Listening to this morning's Takeaway interview with a miner regarding lack of safety in the mining industry, and afterwward listening to the hosts reading some email comments that this latest tradgedy should make us as a nation, turn to using solar energy, and that we "value cheap energy rather than human lives" was more than ironic.
The people of the mining community themselves state that mining is a tradition and is valued not only because means a reliable job for generarion after generation of males (rarely females) in each family but mining makes for a sense of "comraderie" among the people of the town.
Not to downplay the sense of loss that family and friends are feeling over this incident, but we need not feel guilty or responsible. If more Americans began to use different forms of energy and if we were to start using robots to go into coal mines ( as one email comment suggested) miners and people of mining towns would be in the greatest uproar. They would be lamenting that there are fewer jobs for people whom go into mines and that robots cannot possibly do a better job than a human being, and that a lot of families in which there have been several generations of miners are now facing modern times in which they have to consider different work when mining is "in their blood," and of course there would be a lot of talk about how a great tradition that "defines the character" of a lot of small towns is dying out. Who knows, there might be unforseeable undesirable results such as a growing trend toward crime or delinquency for young males whom would otherwise have gone into mining work as soon as they turned 17.
No disrespect, those miners died doing a job that they love to do. How many people can do that in a society in whch a majority of people are not as certain about what jobs are available for themselves?