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Suggestion, when the mines close, the workers should be given a golden handshake (not the execs as is usual), generous enough to live on for their lives in dignity.

Ideally this should be paid for by the coal mining companies that exploited the coal workers to extract coal and profit, at the cost of the environment and often their worker’s health, the same companies who having made their buck are now pulling out and leaving their workers high and dry. But even if the golden handshake is paid for by the government it seems to me that compared to the $Bns that it costs for a new generation of nuclear power plants (before even considering running costs, waste management costs and decommissioning costs) paying off a few coal miners is a reasonable investment to prevent sudden decline of the coal mining communities and the types of resentment that decline and abandonment causes towards a greener future and the rise of reactionary politics we see on the back of that.

Unusual conclusion of my post. I was suggesting that you’re being pretty callous with respect to people with limited options available to them, who are about to experience some hardship.

You didn’t address the many non American workers that are affected (there is a world of people outside America). Even within America, though training for IT might be a slightly flippant example even talking about training for solar or other programs; for the vast majority of workers the retraining is for jobs that don’t exist within their communities, near their families and responsibilities and is often not appropriate for their skills. It’s nothing to do with being scared of change and everything to do with real world material conditions.

Nobody said anything about banning alternative energy, that’s your moon logic, not mine. I was just suggesting a little compassion for these workers who have provided an important service to society (you want your hospital to have electrical power right?) in unpleasant conditions and who are vilified for wanting to keep earning the money that they need to exist when no other option is given them.

Maybe in America, and that’s with the word maybe doing some heavy lifting.

But if you live in a coal mining town in Columbia or Kazakhstan how many training programs do you think are being paid for to reskill those workers? What other opportunities do you think they are being offered?

And even if you do live in America how realistic do you think “retrain to work in IT” is for a 40yr old coal miner?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support the coal industry at all, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support the workers who get left behind.

Truly the UK is the worst nation.

• A Brit