Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 30 Jul 02 - 07:32 PM

And this one of course, whuch I quoted at the start of the thread.

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: katlaughing
Date: 30 Jul 02 - 07:48 PM

Good points, Bill Kennedy, about why are we still doing this.

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: SharonA
Date: 31 Jul 02 - 08:16 AM

Why are we still doing this? Coal provides about 38% of the world's electricity and is used in iron production and nearly 70% of the world's steel production, and it is also the main binding ingredient in concrete, according to The World Coal Institute (http://www.wci-coal.com/web/content.php?menu_id=5.9.1). There's a LOT of industry that would have to be shifted away from coal usage, across the world, before the world would stop mining it.

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: SharonA
Date: 31 Jul 02 - 08:32 AM

Oh, yes, and – on a wry note – I hear on the news that the mining company in Somerset is going to pay those trapped miners overtime for the time they were trapped. Big whoop-de-doo. Not even double-overtime! Not a lot of compensation for all their physican and mental trauma, nor for the delayed-stress symptoms that are sure to follow. Some of the miners have announced already that they're not going back underground (although, as I said before, one guy intends to go back).

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: CapriUni
Date: 31 Jul 02 - 08:39 AM

Yeah, I heard about that overtime thing on the news, too... and it was being presented as if it was this great and generous offer.

Humpf!!

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: GUEST,Bill Kennedy
Date: 31 Jul 02 - 09:29 AM

Just because we use coal for something is not a reason to continue to use coal for something. We have no business generating electricty by burning coal to heat water etc. And the history of coal mining in Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, is one of shame, corruption.

Interesting that one of the miners, when asked why he does it, said it was because it paid $15. an hour, and he couldn't make that much doing anything else. That is at the heart of all the Enron, World Com, etc. problems, and the reason that Capitalism as it is practised today must someday be replaced with another system.

We need to demand a fair living wage, a maximum wage, not a minimum wage, & no private ownership of natural resources, which ultimately belong to the world. Same story about the women in Africa protesting Chevron, and why we are bombing Afghanistan and why we want to invade Iraq. Some oil industry execs want to get their grubby little hands on the oil, pay hardworking people the least they can to do the dangerous and difficult work, do little or nothing for the people who live there, pay off the people in power, people they 'can do business with', ie, corrupt, and ultimately amass as much money as they can, and subvert the peoples' will to their own by buying the government, and get the tax payers to give them a handout at the public trough of corporate welfare to boot, and then move an office off shore so they pay no taxes, but in some cases actually get tax credit refunds! The gall, the greed, the grief.

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: SharonA
Date: 31 Jul 02 - 10:11 AM

Bill, I didn't say the world should use coal. The question was "why are people still doing this?" and my answer was that the world does use so much coal that it would take a long time to retool the world's industry in order for it to use alternative sources of energy.

From what little I've read, it seems that the EU is already so much less dependent on coal than it had been that the coal industry sees its future there as a "challenge" (i.e. they're worried!). So perhaps this is the beginning of progress; a few decades or centuries down the road, the world may not use coal anymore at all. But in the meantime, people will still be "doing this."

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 31 Jul 02 - 08:25 PM

Basically because if you own a coalmine it's not worth anything if you can't get people to dig it out; and if you are in a mining community it's about the only work around.

Money.

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 01 Aug 02 - 05:18 AM

McGofH: "Basically because if you own a coalmine it's not worth anything if you can't get people to dig it out; and if you are in a mining community it's about the only work around." This is why pits in UK are closing, they can't dig it out and still sell it at a profit, when external sources are cheaper. Of course this means that if the requirement for coal does not go away, eventually either prices from abroad will rise, or UK will be the only country left with reserves because of all the closed (but workable) mines

Nigel

Subject: RE: Pennsylvania mine disaster-MIRACLE!!
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Aug 02 - 09:43 AM

Here is a link to PA's Dept of Deep Mining Safety, which is very interesting reading about mining disasters like the Jacobs Creek explosion in the Darr mine in 1908. 239 miners were killed a few days before Christmas.

Also has information about the robber barons/mining wars too:

http://www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/deputate/minres/dms/website/papers/minedisasters.htm