Two Ohio coal-fired plants to close, deepening industry decline

[SpankMe]

7. I feel bad for people who are losing their jobs over this

...as well as losing a large part of their identities as hearty coal workers whose profession has spanned generations of their family. For most of us, our professions help define us.

But...in a modern society like ours, things generally move in directions of better, cheaper, cleaner and more efficient. They have to or we wither and die.

We're not crying to bring back the Model-T now that we have Priuses and Teslas. We're not whining to bring back dirigibles, stage coaches and bi-planes now that we have modern jet airliners. We're not trying to bring back the jobs of telephone operators now that we have the Internet and cell phones. Things just move forward. It's almost inevitable.

Well, now it's coal's turn to sit back and let other forms of energy take over. Energy that is cleaner, cheaper and - most importantly - derived from renewable resources. As msanthrope said above, coal jobs aren't coming back. Oh, Trump may bring back a few by brute force. But those will be token coal jobs that'll disappear when Trump leaves office and the pressure is off.

It's been 4 paragraphs and I haven't said it yet: Fuck Donald Trump