Life after coal

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the likely collapse of the coal industry. Mark Sumner used to be a coal company executive and now writes for Daily Kos. He reviews the steps the nasty guy is taking in hopes of bringing back coal jobs. Sumner shows again why that isn’t going to happen – after a peak in 2007, coal consumption has dropped 40% and is at 1979 levels. Sumner includes a graph that shows this well.

In contrast, Arthur Nelson, writing for Huffington Post discusses the coal industry in Spain. The last of its mines will close later this month. Spain’s government is paying the equivalent of nearly 300 million dollars over a decade in compensation to miners, retrain the workers for low-carbon jobs, restore the environment.

But workers say that isn’t much money per worker per year. Workers are skeptical the government will actually come up with the money – it won’t start to appear for perhaps six months – and that it won’t make much difference.



Steven Dennis, a reporter for Bloomberg, tweeted that members of Congress are still seeking unpaid interns to work in their offices. He also notes there are zero apartments around Capitol Hill for less than $1000 a month. An unpaid intern can’t afford that – or the intern has another source of income, such as Mom and Dad. Meaning those that can afford to be interns don’t reflect the average American.

So incoming Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has announced she will be paying her interns at least $15 an hour. She has also started publicly shaming other lawmakers, as in most of them, to do the same. I don’t have actual numbers, but it seems lawmakers have the money to pay interns if they wanted to.



Yesterday I shared a scenario in which the GOP in Congress maneuver the nasty guy out of office to install the vice nasty guy, the one who will really help to keep their party in power.

But as the VNG makes his moves behind the scenes (such as angling to install his chief of staff as his boss’s chief of staff) some of the nasty guy’s minions are starting to whisper in his ear that perhaps the VNG is a political liability and should be dropped from the ticket in 2020. It seems the one doing the most whispering is his chief of staff John Kelly. That whispering, or at least the idea that the VNG’s job is in jeopardy, has made it into the news. Melissa McEwan of Shakesville explains:

It's a public shot over the bow at Pence, warning that if he keeps coming for Kelly's job, Kelly will keep coming for his.

These sorts of internecine politics are not something that Trump is capable of managing. So it will just keep getting more toxic, until Trump impetuously picks a side, for reasons that are significantly less than well considered.

And, at that moment, whomever he chooses — John Kelly or Mike Pence — is going to get a lot more powerful. Dangerously so.