Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "What Coal Miners Think About Climate Change" video.

  1. Great work guys... this actually goes more towards what I think would be, still a very hard sell, but the actual way forward. It's not only about misinformation, fake news, and political divide by itself. This does have an influence because of positive reinforcement, but aside from very few people, you don't really have full radicalization full spectrum. What you actually have is a ton of people in doubt because there is a lot at stake, and people who even believe on the non radicalized grounded arguments of the "green side", but feel trapped because they see no alternatives to keep going. It's about tons of people whose families, ancestors and whatnot gave out their entire lives dedicated to a career that was hard work, dangerous, to the point of probably having relatives or parents that sacrificed their health and lives, now having to worry about their entire livelihoods and way of life taken away by what they see as an intangible fear, uncertainty, doubt. They just cannot connect with people who never lived that sort of life, and are suddenly coming out to attack what they always saw as a sacrificed life for greater good, which coal mining has always been. This all is not about denying our ancestry, the hard work of people who sacrificed their lives to get us here, the value of industries that still provides power for the vast majority of the world... it's just about the realization that change is needed for us to at least keep and honor the progress we made so far, it's about saying that change is needed for it all not to have been in vain. Protecting future generations from having to start all over again, if they even survive the side-effects of an industry that up until fairly recently in the history of the trade, was seen as a mostly necessary if not outright good thing. It reminds me of another doc on that town that still lives mining... asbestos. F*cking asbestos! You had a whole bunch of townsfolks with relatives or even themselves with some of the worst cases of mesothelioma still defending the mines, the way of life, the practice and material. Exactly because denying it would be tantamount to suicide for them. And really, the only way forward for people in situations like that is offering a shift in focus. Very few coal miners like mining coal, they see it as a necessary sacrifice for the most part. It's very clear in interviews not only in this video but many others. What they like is the fact that it provided them and their families a livelihood, a community, and that the result of their work provided power and a vast chain of jobs and progress for their communities, nations and the world in general. It's just not something you should deny anyone of. Most coal miners also know about the health issues, a lot of them have at least some suspicion that coal mining cannot be good for the environment because they've seen the destruction happening right in front of them, and that the world eventually needs to come up with cleaner methods of power generation and whatnot. It just shouldn't be at the sacrifice of their jobs, livelihoods, towns, people, communities and plans for the future. This is even more serious than just plain NIMBY. You come out to me and say I have to sacrifice the livelihood of my loved ones, I'll tell you the entire world can end tomorrow, I won't do it. Because my world is my community, my family, my city. Worries about "the rest of the world" comes after it, for most people at least. There needs to be a counter proposal and action from representative and leadership positions to, if not make change attractive, at the very least soften the blow enough that it won't just have the effects the interviewees are talking about - towns flattened to the ground, communities dying, entire families left with no prospect for the future. And it just so happens that lots of those places would be great locations for renewables in one form or the other. We have a wave of environmentally conscious people using the fact that we need change, to spew hatred on those "on the other side". This is just plain wrong. If baseline we are just fighting for the future of our existence, and a cleaner future overall, it shouldn't be like that. First and foremost, we only got to this point where people can recognize the side effects of fossil fuels, coal, and other forms of "dirty" energy , only because those forms of energy allowed a measure of progress that would be outright impossible without them. We understand now that dependency on coal and fossil fuel is bad, because coal and fossil fuel allowed us a degree of development to actually reach that conclusion. Which is a bit paradoxical, but it is what it is. Everything from industrialization, transportation, and all sorts of things achieved with modern machinery, electronics and whatnot only got to this point because we had those forms of energy generation in the first place. Scientific understanding and consensus would not be this advanced without our traditional methods of power generation. Societies wouldn't have evolved this far, the ones that had the privilege of evolving I mean, if it wasn't for those forms of power generation. The only thing is that all of that doesn't mean we can get even better, by cleaning things up. It just cannot be at the cost of erasing history, shunning those who sacrificed themselves for us to get here, and ignoring the consequences huge changes like these always have in societies. Even if you have people radicalized against the notion of climate change, or specifically man made climate change... I don't think anyone will argue about efforts to clean up things in general. Forget all these modern notions and arguments... say we are trying to achieve less pollution, less harmful emissions, and forms of power generation that are just plain safer and cleaner for everyone. Lots of people are willing to sacrifice at least some for only that, then it becomes a matter of how much.
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  2. ​@3g0st Very much agreed, and sadly I also don't have answers... It's like the problems are mounting, the evidence that we're gonna pay the ultimate price is getting more apparent, and the way our economic and political systems are setup are still going the wrong way. Little bit of hope I've seen in such cases is clean energy initiatives specifically taking people working in mines and oil rigs and retraining them to work with solar panels and wind turbines... but I do understand this is the exception, not the rule, and it's not only expensive but also takes time. It makes sense on pure logic - we'll need far more renewable projects to cover coal and oil power generation, it's a larger mass of workers needed for those - we just unfortunately don't have the time. There should be government subsidies and incentives for initiatives like these to happen, but it seems that instead of going this way, what we really get is government spending more on military and monopolies/oligopolies. Pressured by future catastrophes fueled by climate change, we'll slowly see a shift I guess... when it becomes obvious to the most ignorant people that we cannot survive without the shift. The question is if there will be enough time left to avoid an extinction level event, since we're already past the point of really big catastrophic events coming up. Humanity as it is now can't even join together to avoid totalitarian regimes from a totally unnecessary war that is massacring innocent people, and electing warmongering leaders that would consciously go this way, so perhaps we've reached the limit... better enjoy life while it lasts...
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