Posted on 11/01/2017 2:59:08 PM PDT by central_va
When Mike Sylvester entered a career training center earlier this year in southwestern Pennsylvania, he found more than one hundred federally funded courses covering everything from computer programming to nursing.
He settled instead on something familiar: a coal mining course.
"I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner.
Despite broad consensus about coal's bleak future, a years-long effort to diversify the economy of this hard-hit region away from mining is stumbling, with Obama-era jobs retraining classes undersubscribed and future programs at risk under President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget.
Trump has promised to revive coal by rolling back environmental regulations and moved to repeal Obama-era curbs on carbon emissions from power plants.
"I have a lot of faith in President Trump," Sylvester said.
But hundreds of coal-fired plants have closed in recent years, and cheap natural gas continues to erode domestic demand. The Appalachian region has lost about 33,500 mining jobs since 2011, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Ultram can do is allow the markets to operate correctly and not to store them. But I think Cole still has a bleak future even with the market being free
They’ve got a long wait ahead of them.
Coal’s future is fine. NG will not stay this cheap forever. Some plants can switch between coal and ng.
Your boy Obama tried to kill it but it won’t work.
Even if coal does come back why spend your free training on something you are already familiar with (with the assumption the training is at a basic level) instead of diversifying your skill set?
I have an unemployed renter. She could find work in a minute if she moved. But, the county she lives in has wonderful schools and is beautiful. She doesn’t want to move. She has family close by who can watch the kids.
That’s the choice. Move for work or stay put and unemployed. In my final years after being laid off, I was prepared to move anywhere. But the Obama economy and my (cough) advanced age prevented me from replacing the income I had been making. The only real opportunity I had would have put me in DC where the living cost would have eaten up my income. But as a younger man, I’d have jumped on it and simply kept looking for a better opportunity.
Coal minors are not known for their mental aclarity but for their work ethic.
Mining is being automated. Ive read that we wont need 90% of the workers withun a generation. These coal miners should use those ten years to learn somethung new.
I want an app that automates my freep responses.
Obama didn't need to do what economics was already doing. Natural gas and strip-mined western coal is lot cheaper than deep mined eastern coal.
Custom Staffing: 215 coal mining jobs available
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3599809/posts
It was probably a coal mining class where he would learn how to run the automation. He’s the 10% that will get hired and make more than he did before.
Industries build and decline naturally, but it was dead-wrong for Obama, who was President of the United States, to actively try to destroy an entire industry.
Once shut down I imagine it’s pretty hard to get a mine going again.
I know that is often discussed in terms of steel mills, auto factories, and coal mines, but here in NJ we are losing our young educated/skilled people because companies have been chased out by high taxes. The remaining jobs are mostly McJobs, and companies would rather hire the imported Asians (for white-collar jobs) or Hispanics (for blue-collar jobs). Americans simply won’t work for the low wages offered; that is why these foreign populations are trafficked here. Their lower-middle class standard of living beats what they faced back home, but is totally unacceptable to Americans with any hope of having a family or even owning/insuring a car.
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