Re:The Future of Coal Country
by acchow on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @06:08PM
(#14649986)
How do other countries deal with this? Or do they have the same problem of local communities extracting federal subsidies for their unsustainable, selfish, local desires?
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Re:The Future of Coal Country
by clock_tower on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @06:38PM
(#14650191)
The latter, at least in Norway -- small settlements propped up by government spending.
http://www.idlewords.com/2010/07/mission_burfjord.htm
Search for "The social center of Burfjord" and read that paragraph and the next. Something like this might be necessary if the US government wants to keep Appalachia populated; I genuinely don't know if I'd support that goal or be indifferent to it.
I know the situation in east Germany a bit. The "solution" is complete denial.
The discussions I observed happen in a way that I can hardly describe otherwise than that coal is some kind of replacement religion for those areas. For a long time (and for some even today) talking about anything beyond coal was considered some form of heresy. By now denial gets increasingly hard, because except one minor expansion all plans for further mines have been cancelled.
They do. But other countries are often not as concentrated as the US is becoming.