coal industry needs an offramp. we need to guarantee pensions to all 30k people working in it who are not likely to reenter the workforce, and let them retire. and there should be government money to start small industries in the towns. something in carbon offsets space would be great. planting trees around closing mines is probably where we should be heading.
companies need to be taken over for pennies on the dollar through eminent domain if necessary. and if some billionaire fund complains about the price per share, they need to be reminded that WHEN government turns off the subsidies, the stock would crash by 90% in like 30 minutes on monday morning. so take it, or leave it.
Coal miners do get (relatively) too much attention though. There’s like 50k coal miners in America and 3 million retail workers. Coal is fucked but there is a much bigger labour issue looming for retails workers.
I imagine maybe to get stuff up north, but in normal times it’s easy enough to cross the border and get a box for much, much cheaper than they are in Canada
Google tells me that Canadian cigarette smuggling is a billion-dollar industry and that it’s possible over 25% of cigarettes smoked in Canada are illegal. I would be curious about how COVID lockdowns have affected the black market.
