By now more or less everyone is aware that there has been a disastrous mining accident in West Virginia this week.
There are many people dead, and at the time this is written it is still possible that survivors might be found.
We don't know much about why these disasters happen, for the most part, and we don't really understand how to make things better.
Today, I'm here to fix some of that.
By the end of today's story, you'll understand a lot more about why people die in mines than you do now-and as an extra bonus, we'll also discuss a radical new way to bring market forces into the process of making mines safer.
(Outstanding reporting, Bob. Thanks for sharing it here at Texas Kaos. - promoted by boadicea)
A rumble a loud crack, like thunder, rocks, dirt and chocking dust rain down. A rock fall is imminent. So what is a miner to do? "You run for your life," said Tim Miller, who toiled in Kentucky's mines for more than two decades.
... The goal is to eliminate the coal industry. Of course the goal is to eliminate the coal industry. Coal is filthy. It destroys ecosystems to dig it up. It kills the people who work around it. Coal plants throw particulates in the air and causes respiratory ailments. They throw mercury in the water and causes birth defects. They throw CO2 into the atmosphere and cause global warming. The coal industry corrupts the political process. It lies to the public about global warming, and mine safety, and coal reserves, and everything else. It leeches money and opportunity out of the states where it is based. The only reason we think of coal as "cheap" is that we don't tally all those costs in the debit column. From David Roberts Coal is the enemy of the human race...
During the winter of my fourteenth year I had a part time job. Every morning I would get up at 5 o"clock and walk up the hill to the ancient brick home of an elderly widow where I would descend to the dimly lit basement and remove the previous day's supply of clinkers from the firebox of an equally ancient and frightening looking furnace, shovel in a supply of fresh coal and get a good fire roaring. That was it, home to shower and head to school. She payed me two dollars a day and in 1958 when a gallon of gas was a quarter, that was a good sum of money. That is also the sum total of my life's experience with coal.
David Roberts wrote the brief but engaging piece quoted above earlier in the summer at Huff Post, he wrote his rant in reference to a coal industry mogul who for several months had been preaching to anyone who would listen about the evils that congress, in league with environmentalists, were plotting to perpetrate on the coal industry. I had heard the name of the subject of his rant before but at the time I didn't recognize it.
It wasn't until two weeks ago when a mine in central Utah's Emery County in Crandall Canyon, one of the deepest coal mines in the country collapsed, burying six miners 1500 to 1800 feet below the surface and 3 1/2 miles from the entrance point, that the name and the reason the it rang a bell popped back into my mind.
Robert Murray. The name was familiar because I had read a Washington Post article about his testimony before a congressional committee in the spring in which he took congress to task over the Clean Air Act of 1990 and declaimed on the perils of listening to the purveyors of Global warming science, which he has since referred to as "global goofiness." (as quoted below in the New York Sun)
