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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. In a major departure from convention, we've got just one long interview today.

This was Kate Soeper, whose book Post Growth Living for an alternative hedonism is just out in paperback from Versa.

Before that, a few comments of my own. First, the human fallout of an energy transition.

The new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Josh Blanz, Brigitte Rothtrend, and Erin Trilland, the first and last of the Federal Reserve, the second of the San Francisco Fed,

report in the broad effects of the decline in coal mining on household finances in Appalachia.

Of course, removing coal from our energy mix as rapidly as possible is a top priority if we want to clean up our energy act.

Everything about it is enormously filthy from mining it to burning it. But what are the human costs of an unplanned transition away from it?

To answer those questions, the authors use data from the Credit Reporting Agency Equifax, which New York Fed has been using to report on household finances for several years now.

The Equifax data has broad coverage and is very timely. Though as anyone who has looked at their own credit file knows, it makes mistakes.

Quibbles aside, the trio of economists looks at important measures of household economic well-being. Between 2011 and 2018, a period when total employment in the industry fell by 43% as overall employment rose by 11%.

In counties with a heavy concentration of coal mining.

Coal rich Appalachia has long been one of the poorest parts of the country, with relatively low educational attainment by national standards a gap that has been widening.

A good bit of the reason for this miserable performance is that coal has been in decline for far longer than the last decade or two. It's more like a century.

Coal has become progressively less competitive economically compared to natural gas, as both plant construction and extraction costs have fallen.

The last thanks to fracking, which certainly won't win any environmental awards either.

Even though coal accounted directly for about 2% of employment in what they define as the active coal mining counties, the economic impact of the decline was broader and more severe than that small share would suggest.

For example, credit scores in coal intensive regions were about three points lower than they would have been without the decline.

That may not sound like much, but other researchers have found that even a one-point decline could be economically meaningful.

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