Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement was sometimes presented as the president putting coal workers first.
But the history of coal mining transitions, both in Europe and the US, tells us that failing to anticipate before change comes often finishes badly for workers.
In a new report, authors from the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations and Climate Strategies examined past coal mining declines in five European countries (Spain, the Netherlands, UK, Poland and the Czech Republic) and also in the US.
One of the overarching conclusions is that early anticipation is essential to making a ‘just transition’. Given the scale of the challenge, it is necessary to use all of the available time. Workers must prepare for and move to new jobs, regional economic policy has to be redrawn and companies need to develop new business models.
This can be a long process. However, with anticipation, experience suggests it is possible. For instance, from 1965 to 1990 the Limburg region of the Netherlands – a former coal mining heartland that employed more than 75,000 miners – was able to transition from coal mining to a relatively successful regional economic hub with new industrial activities, with most workers finding reemployment or retiring normally.
However, from a climate policy perspective, we do not have a lot of time. There are very plausible and even quite likely scenarios in which the global demand for coal, including domestic demand in many large coal consuming countries, begins to decline from the coming decade onwards. The just transition is thus matter of urgency for governments and affected stakeholders.
Anticipation and planning is also crucial because, desired or not, once a transition is underway, events can move very quickly, often with severe and long-lasting impacts for workers and regions. Almost everywhere, with the notable exception of Limburg, the failure to prepare and invest in economic alternatives for former mining regions has meant that regional unemployment in mining regions is often significantly higher than the national average.
In southern Poland in the 1990s, a lack of adequate worker reemployment strategies meant that, meant that roughly 40% of former miners were still unemployed 5 years after redundancy. There, as in Spain in the 1990s, workers often faced little option but to retire at age 40 from mining and live off state pensions due to the lack of possibilities to find desirable alternative work.
In the UK, thirty years after the Thatcher government suddenly withdrew support for the industry, many mining regions still only count 50 jobs per hundred working age adults. This has created problems not just for former miners (now retired), but their children too. Low employment can be accompanied by poor educational attainment, lower average wages, higher rates of physical illness, higher suicide rates, higher rates of workers on disability and incapacity benefits.
In the US, failure to anticipate company bankruptcies has meant the pension and health care funds of former miners have been wiped out. The social and economic costs of failing to adequately prepare and implement the transition while time and resources are available can therefore be very high.
Consensus is crucial. While the state and workers may not agree on everything, the first step should be a basic agreement on the need for, and broad terms of, the transition desired. Historically, where there was relative consensus on the need to phase out activities (like in the Limburg region of the Netherlands), the transition strategy tended to show greater political resilience and implement more coherent and comprehensive adjustment strategies over time.
However, forging this consensus needs to be context specific. For example, hard coal mines for exports to global markets may find different arguments for transition convincing to lignite mines that feed local electricity production.
Of course, short-term interests don’t always align between stakeholders and bargaining power is not always evenly distributed. Companies can sometimes have an incentive to sell or abandon a site as quickly as possible, without playing their part in helping workers and local regions shift away from coal. Environmental clean-up from mining is another thing companies typically get out of paying. Governments need to anticipate this and ensure no stakeholder wriggles out of their responsibilities.
Sometimes badly-managed historical transitions led to generous short term economic compensation to gain the acquiescence of workers, but neglected other long term human needs. These often resulted in poor long term outcomes for workers’ long term employability and health and for those of their children. The future employment and employability of young and middle-aged former miners and their children needs to be ensured. That means investing in intergenerational educational attainment, supporting miners with disabilities to find appropriate work and taking professional pride into consideration when designing employee transition programs.
For governments, a just transition requires long-term financial and institutional commitments. But the costs of failing to invest in the transition early enough are clearly much higher. Typically, prior to transitioning out of mining, the cost of supporting an uncompetitive industry is extremely high. For example, in Spain, approximately €22bn is estimated to have been spent in government subsidies on supporting the profitability of mining activities between 1992 and 2014. That’s before any investment in a transition away from coal.
Failure to invest sufficient resources and political will into a transition can lead to the development of extremely costly economic, social and environmental problems. These net costs for governments can quickly grow into several hundreds of thousands per worker, according to the report.
Coal transitions are not easy. However, early anticipation, building consensus among key stakeholders early and investing in the future of workers and regions are vital ingredients of a just transition.
