I guess some dude who posts on here has all of the insider information and facts. Are you supposed to be talking about this in public?
Yep when Obama used the CPP to close coal fired power plants or force them to convert. They made it prohibitively expensive to run a coal plant, and slow walked the permits and approvals. Kind of a pattern with his administration (IRS targeting). Real free market.
I’ve heard Jimmy Brock (CEO of Consol), Bob Murray and other CEOs say that the biggest headwind they faced was the federal government and their persecution of the coal industry under Obama. But I’m sure journalists and forum commenters know more about it than they do.
@pfury @SkyzykS the biggest problem with trying to do business in WV is tort law. It’s an absolute joke. There’s no burden of proof and the judges/juries are so plaintiff friendly it’s insane. They have something like an 85% award rate for medical malpractice. IIRC the rest of the country < 20%. There are doctors and other professionals who refuse to practice in the state. It’s just as bad for business suits.
The state has more 2 bit lawyers than mechanics.
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I think it’s more correct to say that both sides have an element which disdains others but the majority don’t. There are people out there who have an interest in convincing others that the other side has this deep sense of disdain.
Its most likely a sign of maturity, which you seem to lack, but you just never know who you might run into or end up talking to, even face to face.
It has surprised the heck out of me enough times.
(From one of the posted articles):
“The coal industry has stabilized, but it’s not going to come back,” said Blair Zimmerman… a 40-year veteran of the mines who is now the commissioner for Greene County, one of Pennsylvania’s oldest coal regions…
“We need to look at the future.”
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I’ve come to the conclusion that “Obama Killed Coal” is a myth that won’t die.
It just isn’t worth arguing anymore.
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That could be interpreted as a compliment.
I would also be curious as to where “top US CEOs” would rank the US as a whole vs, say, Bangladesh. For some industries at least, I suspect the US would rank well below them. Assuming this is true, what would you have us infer about CEO opinion as a measure of business-friendliness?
And yet by most metrics the people in these areas are far more well off than those in places who may have a better business tax climate. California’s what the 6th or 7th largest economy in the world?
It just doesn’t jive that these suffocating liberal tax areas are horrendous places to be. The East coast and California have the vast majority of people living there. And though conservatives love to compare all these places to Texas they conventiely leave out the places that have had dominant Republican control for so long like the eastern South states and Some Midwest states.
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The Garden State is not on the list?!
There is a ton of drilling and pipeline and supporting industries action down there at this point.
I spent all of last summer and fall on a road crew re-doing a couple of the roads between Waynesburg and W.Va, and Wash. Pa. Massive truck and machinery traffic that the roads were not built to handle.
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China is mining more coal than ever. New mines are opening in Russia, Poland, Uzbekistan, Australia, South Africa, India… etc. The world is going to be mining coal for a long time. Even if the US stops 100%. The subsidized wind and solar cannot compete with: coal, Nat gas, nuclear and hydro… it’s not anywhere near close.
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Well that’s the thing. Pretty large majority of people in the actual coal industry knew that coal was on its way out anyways. It just couldn’t compete in the current world. Even when coal country was booming in WV, it was only miners and small business owners that made decent money. All the corp stuff was nearly ALWAYS elsewhere. Major reason the economies were shit even pre regs.
People like my family are a LARGE part of why WV simply sucks. Beyond the logistical problems, IT and other types of companies aren’t going there either. There’s a very low quality talent pool, in a low income state with drug problems, with basically nothing to do anywhere.
Imo the BIGGEST problem is simply the people. I don’t want to sound like a dick but the test scores can’t ALL be rigged.
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As long as Angela Merkel has wind farms, the coal industry has a friend in Germany.
Super smart euro-globalists. They look so sharp and sensible in the movies & stuff.
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This is the case in a lot of places. My dad is from southeast Kansas a place that used to have a lot of strip mining and a decent economic base. Place has been a cesspool for a while now. Uneducated, drug addicts, and jobs that can’t be filled by quality people there.
I’m not saying these types of things are anyone’s “fault” per se, but the world evolved and some places just didn’t.
People out there love to knock on “city life,” similarly how Sky mentioned when he said they don’t think they have a right to live. It’s a lot simpler than that. All the things that come along with ‘city life’ is something OBVIOUSLY desired by a large chunk of people.
They created a world without those things they didn’t want, yet forgot that society simply values those things more. In a world of the haves vs the have nots, they picked the losing side.
Life is soooooooo not that simple. That food comes from somewhere (not just the grocery store). That energy comes from somewhere too.
One poor dumb old coal miner that I know that lives way out in the hinterlands and owns just a big ole chunk of nothing now receives approximately 850K per quarter for extraction royalties and well leases on his property.
There are thousands of losers like that between the Ohio shale play and New York state. (at least that is the extent of my knowledge of it).
Imagine that.
Right. I don’t want to say “dumb” jobs, but not intellectual jobs. If you look at careers that require higher education (ie, nearly always higher paying) you see a smaller per capita amount of them in WV. This creates an endless effect of “companies don’t show up because no good employees for certain things” and “employees don’t show up because no jobs.”
Which is awesome for him, but what do they do then? Buy nice cars that aren’t made in WV? Send their kids to nice schools that don’t exist in WV? They don’t all go open businesses (because economy sucks), so they’re either spending it on items where out of staters see the benefits, or they sit on it. Neither of which stimulates the WV economy.
There are thousands. But what does that really do for those local economies. You can only buy so much overpriced crap from your local ma&pa shop. Not only that but Walmart is set up in most of those areas to finish off small business anyways.
These are areas that have adamantly REFUSED to become like the city folk they hate. I have no problem with that. Many of them suck. But they forgot all the bells and whistles attached with city folk life are pretty damn nice.
Low income low education areas are dying in the modern world. Whether it’s the middle of detroit or the middle of WV, they’re dying. Regulations or no regulations.
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THANK YOU for posting that, @pfury!
While the culture and demographics of rural WV and inner-city Detroit may differ…the underlying problems are often the same.
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With I could Like this part twice. Spot on.