This is only in the legislative sphere, pertaining to whether or not bills get passed, but I think RAN’s work speaks for itself in the corporate arena. Citi, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase all agreed to sit down with RAN to craft environmental policies due to our actions at their branches (though we do use lots of other tactics as well).

In fact, since we’ve dressed as monkeys, dinosaurs, 18th century statesmen, barbecue chefs, and even hazardous material workers, a running joke around the office is that the sillier the costume, the better the policy we get.

You’re certainly correct that there is a cost associated with coal abatement. It will cost money to transition workers away from work in destructive industries, and it’s not clear who will pay for it (my vote: tax carbon and fund a hefty rebate to people in coal-affected communities). But that cost doesn’t go away if we stick with the status quo; in fact, it grows. Who pays if we continue pumping carbon into the atmosphere and destroy our own habitat? Future generations do, many times over, most in communities that are even worse off than coal towns in the United States. Furthermore, almost all of the money made by allowing the coal economy to continue will line the pockets of investors. Allowing coal pollution to continue would be a costly and ineffective way to help the communities that you’re concerned about, not to mention the fact that they’d still be working in a coal mine.

It’s not OK to maintain the status quo until we come up with something better, and the coal industry won’t spontaneously disappear if other kinds of economic development occur in coal-affected communities (although there’s a lot of reason to believe that resource extraction actually inhibits long-term development). Keeping coal on life support until it’s convenient to switch to something else is like taking out a loan against the welfare of our children. Like a sub-prime borrower, you’re eying the low, low introductory rate (keeping the coal industry wheezing along through subsidies and lax environmental policy) and betting that your children and grandchildren will have a way to handle things when the shit hits the fan a couple decades down the line. But unlike with the current mortgage slump, when we default on our debt to the climate, the balance will be extracted from us in human suffering.

They move to the city (or the “ex-urbs”) and become the landless poor or they stay and engage in the drug trade, most often meth and weed. In Humboldt County, California this has gone on for decades, with outsiders from Colombia now controlling the drug trade and bringing in a heavy culture of violence.

The point is, you can’t shut down the coal mines and not (loudly and clearly) propose real alternatives to coal mining at the same time. You will lose whatever real sympathy you deserve and at the same time damage the cause.

You’d better serve the mountains, forests, and trees by bringing non-poluting industries to the mountain communities.

Unfortunately of course, that requires being part of the capitalist system most deadheads and pseudo-punks who make up your support network claim to rail against.

But you can’t have it both ways.