GRAYSVILLE, Pennsylvania -- When coal mine employee John Morecraft heard last Monday that United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts approved of President Joe Biden's plan to move the nation's energy industry away from fossil fuels, Morecraft said he anticipated the news would be misconstrued.
"I knew the story would come across as though all coal miners approved of this deal, with no mention of how (un)representative the UMWA is of the coal miner population," said Morecraft, just before going down for his shift at the Bailey Mine here in Greene County.
"The UMWA in actuality represents a small portion of the people who work in the mines," Morecraft said. "What that means is that deal was not made with the support of most of the people who do the work in the industry."
He is not wrong.
According to the latest energy statistics for the U.S. government, there are 6,758 coal miners working underground in this country today who are members of the UMWA, compared with the 24,820 miners, such as Morecraft, who are not members of the union.
The same goes for the surface-mine workforce, where just over 3,000 are members of the UMWA, compared with the nearly 17,000 who are not.
Once a dominant force that represented virtually everyone working in the entire industry, the UMWA membership today is the smallest portion of the mining workforce.
Had you not really followed the decline of UMWA membership over the decades and were sitting at home watching the news reports and thought, "Oh, wow, the coal miners are now backing Biden's 'climate-justice' infrastructure package; maybe it is not that bad," you were misled.
Morecraft said there's another component of the story many people might miss. When deals like this are struck, or union bosses look the other way when the party they support hurts their jobs, he says it shows how the people who negotiate these deals are entrenched within this administration.
Morecraft does not fit any of the stereotypes of coal miners that our cultural curators in the news, government or Hollywood like to cast. He is a college-educated former history teacher who coached both high school football and basketball until he was laid off from his teaching jobs.
"I was kind of down on my luck, with students and a young family," he said. "Working at the mine was my only way out because there are not too many jobs around here other than coal mining, which is now providing me with a life that I never would have had."
Morecraft says he has been following in detail the proposals in the so-called "infrastructure bill," which presently does include grants or loans to fund carbon capturing. He is not sure if those grants will stay in there: "What I don't understand is why they're not trying to put more money towards carbon-capture sequestration rather than displacing an entire workforce."
Carbon capturing is not embraced by Biden's environmental-justice base. Last year, when the House passed a clean energy package, 18 Democrats, including leftist Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, all voted against it.
And some of the most influential liberal environmental groups also objected to that bill's plan to capture carbon dioxide from coal- and gas-fired plants. For many of these groups, it was viewed as a bargain that only benefits fossil fuel companies.
Morecraft sighed in exasperation.
"These people on the far left won't even entertain the idea of carbon capture," he said. "They just say, 'No, fossil fuels are bad, and we need to go in a different direction,' even though the technology isn't quite there to even sustain the grid, as was shown in Texas this winter."
In February, in the middle of an unexpected deep freeze, 3 million Texans lost their electricity when the state's generating capacity could not meet the sudden demand caused by the plunging temperatures. Pipes froze and burst; people were left without heat and power for days; and the power grid suffered a wholesale collapse.
Morecraft says he loves his job. "I am a fire boss, EMT, and I work in our bunker, which is the main hub of the underground. And it is sort of like a desk job, only in a mine, because I have all of these computers, and I am basically in charge of all the tracking of where all the miners go and also the CO sensors that go off."
"More reporters and elected officials should come and take a look at what we do," he added. "It is not at all what they think; there are no picks and shovels. There are just a lot of misconceptions. There is also a lot of presumption that we don't care about the climate, and that always gets me. Do people not understand that we live, drink, fish, raise our families and enjoy the wildlife right in the same place where the mines are located?
In saying so, Morecraft echoes a frustration that energy workers frequently share.
Salena Zito is a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between. To find out more about Salena and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
15 comments:
eh...the power grid in texas didn't fail because of green energy. the energy companies weren't required to winterize the network, and they didnt. and so it failed in bad weather.
no future in mining. my dad worked the mines in alabama--many college graduates did it because it pays well. too bad that many many miners die young...
nothing to see here-move along.
