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Forget About Coal

It Isn’t Your Father’s Economy



Leo Markowski was a hod carrier.


But the trade he was learning in the union-sweat streets of Chicago was in a state of transition.  New innovations in materials and processes forced changes down to the rank and file. Plaster and Sheetrock; stone, brick and steel. The demand for the traditional hod carrier dropped. He had to adapt or go hungry.


So Leo Markowski put down the hod, and he picked up a ladder and a paintbrush. The new trade provided him with a living and the means to raise a family. He was my grandfather.


We must adapt to the changes in the market. But it was a far easier thing to do 80 years ago in a city that was building a future than it is in the coal fields of Southern Illinois.

  

For generations mining coal was the only smart thing to do for the common man in this region. Good wages and steady work. It was enough to make you overlook the threat of roof falls and the insidious and silent risk of black lung.


But things change — it’s not your grandfather’s economy — and the bottom fell out of the coal industry. Unfortunately, in Southern Illinois, there was no ladder and no paintbrush lying there to be picked up. There still isn’t.


The transition to non-mining work was difficult. The retraining programs were only modestly successful, and most of the miners disappeared into the landscape.


Now comes a new threat: a threat of false hopes.


There has been a lot of talk recently from Washington to Springfield about the revival of the coal industry.  Because the federal Clean Air Act is frequently singled out as the killer of the coal industry, several state and federal energy initiatives call for the lifting of some of these clean air regulations. This is shortsighted.


It was not the Clean Air Act that killed the coal industry. It was common sense. It was science. Coal is dirty to extract and dirty to burn.  Do we suddenly ignore the threats of acid rain and global warming?


It would be one thing if we could burn coal cleanly, but that technology hasn’t found a lot of takers, and it hasn’t been embraced by an industry that is more interested in quick profits and finding loopholes in existing regulations.


The real push for coal’s revival is coming not from the miners themselves but from an industry hungry for profit. Since the energy crisis came to light, the price of western coal has soared. After being stable for 15 years, the price, according to Bloomberg Business News, has more than tripled since February.


The coal industry, eyeing the reserves under Illinois soil, would love a piece of that action. And they can get it, too, if only they can change the rules. But even this is an illusion.


If the clean air rules are relaxed and new mines are opened, this is what we could expect: more mines, more jobs, more pollution, a glutted coal market, plummeting prices, fewer coal mines, fewer jobs. In less than a generation, we’d be back where we were 20 years ago, watching the industry die.


Any surge in coal mine jobs would be a blip on the screen, and in its wake we’d have another mess to clean up, not only with the environment, but also at home. How can we pin the hopes of yet another generation on a dying industry?


All of our children deserve a future of clean air. And a coal miner’s family deserves a future not subject to the whims of Mr. Peabody. To hitch our wagon to the dirty engine of this industry would be to lead astray yet another crop of hard-working people.


For the sake of our future generations, the coal industry should not be exhumed. There is no future in coal. We must build on the stones laid by those who came before. As we learned the hard way less than 20 years ago, coal mining has a shaky foundation. We can’t go back.


Southern Illinois has to get out of the hole and come into the clean air. That is where our future lies. 


— 30 —


This column originally appeared in The Southern Illinoisan.

Collected written works  |  Gary Marx

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