Against the odds, The Coal Industry is starting to come back

[SoLongAtlas]

Coal will never fully come back and will be completely gone within a matter of a few decades http://www.mining.com/us-coal-industry-decline-even-2017-ieefa/ and employs fewer people than Arby's https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-surprisingly-small-industries-that-employ-more-people-than-coal/?utm_term=.3a31bacb2009

It's sad for Appalachia but it needs to die due to its harmful impact on global warming and the need for energy diversification.

[SoLongAtlas]

OP, please consider this (and this is 3 years old)
  -WaPo

[SoLongAtlas]

OP, please consider this (and this is 3 years old)

interesting graph - recently i read we are only talking about 50 something thousand people anymore.

just one question...is that graph about national employment?

thought there would be more people employed in the whole of the US selling flowes for example.

It may well be 50K. CNN did a feature on it the other day on Fareed. Will try to find it. Yes, that is the overall national employment in those sectors.

[SoLongAtlas]

"So how many coal miners are there? In the most recent jobs report, the mining industry accounted for 183,300 jobs. But that includes a lot of mining unrelated to coal and a lot of support occupations, too: supervisors, truck drivers and so on. In May 2015, there were 69,460 jobs in coal mining itself — only 15,900 of which were extraction workers or helpers, mining machine operators or earth drillers.

That’s 0.019 percent of the American workforce that month."

Source, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/20/there-are-fewer-coal-miners-than-you-might-realize/?utm_term=.039f52db5e4d

[SoLongAtlas]

The second annual US Energy and Employment Report (USEER) from the US Department of Energy (DOE) showed that in 2016, solar energy employed more people than the traditional coal, gas, and oil combined.



http://www.iflscience.com/environment/solar-employs-more-people-than-oil-coal-and-gas-combined-in-the-us/

Major energy sources and percent shares of U.S. electricity generation at utility-scale facilities in 2016

Natural gas = 33.8%
Coal = 30.4%
Nuclear = 19.7%
Renewables = 14.9%
Hydropower = 6.5%
Wind = 5.6%
Biomass = 1.5%
Solar  = 0.9%
Geothermal = 0.4%

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3


Coal, Natural Gas contribute more than 60% of the energy but provide less than 150K jobs. Solar does around 1% & has 373K jobs.

Can you imagine the amount of jobs created when in 10-15 years solar takes over from coal & natural gas ? This has to be the biggest employment opportunity that has ever come. No wonder China is massively investing in solar, they want to monopolize solar panel manufacture!

Additionally, when a stable/profitable form of energy storage becomes widely available, the number of jobs refitting the US electrical grid to decentralize from a "power plant model" could be in the millions.

That's what most power companies are afraid of. They don't want each house independent or near-independent of the grid. Solar allows you to be off the grid or near to that. Tbh, we should be pumping more money into fusion research not just standard fission. That could really allow us to solve most of the supply problem in the near-term.