Seeing what's coming doesn't make it much easier when it arrives.

I've had a couple of experiences in recent weeks of having read the tea leaves really correctly on big issues, only to see them arrive as I said they would, and then come as surprises to most when they do.

Most folks don't analyze stuff all the time, but that's a primary aspect of being a lawyer.  More frustrating that that, a lot of people who do analyze things analyze the with the goal of trying to boost a view they have, rather than find out the truth of a thing.

The recent stories on the demise of coal have had that frustrating nature.  Folks who stop in here are aware that I've been saying coal was on the ropes for months and months.  I've known that for years, indeed now decades.  It wasn't going to be able to keep on keeping on.  The truth of that was there.

Part of that is that, as noted, I try to analyze things for what they are, not for what I hope them to be, and no other conclusion seemed possible to reach.  I think, quite frankly, that a lot of people in government and industry had reached the same conclusion, and I know that at least some major energy players did.  When an outfit like British Petroleum dumped coal a couple of decades ago they were betting on it being a bad bet.  And just because an outfit like Peabody stayed in it doesn't mean that they were convinced .  R. T. Frazier, the successful saddle maker in Pueblo Colorado of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries reportedly told everyone that the thought the age of the horse was over, but that didn't mean that he quit making saddles.

I should note that I have personal experience with this.  I've posted it elsewhere but when I was a geology student my focus was on coal. That was because the petroleum industry fell into what must be regarded as an economic depression and there was hope still for coal.  I was about the only one focusing on it.  No matter, in the downturn of the 80s coal was hit too and some mines were closed.  No jobs.  I spent a year looking for work unsuccessfully and then headed back to school.  So, this is familiar to me personally.

And partially for that reason, I'm pretty sure I know what is going on.

In today's local Tribune a series has started that will focus on the plight of the coal industry. Good for the paper, but quite frankly this is like reporting on the crash after the cars have collided.  Still that should be done.

One thing that should not be done, however, is to give false hopes to people.  The Tribune interviewed all of those running for the open U.S. Congress seat, and that's what motivated this post.

Politicians shouldn't offer false hopes.  Indeed, doing that is the very thing that has caused the rebellion in the GOP and the Democratic Party this year leading two radical candidates to do so well, so far.  Feeding into the hopes of a desperate group of people and a desperate state shouldn't be done, if it can't produce results.   When that blows up, it's a disaster.

Let's be honest.  Everyone who speaks of regulations being the cause of this is flat out wrong.  It isn't.  Coal was able to work around the regulations.

Everyone who is holding out hope for "clean coal technology" to reverse this is pinning their hopes on a long shot.  It's worth looking into, and developing, but it is a long shot.

Everyone who states that climate change isn't real and shouldn't impact coal is swimming against a global tide.  It doesn't matter if it is real or not in this context.  The majority of people in the industrial world feel that way and what Wyomingites feel is really irrelevant given our numbers.  Only in the United States and Australia is there a view questioning this and even if the US and Australian critics are 100% right, the movement of the world opinion in this direction can't be criticized down.  The industry, if any aspect of it is to survive, has to work around and with this.  If the Democrats, moreover, take the White House in the Fall, again, and right now it appears highly likely they will, this argument will be effectively over in the context which it presently exists, even if the GOP retains the Senate.

And finally, people need to be honest about what killed coal.  Natural gas did it.

Gas is cheaper and cleaner in every sense.  It has a market advantage on coal and that's the simple fact of it.  Added to that, a movement towards "green" energy has cut into coal as well.  If nuclear power revived, which it really should as it is efficient and the greenest of them all, the death of coal would become all the more rapid.

When a person states things like this, they're stating the truth.  It's not gloating over the demise of coal to note the reality of what's happening, and it doesn't lessen the human tragedy of the lost jobs to note the truth. Indeed, it's kinder than spinning fantasies about the revival of coal which will not be happening.

So what do our candidates say.  Well, only the Democratic candid date, Ryan Greene, who actually works in the industry, is facing it by looking square into it with open eyes.  According to today's Casper Star Tribune, he stated:

Regulations are a problem but the bigger issue is the lack of demand, he said. To address that, Greene said he will work to curb coal imports from other countries, support federal research into clean coal technologies and support expanding extraction of Wyoming’s lithium deposits to keep mining jobs in the state.

Green believes global climate change is occurring.

The regulations have “been a long time coming,” he said. “This hasn’t just happened overnight. But if we send a talker to Congress, all we’re going to get is more talk. And talk is cheap.”

Talk is cheap, but Greene gets high marks here for facing this honestly with unpopular views.  He has almost no chance of winning, and being pessimistic about coal isn't going to help him, but at least he didn't shy away from unpopular views.

In contrast, Liz Cheney spoke only of regulations and rolling them back.  Well, you can't roll back the power plants converted to gas or the new ones built only for gas.

Tim Stubson, the other GOP candidate who stands a good chance of winning, spoke of clean coal technologies, but Stubson was much more hesitant in his views. He didn't really promise anything, and he probably shouldn't. That suggest to me that Stubson, a Casper lawyer, knows what I've stated here.  In order for coal to survive it has to survive in a market where it competes with gas and it becomes green. Hence his support for "clean coal" technology but hence, also, his reluctance to say he's optimistic.  And hence his lukewarm statement on regulation. Like Greene, I suspect he knows that market and social forces are against a coal revival.

None of the Wyoming candidates are going to oppose "clean coal" technology, nor should they. But we have to accept that there's a good chance they'll come to nothing.  Moreover, we have to also accept that if they do come to something, it might take so long that coal will be dead by then.  And if that technology is ever used, it'll be used somewhere else, not here, or in a future market that we're not in today.  But working on it is worthwhile.

But in doing that, we also have to accept that we're urging something that we claim we oppose. That is, here in free market Wyoming we want the government to fund research to help an industry.  That's pretty socialistic, and that makes a lot of our statements about economies out to be baloney, when it applies to directly to us.  But that's okay too, if we're honest about it.

All this begs the question if we can be angry.  And the answer here, I think, is yes. But unfortunately, that anger is going to have to be directed close to home.  When the oil crash of the 1980s came we vowed to diversify our economy so that when oil came back, as we hoped it would, and it did, we wouldn't be hurt in any future crashes.  We really didn't do that.  And with coal, if we were going to invest in its future, the time to do that was starting in the 1980s, or at least the 1990s, when the situation we are now facing was already becoming evident.  Waiting as late as we did was a mistake.

Oil will stabilize sooner or later at some price that we'll be able to live with, although it's fallen again this past week.  Natural Gas is here to stay.  Uranium is something we should be planning for now, but are ignoring.  The day might just be too late for coal.  But we didn't do much about any of these things when we could have.