If coal is up 85% why are so many miners still out of work and the Governor of WV is asking for financial support to prop up the mining industry?
I know for a fact that coal mining is the highest it's been for a long time. But then the problem is that there's been a war on coal for at least the past 8 years under Obama. It's 85% up from previous numbers.
Coal production was up the first six months of this year quite significantly (though not 85 percent).
In part that’s because coal production last year was absolutely abysmal.
If I recall the charts, they have recovered to 2013 numbers, which were the historical low at the time.
The primary problem in WV is that even if production goes back to, say, 2008 levels (which doesn’t seem possible based on the shift to natural gas), so much of coal mining has become automated that most jobs won’t return.
If you go into coal country, they really aren’t “mining” any longer. They are blowing up mountains and then sifting through the rubble with very large machines.
I’ve never studied the numbers, but I would think you need 1/10th of the miners you would need in the 80s to get the same amount of coal.