May 06, 2016
David Brooks used his column today to complain about Hillary Clinton’s lack of imagination. (She will face a candidate in the general election with considerable imagination.) One of his highlights is that she has no plan to deal with the problem faced by coal miners and their communities as a result of the loss of coal mining jobs. He tells readers:
“A few decades ago there were 175,000 coal jobs in the U.S. Now there are 57,000. That economic dislocation has hit local economies in the form of shuttered storefronts and abandoned bank buildings.”
While the numbers are accurate, readers may have been misled about timing. The vast majority of the job loss took place more than two decades ago and had nothing to do with recent measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Jobs in the Coal Mining Industry
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of course this doesn’t change the seriousness of the problem for the workers and communities affected, but it is important that readers be clear on its cause. The effect of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are a relatively minor part of this story.
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