Coal producers digging in heels
About 20 years ago, newspaper publishers began having an uneasy feeling about their future. Millions of people were beginning to connect to the Internet by way of their personal computers, and the idea that someday they might get their news that way – fresh and at any time of day, rather than from their morning newspaper – was scary.
Soon, circulation figures began to drop precipitously, confirming publishers’ fears. An idea began to take hold that newspapers as we knew them – printed on paper – might someday be obsolete.
Now, two decades later, the Internet is the world’s dominant conveyor of information. News, as we could never have imagined it, instant and and consisting of multimedia components, is available to nearly everyone, anywhere and at anytime. Yet, the newspaper industry still exists. How?
Even before the advent of the Internet, the people who ran newspapers realized that the world was changing, that advances in electronics would inevitably make communication faster, easier and cheaper. They realized that the way to keep existing was to change along with the world and to broaden their mission. They began to see themselves not in the newspaper business but rather in the information business.
In short, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Had newspapers dug in their heels, fought change and refused to apply resources toward anything other than columns of words and photos on the printed page, many would not be in business today. By developing their own websites and networks, newspapers were able to retain readers and generate revenue to support the traditional paper. Although fewer people are reading this editorial on paper, just as many are reading it on their computers, phones and other devices, not just here in Western Pennsylvania but all over the world.
The world has been changing in other ways. The atmosphere may have been able to absorb the carbon dioxide produced by human industry a century ago, when the world population had not reached 2 billion people. But now we number 7.3 billion, and are burning not just coal and wood but petroleum in incredible amounts. That Earth’s temperatures are steadily rising is undeniable. This is the new reality that, unfortunately, the coal industry refuses to accept.
Rather than acknowledge that we need to produce electricity more cleanly and diversify, developing cleaner-burning fuel and other less toxic energy sources, the coal industry has dug in its heels, insisting that coal must be burned in order to preserve jobs and keep electricity bills low, regardless of the consequences.
“The Obama EPA has waged an all-out war on coal, promulgating a series of rules and regulations seeking to eliminate the United States coal industry, and the very good jobs, and low cost electricity, which it provides,” Gary Broadbent, a spokesman for Murray Energy, the nation’s largest underground coal producer, said. “Indeed, the lives and livelihoods of entire families in many regions of America are being destroyed.”
The industry assertion that the nation’s economic vitality is dependent of coal is similar to the argument against the abolition of slavery. By the mid 19th century, agriculture, especially the production of tobacco and cotton, was highly dependent on slave labor; freeing the slaves, it was said, would create widespread unemployment and chaos, resulting in uprisings, bloodshed and anarchy.
Southern plantation owners were undeniably dealt a blow by emancipation, but the nation survived and humans were no longer held in bondage.
If coal producers wish to survive, they need to be in the energy business, to embrace and invest in alternative sources of energy, to make coal – and there will still be a market for it for years to come – just one of many divisions that might include wind, solar, gas and geothermal power. They need to look at the future and decide to be a part of it.