The US currently has 54,000 coal miners.
Down from 630,000 100 years ago.
A friend of mine asked me the question with the debate of the future of coal, why not just pay to retire every coal miner and end the practice?
Which sounds crazy, but coal is likely a dying market.
46 billion dollar industry in 2010.
25 billion by 2019.
And coal production has also dropped.
706 million tons of coal in 2019.
Down from 1.05 billion tons in 2010.
Jobs doing it are also way down, going from 85,000 a decade ago to 54,000 today.
So is just retiring every coal miner and ending the industry a realistic idea?
Coal miners average $49,000 a year and people doing it for over a decade average $62,000,
The average age of miners is 40 years old.
It’d actually only cost a few billion dollars a year to just give every active coal miner in the US a $50,000 a year check and send them home.
Money wise, the suggestion isn’t terrible.
Problem becomes that coal is still as a product needed.
19% of electricity in the US comes from coal.
Which is down massively from being at 45% in 2010, but that’s only due to natural gas rising from 20% to almost 50% in the last decade.
Nuclear didn’t go up.
Solar didn’t go up much.
Wind rose slightly.
Biomass in many states declined.
Natural gas rose, largely due to fracking, but that’s not really promised to be stable.
Natural gas is way better for the environment over coal, but shortage issues could happen in the future.
Banning coal just doesn’t really seem that needed, when it will likely crash further in the next decade, because natural gas seems likely to get cheaper.
Which the idea of some sort of education plan for miners is probably a good idea, seeing how the states with coal do have them as good portions of their economy.
One thing to also mention is the need to do more research in clean coal tech.
Coal is 19% of electricity.
It’s really cheap.
It only takes 54,000 people to keep that going.
It’s abundant.
If coal could be made cleaner, it would easily be the most efficient way to power the economy.
Which sounds crazy, but…
Fracking was an old technique until a decade ago, when they found out how to do horizontal fracking.
Solar has had decades of research into improving it.
Nuclear research for efficiency there is still being done.
Coal is an old practice, but the research budget for improving it has been so low, maybe it’s time to give that another crack.