Cap and Trade alone will cost the average household in America about $1,800 and this will cost far more:
Peak coal could happen by 2011... if we don't start any more mines!
The paper just released by Tadeusz Patzek at The University of Texas at Austin and Gregory Croft at the University of California, Berkeley is limited to looking at production from existing coal fields and mines, which is expected to start declining after 2011. Of course, this is only a problem if no new coal production is started, something that is not expected for many decades to come.
Total coal-related jobs
There are approximately 174,000 blue-collar, full-time, permanent jobs related to coal in the U.S.: mining (83,000), transportation (31,000), and power plant employment (60,000). (See below for details on each sector.) The U.S. civilian labor force totaled 141,730,000 workers in 2005; thus, permanent blue-collar coal industry employees represent 0.12% of the U.S. workforce.[1] (Compare this percentage with the 1.89% of U.S. workers who worked in coal mining alone in 1920.)
This total does not include indirect employment - workers who are not directly employed in the coal industry, but whose jobs are supported by that industry. It is entirely possible that thousands - even tens of thousands - of workers are indirectly supported entirely by the coal industry. However, the National Coal Association's 1994 estimate that the coal industry directly and indirectly employs around 1.5 million people[2] seems exaggerated. The level of indirect employment is in the low hundreds of thousands - not in the millions.
