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Coal-Dependent States Lose Jobs And Gain Drug Addiction. What To Do?

It could be the cruelest quandary of all: to bless a region with a once-rich natural resource only to have it lose favor decades later to cleaner fuels. The resulting devastation is now occurring in Appalachia, not just economically but also emotionally, as drug addition among local inhabitants is at dangerous levels.

The scourge is especially profound in Central Appalachia because of falling coal demand, thinning coal seams and rising air quality standards — all compounded by the abuse of prescription pain killers. While boom-and-bust cycles are common in resource-rich regions, it feels different this time for the coal laden territory, which has seen its spirit depressed and its people tossed from work.

Throughout the industrial revolution, coal fueled the United States and in doing so, created bustling communities where kids found it more lucrative to skip college and to work in the mines after secondary school — a tradition that would come back to haunt many families in the 21st Century. But despite the political promises that coal will conquer, those jobs are not coming back. What to do?

“The coal industry provides employment opportunities and income, but our results suggest that those opportunities come at the price of overall long-term income growth,” write economists Stratford Douglass of West Virginia University and Anne Walker of the University of Colorado at Denver, in a 2015 paper.

“Rather than promote the coal industry whose growth and decline are largely determined by the world market for coal, our research suggests that state and local policy makers would be well-advised to capture rents during boom times and use them to implement policies that promote long-term economic diversification and accumulation of human capital,” they add.

Consider: The shale gas revolution will create nearly 3 million new U.S. jobs by 2020, of which 1.7 million will be permanent, says consulting firm McKinsey and Company. Those benefits are dispersed around the United States but they have been especially fruitful for the Gulf Coast and the Marcellus Shale region, where 20 percent of the nation’s natural gas production now takes place.

IHS , a global market and economic information company, concurs. It adds that by 2025, nationally, there will be 3.9 million positions directly and indirectly tied to the shale gas and shale oil industries.

Hydraulic fracturing technologies have given natural gas producers access to deposits that had previously been unattainable. Meanwhile such coal-rich states as Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia sit on plush deposits and have been among the beneficiaries.

Source: Forbes.com