Reply #26: When it comes to the best solutions... [View All]

[Silent3]

...off the top of my head, I'd go with these:

(1) Stop using so much coal -- it's not good for the environment anyway.
(2) For whatever coal use remains, automate the mining process so few if any humans are exposed to danger and an unhealthy environment. That would mean a loss of jobs, however, and no guarantee other sectors of economy will offer replacement jobs.
(3) Improve safety and health conditions for miners.

If practicality has little or nothing to do with the solutions we're putting on the table, I'd go with the above list well before instituting a strange system of trying to financially compensate people for how much of their life and health they give away.

If we are going for practicality and feasibility, the above list should work pretty well too, in reverse order for the short term. Long term, we don't really have a choice about solution 1. I'd consider it fairly likely that in the next 25 years we'll see advancements in automation which make robotic coal mining (solution 2) cheaper than using human labor. With (1) and (2) taken care of, (3) hopefully becomes a moot point.