount of the number of workers effected and a similar effort to downplay the cost of treatment. That’s kept the tax rate assessed for mining companies at a level that was never adequate to the need. In addition, a number of large companies have declared bankruptcy in recent years, pulling the plug on billions of dollars in debt, and walking away from both reclamation and worker health claims.
So coal mine operators have already been gifted more than $11 billion to cover black lung payments, and are looking at another $15 billion. When conservative sources complain about subsidies given to renewables, the billions that coal is getting paid to not provide health care to the workers it’s crippled or killed somehow gets overlooked.
The money to cover this will now be coming from everyone, as mine owners appear to have successfully managed to dodge responsibility for their actions and put the cost on the all taxpayers. At the same time, Trump is launching his multi-billion dollar industry wealth redistribution program, forcing electrical providers to keep aging coal plants in the system—a plan that represents a fee for everyone else to reward mine owners. But not a dime of that goes toward addressing the crisis of the failing fund for black lung.
Because what Trump insists on calling “clean, clean coal” is killing miners. To just cover new claims, coal companies would need to raise the associated tax by 25 percent. But that would increase the cost of coal, which is already more expensive than wind, solar, or natural gas. Which would only mean that the cost of Trump’s other coal bailout would be even larger.
So long as Trump insists that energy providers keep using long-in-the-tooth coal plants to produce power at higher cost, the price of coal doesn’t matter. So mine owners could even champion the increase in the tax rate. It all goes to the consumers anyway. Coal no longer has to be cost-competitive, since Trump is propping up the industry.
Even so, the more likely action is that the government takes another hit for coal companies, forgiving additional debt on the fund, continuing to under tax, and just lets the debt build up—until they repeat the action down the road.
Because covering this debt would allow coal to continue to look cheaper than it actually is, while allowing Trump the pretense that he took care of miners. By giving another huge gift to mine owners.
Meanwhile, the industry has a response. The National Mining Association claims that the government has been too “liberal” in allowing people into the black lung program, noting an increased rate of claims. Their answer to keeping down the costs would be to simply take it away from all but the worst, most obvious cases.