By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
On the campaign trail in 2016, then-candidate Donald J. Trump spent a lot of time trying to win the votes of coal miners by lying to them. He frequently told them he would end the mythical “War on Coal” and somehow magically bring back coal jobs.
Well, here it is in 2018, and now-President Donald J. Trump is still talking about saving coal jobs, even as coal miners watch their coworkers lose jobs to automation and, yes, a reduced need for coal. A lie, no matter how often it is repeated, is still a lie.
So here’s a question raised in an article on the website The Conversation, that has bugged me for quite a while now and seems to have been ignored by most people in the mainstream press and beyond: Why aren’t we trying to train these coal miners for energy jobs of the FUTURE, like solar energy?
There are programs out there that are doing some good, but we keep trying to pretend coal jobs are going to come back, and they simply aren’t.
(It should also be noted that, as one wag put it yesterday, the “War on Coal” is not being waged by wind and solar, but by natural gas. If you’re going to have an enemy, it helps to properly identify it to begin.)
Author Joshua Pierce wrote in his piece on the website “The Conversation”:
Overall, we found that after retraining, technical workers (the vast majority) would make more money in the solar industry than they do in coal. Also note this study was about careers and was done before an uptick in the practice of hiring temporary coal workers. The only downside on salaries we found are that managers and particularly executives would make less in solar than coal. This represents only about 3.2 percent of coal workers that are professional administrators.
So the question remains: Why can’t we do this?
The most logical answer is tradition. As the incomparable Julia Pyper put it (gorgeously) during a Twitter discussion on the topic yesterday:
A guess: when you get up each day in the home you bought, send your kids to school, go to work, say hi to your neighbor — it’s hard to think about what “the next century’s jobs” mean for you & your family. There’s an instinct to preserve what you have.
And I respect that. I truly do. At the same time, however, it’s important that politicians and the like stop lying to these people who, no joke, have literally powered this country for the better part of two centuries. Tell them the truth: that training for jobs in solar would actually net them more money than what they’re making in the coal mines (save for administrators, who would make slightly less). That the training wouldn’t cause that much disruption to their lives. That for many of them, it would be a matter of training for a few weeks ON THE JOB and then they’d be ready to take jobs in the energy industry of the future.
It is sinful that we are telling these people horrible lies just to get their votes. Stop telling them and start training West Virginians for the jobs of the future. We can do this. We MUST do this.