Ahh thanks for the link! I admit I’m coming in at a more anecdotal position of people I know who still live and work in that industry. So it may just be their isolated area that is experiencing a downturn. They may be still acquiring coal but from other sources.

Her and her brother Finneas regularly call out the rich and make political comments. Here’s a recent incident.

Ahh thanks for the picture! I used to live near where they had several of these growing up. We were fed the “clean coal” angle. So many grow up believing that it’s better than other coal and better burning. (clean coal isn’t a thing lmao) The peopel felt better with this angle about it.

It was the northern plains, though. So it was all boring open landscape already. (I referred to it as the moon growing up.) There’s not a lot of people living out there, anyway. Wyoming specifically, though, has environmental regulations on oil, gas, and coal from a beautification standpoint. So yes, they can have these large pits, but once done, they have to turn them into things like ponds/lakes/etc. They can drill for oil/gas as well in the state, but they can only be so many feet/miles between pumpjacks to not ruin the landscape. That type of thing.

It’s been slowing down as an industry, coal that is. One of the major exporting countries that was buying and using coal (had even completely purchased many of the processing plants there in WY) was China. In the last few years, China has largely moved away from using coal as much, so that industry is in decline. They’ve been doing a lot more Solar, Wind, and Hydro. So as long as we keep moving toward that, these big pits will slow. You just need to get other big coal consuming countries onboard.