I'll not give the details on it, but one of the things was that before it, there was, as there often is now, a slideshow with photographs of the departed's life, which in this case was certainly highly poignant. That was done to background music, as is also seemingly the norm now.
One of those songs was James McMurtry's Lights of Cheyenne.
I'm not sure how McMurtry is categorized musically. I wouldn't classify him as "Country" music, now that I'm slightly familiar with him, as he seems to me to be more of a sort of folk balladeer. Not a cheesy neo folk balladeer, like Bob Dylan (sorry Dylan fans, but that's how he strikes me), but more of the genuine article like John Prine.
McMurtry is the son of novelist Larry McMurtry whose novels are concentrated on rural, and often historical, Texas. Larry McMurtry wrote what I'd regard as by far the most accurate novel on the atmosphere of modern ranching, Horseman, Pass By, which was made into the very good, but not as good as the book, movie Hud. Some of those descriptive abilities clearly passed on to his son, as they're in Lights of Cheyenne.
Okay, what's this have to do with Gillette and the coal layoffs? Quite a lot.
Lights of Cheyenne does a really good job of describing the lives of dozens, maybe hundreds, of people from this region I've met in lawsuits and in the law in general, both plaintiff's and defendants. I can't quite describe it, but he does in the song.
I should note that when people post such things, the first question is "are you referring to yourself?".
Nope.
Not at all in fact. But rather the people I've met on both sides of litigation.
And frankly a lot of those same people are now out of work in Gillette.
The Houston Chronicle published an article sometime ago trying to describe the reason that Donald Trump won the presidency, and did it by saying that those people were described in the music of James McMurtry. If you wanted to understand them, it maintained, listen to McMurtry.
That's too simplistic and definitely not fully accurate, but there's something to it.
I haven't written about coal for awhile, although there are quite a few items up on this blog about coal and trends applying to it. What surprised me over the last year or so is that coal seemed to stabilize. Then it became clear that it had not. It was still in trouble, but it did look for awhile as if the coal companies might be able to hold on and work their way out of their immediate financial difficulties. Then this came, so apparently not. At least it doesn't look that way. Seven hundred benign laid off at once is a pretty big message.
Where from here? Well nobody knows. But even on a day in which the Tribune leads its headlines with the disaster, in the help wanted a coal mine in Sweetwater County is hiring. So some will make it back into coal jobs. Chances are that these mines won't be closed forever either.
But the trend line is pretty hard to ignore. People who were counting on a change in administration to reverse coal's fortunes must be disappointed and there's no way to realistically related this back to any prior era. It's the era itself. Half of Wyoming's coal production has disappeared over the past decade and a lot of jobs with that. Now more are gone and a lot of them won't be coming back.
In the 1970s John Prine released a song that continued to irritate the giant Peabody Coal Company ever after. It's chorus lamented the disappearance of a town due to mining, laying that at the feet of Peabody in the chorus:
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.
Well, now it's Peabody that seems to be disappearing, at least in terms of being the giant it once was. Yesterday it took Chapter 11 (reorganization) bankruptcy.
Peabody is the largest coal producer in the world. And yet its fortunes have fallen so far and so quickly that over just a few years its value has been estimated to have declined from billions to millions, and now its in bankruptcy. It's coal trains, or rather those of railroads serving Wyoming, heavily laden with Campbell County coal were a common site in parts of Wyoming, but now I'm told that you can find idled locomotives reflecting the decline and a once proposed rail line has now been dropped. Signs that are hard to ignore.
Peabody Coal Company, the world's largest coal producer, and Arch Coal have announced layoffs in the Gillette area which amount to a combined 450 jobs lost. And the losses won't stop there. With that many jobs lost the local economy in Campbell County will be undoubtedly impacted. Additionally, a loss of that many jobs clearly indicates big changes in operations at the mines themselves, and the energy infrastructure in Campbell County, which is what the economy of the county is based on, will be hit. It's unlikely, therefore that the job losses will stop there.
This is a rim news for the area economy. And for the state. School funding is principally based on the coal severance tax. Without ongoing major coal production, the schools are in big trouble.
Moreover, this may reflect such a major shift in the economics of coal that there may never be a return to its former position in the economy, either nationally or locally. Wyomingites have been quick, in some quarters, to blame regulation and the current Administration for coal's demise. One of the interviewed miners blamed the event on regulation and expressed the thought that things wold turn around under a new Presidential administration. Our Superintendent of Public Instruction mentioned budget problems, in a recent op-ed, as being due to "the war on coal". But people shouldn't fool themselves. This likely represents a shift so deep in the economics and culture of coal that current events show an existential change much deeper than merely a current White House discontent with it.
Indeed, even twenty years ago I was told by an energy company executive that "coal is dead". I was surprised by his view at the time, but he was quite definite in his views. But he was expressing an energy sector long term view, at that time, that coal wouldn't survive a switch to other forms of power generation. Ironically natural gas, of which North America has a vast abundance, has really eaten into the coal market and that's not going to change. Power plants take years to build and years to permit. Coal fired plants are being built, they're being retired. This not only won't change overnight, it won't change at all. The coal industry itself pinned its hopes on the Chinese market, which uses a lot of coal, but China also has a lot of coal. The Chinese economy is in the doldrums right now, and that will likely change, but when it does the question is whether China will enter an economic period mirroring Japan's long endured slow economy, or change to a more growth oriented but volatile economy like North America's and Europe's. And a bigger question is whether China, which is under pressure from much of the rest of the world on emissions, will itself move away from coal. It hasn't so far, but there's no guaranty that it will not. Coal, to the extent it retains any popularity (and that's little outside of the coal producing states), is popular only in the US and China. Indeed, in some areas of the US it is now so unpopular that efforts to ship coal by sea to China were opposed in Pacific maritime states, something that had not been worked out at the time the local coal producers went into this slump.
So chances are high that this is a sea change, not a downturn. And if it is, it's one that has huge implications for the state. The state didn't deal with them in the last Legislature, or even really discuss dealing with them. By the next one it will have no choice.
And this morning we learn that Arch Coal, the nation's second biggest coal producer, has filed for bankruptcy. Arch operates Wyoming's Black Thunder Mine.