Everyone should prepare for this folly. There isn’t enough surface area in America to install solar panels to generate the needed power from solar. Wind won’t work during any sort of inclement weather. And it will take 30 years to even start building enough nuclear power generation capacity.
No, it will be a dark winter indeed.
The most in demand items will be a still to make ethanol for fuel.
Never forget what leftist social experiments have done to Jackson.
The union is about the survival of the union, not the workers or the industry that employs them. That makes them easy pawns of politicians and gangsters who can manipulate the leadership with financial reward. It's called selling-out and the only reason to increase membership is to increase the union bargaining power when they sell-out to the politicians and gangsters.
The biggest error with this article is acting like Joe had any involvement with this at all. Uncle Joe is sitting in a room watching reruns of Alf and eating jello. There are other entities at work here.
The coal industry is dead. There is no reason for the right to cater to the dwindling low paying jobs that everyone knows will die without constant bailouts.
As usual, the buggy whip and harness makers show up to screech that nothing will ever replace horses. Oil and coal are ultimate dead ends. Something will replace them as surely as oil and gas replaced horses.
Meanwhile, we like our solar panels. They save us money. Too bad that Trump's China tariffs increased the cost of panels to the point that the Chinese have now bought manufacturing facilities on US soil to produce panels. Google solar panels and see who is producing them in the US.
@3:25
FACT: More Teslas are charged with coal fired power plants than with solar panels
@3:59
Japan is restarting her Nuclear Reactors. Solar is even more of a dead end and money pit than coal and petroleum.... unless you are in cloudless weatherless space.
Tell me how long it takes to charge a Tesla with rooftop solar shingles? Do they even exist yet?
@3:59
Electric cars, as well as steam powered cars, were in the scene when petroleum distillate burning ICEs surpassed horses.
Electric cars are barely more reliable now than they were 100 years ago. Teslas for instance, are leas reliable than a Chevy Malibu.
Visions of Jello and Alf. HAR!
'Shovel 16 tons and what ya get...'
Coal mine BAD
Lithium mine GOOD
Guess which mines CHINA controls?
The real world, now there's a place to live. Some need to visit.
Uncle Joe thinks that electric will replace oil, and he is doing all he can to make that happen. But he ignores the fact that oil is used for a hellofalot more shit than just to run automobiles.
His proposed subsidy of electric cars will fail - because the public is not ready to purchase electric cars. They work great for some purpose, but not for all. Just as natural gas propelled vehicles are great for those that can refuel their vehicles at available ports (Waste Management is a good local example). But for those that want to travel 800 miles a day across country, EVs don't work. Unless of course you are willing to spend several hours in a roadside restaurant (i.e. Cracker Barrell) while you plug into a charging station.
Uncle Joe - excuse me - POTUS, wants to subsidize charging stations until EVs are accepted. The US didn't subsidize local service stations until gasoline was accepted - they didn't build until there was a demand. At that point they cropped up everywhere. Sometimes too many places. Full Serve, sometimes with monkeys in the window to add excitement while the attendants filled your tank, washed your windshield and checked the air in your tires. Now, just self service - which most are happy with..
If and when there is enough demand, either these local stations will add EV charging stations - granted, they will be using electricity produced often by natural oil/gas production- but who is counting those details. And they will be charging batteries with lithium coming from China rather than filling the tanks with oil from the Middle East OR from Middle America.
But - it sounds great. So let's do it. Move on, spend the tax dollars subsidizing the popular issues. Al Gore has told us, as he travels the country leaving on his jet plane, that using those oil products is terrible for all of us (except him, of course.)
I'm all for exploring new processes. And I expect, although not in my short remaining lifetime, that all this electronic vehicle crap will be short lived, soon to be replaced by hydrogen processes.
live long and prosper - y'all
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