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Originally Posted by 2Stonedbirds
First and foremost they need gainful employment. Then the complaining stops. The issue is if STEM education will work quickly enough to stop the complaining (it wont) and if clean energy initiatives will provide economic opportunities to those who need it. I doubt they will be able to fill the void left from a coal industry that is bleeding jobs. The mining and logging industry lost over 130,000 jobs in 2015. The complaining isn't because people are a bunch of simpletons, but rather they cant pay the bills.
Coal, for all its warts, is still very much a viable, cheap and reliable means of producing energy.
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But you need a means of transitioning away from coal/logging, etc. These are industries that simply aren't sustainable over the long term if we're to leave any kind of livable environment for 100+ years down the road. And that's where education comes in, so that these people have children who get a solid education that gets them employment going forward, not for tomorrow, but for the next 40 years. It's not simple, but we can't go back to 100 years ago when Pittsburgh was covered in smog and smoke from steel mills and all of WVA was coal mines. That's not sustainable, period.
The biggest issue is that these are initiatives that should have started 20+ years ago, but they didn't, and now we're hitting a breaking point.
Also: Trump and the GOP aren't going to fix the coal industry dying, the logging industry dying, the steel industry dying. They're industries whose best times were in the past, and we need to transition away from them.