And following on this:
I read in the paper this morning that the solar panel industry now employers more people in the US than coal mining.
Indeed, an irony of this is that there's now an effort in some states to tax homeowners who install solar panels, using the logic that they use power on the grid when they cannot generate power on cloudy days. While that's generally true, the law has generally been, or at least was (I haven't kept up on it) that power companies actually had to buy power sent back down the line by domestic solar and wind electrical generation. This has likely been regarded as a minor inconvenience by power companies for a long time, but now they're becoming irritated in some areas, apparently.
Irrespective of that, solar has quietly come a long way in the past 40 years. 40% of German electrical output is now solar (and if they'd continued to allow nuclear power generation, they'd have darned near 100% non emitting power). There's no reason to believe that a high American output isn't similarly possible, and perhaps now even probable.
All of this is hugely important to the state of Wyoming, and of course other energy producing states. With an oil industry that dates back to the 1890s and a coal industry that started when the Union Pacific was first constructed, the state has acclimated itself to the extractive energy industry being the main economic engine of the state. Coal severance taxes, which were at first stoutly opposed by some, have been funding the state government here for over 40 years now. The schools are nearly entirely constructed using money generated from taxes on coal. Coal production has been declining now for several years, and the coal industry's backers have been quite vocal about what they feel should be done to aid the industry, and that it can generate "clean coal". But the long term trends seem hard to ignore at present. Coal is being supplemented in the U.S. as a fuel, in Europe its being supplanted. The trend line in the US seems headed in the same direction unless major technological developments can change the dynamics of the situation. The coal market right now seems to be mostly China, but Pacific coast states and provinces object to the loading of it, and transportation of coal by sea has its own costs and problems. So, in spite of hopes in that quarter, and in spite of efforts by Wyoming's politicians in that direction, the Chinese saving the market seems unlikely.
And, as explored here earlier, it seems difficult not to conclude at this point that the Saudi Arabians have made a similar conclusion about future of petroleum oil, and have decided to keep the price on the floor so that they dominate the market during what they have calculated will be the transition phase. Probably calculating that the beginning of a technological transition from petroleum has commenced and that the process will take about the same amount of time one way or another, by keeping the price low, they'll dominate it during that period of time. In other words, the money is going to go somewhere, and it might as well go to them. By keeping the production high, and selling what they'll have, they'll make the most money possible out of their resource and probably try to use that to transition to some other type of economy. Goodness, knows they need to, as their current culture and economy isn't viable continuing on with its current model.
But for states like Wyoming, which have relied on these industries, the trend line is a bad one for the traditional economy. Agriculture, Extractive industries, and Tourism have been the three legs of the stool of Wyoming's economy. There's a pretty good chance that one of those legs is now broken, and there's no really solid idea of what to do to replace it, if it needs to be.
As a final observation, folks who note things like this here are often branded as "antis". However, as a Wyoming native, and a former crewman on a workover rig, and as a person with a geology degree, I think I can stand on my bonafides. I'm not declaring this as part of a manifesto, but rather observing as a person given to that by training and inclination. We probably need to be pondering these topics here.
