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By Beatrice Lumpkin
I write about fossil fuel workers with deep anguish because I’ve lived through the tragedy they are trying to avoid. With my steelworker husband and our children, I lived in the steel towns of Gary, Ind., and the South Chicago area of Chicago when the steel mills were working full blast and neighborhoods were thriving.
We met in Buffalo, N.Y., another steel town, where his extended family still lives. All of us went through the agony of the closing of the steel mills, impoverishment of working people, deserted neighborhoods, destroyed families, grass taking over empty lots right on Broadway. We do not want to see this happen to the fossil fuel workers.
Still, this is the future that the banks and fossil fuel companies are planning for these workers, about 200,000 of them. The banks and fossil fuel companies have become obscenely rich from the hard work of their workers and from the huge subsidies the government gives them. They are getting ready to pick up their ill-got gains and run, while they dump the fossil fuel workers.
Switching from fossil fuels has already begun because of the laws of the capitalist market, economist Jeremy Rifkin explains...
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