Oliver Sartor is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations and Andrzej Błachowicz is the managing director of Climate Strategies
More
- ‘Nobody wants to be part of a dying culture’: Reddit on the end of coal
- Obama: ‘I didn’t kill coal, gas did’
- Trump: I’ll get miners back to work as US president
- Why coal miners need a moratorium (but can’t ask)

Researchers from Michigan Technological University (MTU) recently published
a study, “Potential Lives Saved by Replacing Coal with Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Production in the U.S.” According to the study, ditching coal in favor of solar power would save nearly 52,000 lives in the United States each year. The deaths arise from such medical conditions as asthma, lung cancer, other pulmonary diseases, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and strokes.
The study also says the cost of saving these lives by investing in solar power would be about $1.1 million each. Nevertheless, the study says, “These results found that for most estimations of the value, saving a life by offsetting coal with PV actually saved money as well, in some cases several million dollars per life. It is concluded that it is profitable to save lives in the U.S. with the substitution of coal-fired electricity with solar power and that the conversion is a substantial health and environmental benefit.”
In other words, by any standards, it is much less expensive to ditch the coal and save the lives.
The MTU study says external costs of use of coal for generating electricity amount to 27¢/kWh, which, added to the levelized cost of electricity provided by Lazard, would make burning coal the most expensive form of power we have, by far, at 33¢/kWh to 41.3¢/kWh.
By contrast, according a CleanTechnica article, the cost of solar-plus-storage in a recent Tucson Electric Company agreement came to only 4.8¢/kWh. Including incentives at 2.1¢/kWh, this comes to 6.9¢/kWh.
So, the question is, should we use coal, at over 33¢/kWh, or switch to solar-plus-storage, at under 7¢/kWh, saving lives and human suffering in the process? More simplistically, even if coal was free and the only costs were the 27¢/kWh of externalities, why would we still use it? Donald? Are you awake?
Of course, there is a cost to ditching coal the study may not have taken into account. Workers in power plants that burn coal are spread all over the country and can fairly easily be helped to find new jobs. But, by contrast, coal miners are concentrated in rather small areas of the country, and the disruption to their lives would possibly mean that they would have to go beyond merely finding new jobs and would need to find new places to live, disrupting community ties and stressing their families.
I would like to offer a solution to this problem.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have about 51,000 coal mining jobs in the U.S. This is a number that is actually only slightly smaller than the number of people killed each year by the material those miners produce.
It is not the miners’ fault that each coal-mining job represents another person killed each year. In fact, the miners are people who have, rather courageously, gone into the pits and shafts, exposing themselves to dangers both of accident and job-caused disease, to supply the rest of us with the electrical power we use. Furthermore, they have, of late, been under constant threat of losing their jobs.
According to an article that appeared in the New York Times in 2011, under the George W. Bush administration, the EPA used a value of $6.8 million on human life, while the FDA set the value at $5 million. We could choose the lower figure here.
Since the number of people killed each year by coal is approximately equal to the number of miners who produce the coal, why not just let the miners go, giving them each the value of one year’s savings of human lives? That would mean that each miner gets $5 million. We could put the money into annuity accounts that would pay, say, 2%, so the miners would get $100,000 per year each to stop working and enjoy their home community, families, good health, and knowing that they have been appreciated by their fellow Americans.
Of course, the current administration might not approve of this idea. Trump has promised to create coal jobs. But he could change his mind and decide that human lives are more important than his promises. After all, his promises never had any value in the past. Besides, I rather think the miners would forgive him.
By Jill Russo, Climate Home ran a story on the need for governments to plan for the end of the coal industry now, or condemn mining communities to generations of poverty and unemployment.
On Reddit thousands of commenters gave their thoughts – including many from the coal mining regions of the US.
President Donald Trump claims to represent coal miners. But commenters from mining families said what their communities really needed was to move beyond coal. They spoke about their grandparents and parents, about the pride and identity that made change a struggle. These views may not be representative, but they are from a rarely heard section of the coal mining community – liberals who just want the best thing for their home towns.
https://singularityhub.com/2017/07/04/7-critical-skills-for-the-jobs-of-the-future/
We live in a world of accelerating change. New industries are constantly being born and old ones are becoming obsolete. A report by the World Economic Forum reveals that almost 65 percent of the jobs elementary school students will be doing in the future do not even exist yet. Both the workforce and our knowledge base are rapidly evolving.
Combined with the effects of technological automation on the workforce, this leaves us with a crucial question: What are the skills future generations will need?
Education expert Tony Wagner has spent a lifetime trying to answer this very question. Through investigating the education sector, interviewing industry leaders and studying the global workforce at large, Wagner has identified seven survival skills of the future. These are skills and mindsets young people absolutely need in order to meet their full potential.
