Arby's already employs more then the coal industry. Coal is already dead, and they are already dealing with it (poorly).

It feels like it's already mostly gone this way; the vast majority of the coal-associated jobs (those involved in mining) are already gone. Automation plus large closures already gutted the industry.

Yeah.

There are only ~80,000 coal miners in the US now, which is 0.06% of the full-time employee population.

According to wikipedia [1], the figure is 50,000. The peak headcount was 883,000, but due to mechanization, those 50,000 way out-produce those 883,000. Looking at the graph on that page, coal production is down but is still higher than what it was 50 years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...

> the parts of America still dependent on it economically will go with it. We are not ready.

And you'll never be. You didn't learn from the lessons in the UK of the 60s through 80s when output dropped dramatically. It's taken decades of EU investment for places like the Welsh valleys to begin to recover.

There are going to be big bills to the taxpayer. Pensions, retiree health care, site cleanup, etc. The Black Lung Fund which operates off of a coal tax already has a ballooning deficit, we're going to be paying for those people for decades.

I’m ready to breathe clean air though.

Time to retrain the coal workers to build wind turbines instead. We'll need a lot of those in the next ten to twenty years.

Better yet, nuclear plants.

If you look at how long it takes to build a nuclear plant and compare it to the carbon budget we have left you'll find out that you can't build enough nuclear plants in the remaining time.

Americans are just slow. The Japanese and South Koreans can build nuclear plants in a jiffy: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...

Maybe that's why Toshiba thought it was a good idea to buy Westinghouse; that they could better manage American mega projects.

83 plants over twenty years means that we first need to scale up production capabilities for things like pressure vessels (they need gigantic forges to make) because we can even think about building hundreds and hundreds of nuclear power plants in the next twenty years. We also need to train engineers to staff them.

Maybe not full-size plants, but SMRs are a possibility.

https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/the-new-nuclear-option-...

Good luck suddenly building thousands of 500MW reactors over the next ten to twenty years when currently zero are operational.

That's assuming we won't get better at building them. Also, wind/solar have terrible energy density and are very bursty, so it sounds like we're screwed.

Given the history of the industry, that's a good assumption.

Solar and wind are cheap and are getting cheaper, which will make up for a lot of intermittency. If you want a career in energy, look into ways to exploit intermittent cheap sources. There's free money waiting to be picked up if you can do that.

Comparing industries to countries is absurd. What do you even mean by that?