Increased automation guarantees a bleak outlook for Trump's promises to coal miners

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Not new.

Increased automation guarantees a bleak outlook for Trump’s promises to coal miners
Devashree Saha and Sifan LiuWednesday, January 25, 2017

President Trump has made empty promises to make the coal industry great again, vowing to reverse decades of the industry’s downward employment trajectory. In previous blog posts (see here and here), we have shown how his promises to put coal miners back to work will be a tall order. Here, we introduce another reason why coal will face an uphill battle: automation.

The problem facing the coal industry is not unique: Automation is rapidly reducing employment in mining and manufacturing. Across a wide range of industries, from car manufacturing to computing, robots or artificial intelligence are increasingly taking over roles traditionally performed by humans. The same is true for coal mining.

More importantly, automation has been eating into coal jobs over a long period of time—years before concerns about climate change led to the environmental regulations that President Trump solely blames for the industry’s decline. Nationwide, employment in the coal mining industry peaked in 1920, when it employed roughly 785,000 people. The more recent decline started in 1980, when the industry employed approximately 242,000 people. By 2000, 15 years before the Environmental Protection Agency first proposed the Clean Power Plan and released new pollution guidelines to cut toxic emissions from power plants, industry employment had dropped to 102,000. By 2015, coal mining had shed 59 percent of its workforce, compared to 1980.



During the same period, coal production grew by 8 percent, to about 897 million short tons in 2015 (23 percent below its 2008 peak). At the same time, coal mining productivity jumped from 1.93 short tons per miner hour in 1980 to 6.28 short tons per miner hour in 2015. .... The coal industry is changing dramatically, with job losses mounting continually. Automation will just add to the pressure the industry faces from a variety of forces. Taking care of affected coal workers will require big-picture thinking on the part of the new administration.

[tonyt53]

1. Having grown up on coal miner's money, worked in one during college, and living in coal country

I have to say that the main threat to job creation is the coal end-users. They make much more money by using gas to generate electricity - about 34%-38% more profit. That doesn't even account for the very expensive yearly maintenance cost associated with coal.