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10-09-2016 03:43 PM |
A lot of coal miners and coal companies are going out of business. This is partly the result of Obama Administration policies designed to combat climate change, by shifting power-production away from carbon-intensive coal. It's also the result of the fracking boom, which has led to a sharp drop in the price of natural gas. Together, these forces have put coal at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to turning on our lights and powering our factories. A decade and a half ago, more than half the electricity in the U.S. was produced by burning coal. Today that's shrunk to less than a third, and coal continues to lose market share to natural gas and renewable sources of power.
Dozens of U.S. coal companies have filed for bankruptcy protection, including Arch Coal, the parent company of the mine where Bo Copley worked. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has put the Obama Administration's power plant rules on hold temporarily, many utilities continue to shift away from coal for both economic and environmental reasons. Coal mining employment dropped below 75,000 in 2014, with Appalachian mines seeing the steepest declines.
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