“Coal” in US politics is not a fossil fuel; it’s an ideology. Coal used to be a very important fuel that powered the engines of expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mining coal back then was difficult, dangerous, and poorly paid, and the people who did it took pride in their barely-compensated toil, the importance of the stuff they ripped out of the ground, and I think even in their perseverance amidst grinding poverty.
Coal hasn’t been an important driver of industry for a long time, and it’s also been a long time since mining the stuff was a job for strong, stoic men who took the elevator thousands of feet down into the mine every day. West Virginia is a political boundary that, by chance, encloses an area where a lot of coal can be found. To extract the coal from under a West Virginia mountain these days, nobody carries their lunch pail deep into the earth each shift. What’s done now is you just demolish the mountain and have a machine pick the coal up from underfoot.
But the coal ideology hasn’t budged for half a century or more. As Paul Krugman observes, “West Virginia thinks it’s a coal state, when in reality it’s mostly a health care state…” And as Mark Cuban has proposed, the entire coal industry could be bought up for a lot less than the value of a single AI company that’s not even ten years old (OpenAI). Cuban calculated that for about $36B, you could buy the coal industry and make sure nobody suffers: owners make a profit, remaining customers get a long transition period, and employees receive full salary until they retire.
But there are people who observe what’s around them and think about it, and then there are people who observe what’s in their mind and think about that. The latter group is driven by ideology. And the ideology around coal is all about ancestors who achieved the kind of nobility that’s sometimes accorded to people who endure jobs and conditions that you’re not sure you could stand. That nobility, which probably didn’t appear until after the lifetimes of those ancestors, is also connected with another ideological idea: that everything used to be better than it is now.
Sure, we live in a time of massive change, and as we imagine our parents, and their parents, and the kinds of lives they had, there’s one underlying thread that we don’t always notice: for them and their time, everything turned out relatively okay. We aren’t sure that’s going to be true for us and our time, so “the good old days” glow with the extra added attraction that we know the story didn’t end there and then. Having lived through some of those “good old days,” take it from me: at the time we felt exactly the same way, had similar fears, and had the same yearning for what were the “good old days” back then.
When I was in elementary school we didn’t have any drills about what to do when some lunatic came into the school and started shooting people. But we definitely did have drills about what to do when the sirens told us the missiles with the atomic bombs were on their way. What we did was not so different, either; basically we tried to hide. Those 1950s and 1960s elementary school desks were pretty solid, but luckily their resistance to atomic explosions was never tested in practice.
My point is that many of the problems we’re facing in our edition of changing times could be solved, sometimes relatively easily, by people who observe what’s around and think about it. But nothing is ever solved by people who observe what’s in their mind and think about that, instead.
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