1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
We spend so much time teaching students how to answer questions that we often neglect to teach them how to ask them. Asking questions—and asking good ones—is a foundation of critical thinking. Before you can solve a problem, you must be able to critically analyze and question what is causing it. This is why critical thinking and problem solving are coupled together.
Wagner notes the workforce today is organized very differently than it was a few years ago. What we are seeing are diverse teams working on specific problems, as opposed to specific specialties. Your manager doesn’t have all the answers and solutions—you have to work to find them.
Above all, this skill set builds the very foundation of innovation. We have to have the ability to question the status quo and criticize it before we can innovate and prescribe an alternative.
2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence
One of the major trends today is the rise of the contingent workforce. In the next five years, non-permanent and remote workers are expected to make up 40 percent of the average company’s total workforce. We are even seeing a greater percentage of full-time employees working on the cloud. Multinational corporations are having their teams of employees collaborate at different offices across the planet.
Technology has allowed work and collaboration to transcend geographical boundaries, and that’s truly exciting. However, collaboration across digital networks and with individuals from radically different backgrounds is something our youth needs to be prepared for. According to a New Horizons report on education, we should see an increasing focus on global online collaboration, where “digital tools are used to support interactions around curricular objectives and promote intercultural understanding.”
Within these contexts, leadership among a team is no longer about commanding with top-down authority, but rather about leading by influence. Ultimately, as Wagner points out, “It’s about how citizens make change today in their local communities—by trying to influence diverse groups and then creating alliances of groups who work together toward a common goal.”
3. Agility and Adaptability
We live in a VUCA (Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. Hence, It’s important to be able to adapt and re-define one’s strategy.
In their book, “Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World,” Richard Paul & Dillion Beach note how traditionally our education and work mindset has been designed for routine and fixed procedure. “We learned how to do something once, and then we did it over and over. Learning meant becoming habituated,” they write. “But what is it to learn to continually re-learn? To be comfortable with perpetual re-learning?”
In the post-industrial era, the impact of technology has meant we have to be agile and adaptive to unpredictable consequences of disruption. We may have to learn skills and mindsets on demand and set aside ones that are no longer required.
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurship
Traditionally, initiative has been something students show in spite of or in addition to their schoolwork. For most students, developing a sense of initiative and entrepreneurial skills has often been part of their extracurricular activities. With an emphasis on short-term tests and knowledge, most curricula have not been designed to inspire doers and innovators.
Are we teaching our youth to lead? Are we encouraging them to take initiative? Are we empowering them to solve global challenges? Throughout his research, Wagner has found that even in corporate settings, business leaders are struggling to find employees who consistently “seek out new opportunities, ideas and strategies for improvement.”
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
A study by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills showed that about 89 percent of employer respondents report high school graduate entrants as “deficient” in communication.
Clear communication isn’t just a matter of proper use of language and grammar. In many ways, communicating clearly is an extension of thinking clearly. Can you present your argument persuasively? Can you inspire others with passion? Can you concisely capture the highlights of what you are trying to say? Can you promote yourself or a product?
Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson has famously said “Communication is the most important skill any leader can possess.” Like many, he has noted it is a skill that can be learned and consequently used to open many opportunities.
6. Assessing and Analyzing Information
We now live in the information age. Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. As this infographic shows, this would fill 10 million Blu-ray disks.
While our access to information has dramatically increased, so has our access to misinformation. While navigating the digital world, very few students have been taught how to assess the source and evaluate the content of the information they access. Moreover, this information is continuously evolving as we update our knowledge base faster than ever before.
Furthermore, in the age of fake news, an active and informed citizen will have to be able to assess information from many different sources through a critical lens.
7. Curiosity and Imagination
Curiosity is a powerful driver of new knowledge and innovation. It is by channeling a child-like sense of awe and wonder about the world that we can truly imagine something even better. It takes powerful imagination to envision breakthroughs and then go about executing them. It is the reason Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
We consistently spoon-feed students with information instead of empowering them to ask questions and seek answers. Inquisitiveness and thinking outside the box need to be treated with the same level of importance the school system gives to physics or math.
Transforming the Future of Education
There is a stark contrast between these seven survival skills of the future and the focus of education today. Instead of teaching students to answer questions, we should teach them to ask them. Instead of preparing them for college, we should prepare them for life.
Beyond creating better employees, we must aim to create better leaders and innovators. Doing so will not only radically transform the future of education and the workforce, it will also transform the world we live in.