About ten years ago I had a conversation with a teacher from West Virginia. She was lamenting how hard it was to teach in her area because so few of the students were motivated to graduate high school, much less prepare themselves for college or a skilled job. The reality for most of them was that they were going to turn 18, drop out of school, and become coal miners.
I was reminded of this when Sanders was interviewed on Morning Edition during his visit to West Virginia. Sanders admitted that coal was a problem with relation to climate change, and the mortality rate due to the industry, but we had to primarily be concerned with jobs, so he would not support Clinton in the destruction of the industry. Clinton, who I think has the right policy toward the coal mining industry, has apologized for past comments that she wants to destroy it. While I am disappointed that Clinton one again is being unnecessarily politic, she is not going to win West Virginia in the general election, I am more disappointed that a progressive like Sanders is pandering to the climate change deniers for votes that, at this point, do not matter.
To understand why this pandering is destructive, we have to look at the climate change research timeline. I clearly remember in the 80’s when ‘global warming’ was a known phenomenon, and only radicals like Ronald Reagan were willing to trade future generations for present profit. By 1990 the science was secure enough to make climate change a likely and increasing risk. The oil and coal industries see it as a political risk and start the funding of disinformation campaigns. In 1995 the IPCC declares human induced climate change to be probable, and by 1999 a continued disinformation campaign to disregard data is shown to be meaningless. By 2000, the Global Climate Coalition, a organization built soley to deny climate change, began to fall apart, but had suceeded in it’s mission to create a generation of climate change legislators. By 2001 climate change was a known thing, and the IPCC had solid and irrefutable data.
What does this has to do with Sanders pandering to the coal industry and the destruction of the planet? Since 2000 anyone who promotes or has a job in coal is contributing the destruction of the planet. This means that all the mid career coal miners made a choice to ignore science and trade profit for the destruction of the planet. Now, I am not a radical and do not want people to not have jobs, be in coal mining, financing, or retail, but i do think we need to be reasonable and say some jobs are not worth the externalized costs. For coal mining these cost are the rate of increased death of workers and increased health care costs, as well as future destruction due to climate change. The damage is extended because these people how chose a job knowing how destructive it is now want to be employed in that job for the rest of their lives, no matter how short that may be.
It would have been best if fifteen years ago we would have introduced legislation to slowly scale down the coal mining industry in this country. Introduced measures like we did with smoking where is became increasingly less profitable to mine coal. Instead we are in a situation where coal mine executives are going to jail, and stocks are plummeting to penny status. Instead of a controlled contraction, we are looking at a devastating burst of the coal bubble, with many families suffering, and any progressive president being force to shut down the industry in a much less elegant manner to not only save the planet, but also to minimize future harm to families.
What is truly distressing is that Sanders understands this. In the interview he specifically talked about Walmart and how low wages force the US to pay health care and other costs of the workers. What is interesting is he is not willing to take such a hard line on the coal mining industry, which arguable causes orders more magnitude of damage than Wal-Mart. Likewise he is willing to put an entire industry out of business, just because he thinks it is politically prudent. What he does not talk about is the a single branch of a broker employs a dozen people who are not crooked brokers, people who like the coal miners just expect to do an honest days work for an honest days pay, and, unlike the coal miners are not going bankrupt our medical system with lung cancer claims. In fact I wonder how much more likely universal health care would be if we did not have to deal with externalized costs from coal mining?
Here is why it is so hard to make change. The conservatives are making huge sums of money, and the liberals are afraid to kill jobs. In Texas oil is a way to employ otherwise unemployable people. Instead of figuring out what else these people can do, or just stick them on welfare, we continue to train them through petroleum program in high school and continue to have petroleum programs in college. In the process, we guarantee that there will be obligated to provide petroleum jobs for the next 40 years or hear people complaining about how they did what they were supposed to do, but the government let them down.
The saddest part of this is that there is no justification for such pandering. Clinton will have the delegates by California. Any campaigning against Clinton is campaigning for Trump. Trump is going to pander to those who want to have job security for 20 years even if destroys the planet. Clinton is clearly the one who take climate change seriously, and is willing to make the systemic changes to keep future generations from suffering more than they have to.