What will West Virginia look like 1 year from now?

[Lewdog]

....

Haha so your [sic] a tough guy only if someone else does the work for you? .....

"work"? What work?

If you really are a history teacher, it is a shame that students have to put up with you. No wonder the U.S. education levels are so woeful.

 

[Unkotare]

....

Haha so your [sic] a tough guy only if someone else does the work for you? .....

"work"? What work?

If you really are a history teacher, it is a shame that students have to put up with you. ....

What do you mean?

 

[ding]

I am very excited about Donald Trump's election.
If we come back and talk 1 year from now, how changed will West Virginia be 1 year from now, in terms of the economy? I am from WV and are very excited with the prospect of us having prosperity and filling up the mines with coal workers again.
Please predict how much our unemployment rate will decrease.

I live in WV.

In terms of politics - I think the state will stay red. We're a conservative state and even when Democrat - it was conservative Dems.

The thing is though - the idea of "bringing coal back" is exactly the sort of short-sighted crap that lands us in the frying pan when the energy economy hits a bust and right now - we are in a huge bust, and it's not just due to clean energy regulations.

Coal is finite - that's a given. All the easily and cheaply accessable coal has been extracted. What's left requires more money for less gain to extract or can only be extracted at a very high environmental cost. If it's too expensive to extract, and there is too little profit in it - they're just going to sit on it. What's killing coal more is natural gas and fracking. Gas is cleaner. It's cheaper. It's more plentiful (though, that too is currently in a bust). The problem with the energy industries is that they are constantly going through a boom-bust cycle. That makes it tough to build a sustainable state economy based only on coal or gas or oil. We're in deep trouble now budgetwise because so much of our revenue was based on coal excise tax.

The problem in WV is the same problem other regions that have lost jobs have: automation. It's not just that jobs are sent overseas where labor is cheaper and regulations looser - it's that automation has replaced many operations that human workers formerly performed. So promises of bringing back manufacturing jobs at the rate they once had is not likely to come about. It's the same thing with coal jobs - automation has replaced many of those jobs.

I wish WV hadn't followed Trump's Pied Piper on this. Clinton had better ideas. We can't go back to a dependency on coal, we need to bring in new jobs, new industries and invest in training our workforce to meet those new challenges. Otherwise we are going to be left with ghost towns, an aging population, and little more than McFranchise jobs for your young people. Should they stay.

According to the EIA there's quite a lot of coal remaining to be mined.

How Much Coal Is Left - Energy Explained, Your Guide To Understanding Energy - Energy Information Administration

 

[Preacher]

I am very excited about Donald Trump's election.
If we come back and talk 1 year from now, how changed will West Virginia be 1 year from now, in terms of the economy? I am from WV and are very excited with the prospect of us having prosperity and filling up the mines with coal workers again.
Please predict how much our unemployment rate will decrease.

My wife is from there as well. I hope the wages rise as well as the unemployment dropping. Her brother and uncle are constantly laid off thanks to the war on coal....

 

[ding]

We might export coal to Asia, but by doing so we risk a return of acid rain to North America.

Coal can be cleaned. Wet scrubbers can remove sulfur dioxide which is a major cause of acid rain. From a national security standpoint, it would be a mistake to not keep coal in our energy mix.