Deann is a wash-plant hand on the coal-preparation operation I own outside Williamson, West Virginia. She stands at the cyclone feed 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, separating slate from coal with water and breathing what the water cannot hold. She is 44. By the time you read this her coal has lit the lamp in your kitchen, or charged the phone in your hand, or warmed a schoolroom you will never enter. The lamp is yours. The dust in her chest is the rent. The Lord made the lungs. I made the rest of what they do.
I keep $4.20 of every ton she moves. She keeps the dust.
John Yoo wrote this week that the Supreme Court ought to stop Boulder from suing the energy companies that lit Tessie’s lamp. He said China’s emissions are nearly a third of the world’s. He’s correct about the rate. He’s correct that the courtroom is not for the climate. The carbon is a federal question. Congress regulates it. The EPA administers it. Boulder has no claim. Let me show you what the climate is for.
The carbon passes through my hands before it reaches the atmosphere. It starts in the coal seam, and before it becomes a molecule of CO₂ that Boulder wants to litigate, it passes through the dense-medium cyclone at my prep plant. It passes through the wash bay. It passes through Deann.
I have saved $0.31 a ton by not installing the local exhaust on the crusher she tends three bays over. The wet-suppression system on that crusher would cost $42,000 per unit. 4 units on the line. $168,000. Six-month payback at current production. Across the Williamson operation, 4.2 million tons a year, the dry run saves me $1.3 million a year in operating cost. I keep the $1.3 million. Deann keeps the dust. The respirator she wears is the $11.99 paper model. The one that would have saved her is in a closet on the second floor of my office in Charleston. I walk past it on my way to the safe.
Her respirable-dust exposure at the cyclone feed runs 4.8 mg/m³ across a 10-hour shift. OSHA’s permissible exposure limit, corrected for the crystalline-silica content in this seam, is 1.1 mg/m³. She breathes 4.4 times the legal limit. Her last chest film is dated April. I have not requested a copy. The radiologist has. He has written me twice. I have not answered.
Read the next sentence twice.
The enclosed cyclone room — 4,200 square feet of steel and ventilation that would contain the dust at the source — has a bid on my desk. The bid was placed in March 2024. The enclosure costs $183,000. My margin on Deann’s station for the year is $174,720. The enclosure costs 1.05 years of her output. To recoup it I would have to wait 272 shifts — 54 weeks — and at the current turnover rate on the cyclone floor, there is a 40% chance Deann will not be here for 272 shifts. The next Deann will stand in the same dust at the same 4.8 mg/m³ and generate the same $672 a shift. The enclosure will still be on my desk. The dust will still be in the air.
So I kept the $183,000.
$183,000.
The respirators — $94 per unit, replaced every 30 days, for the 28 hands on the cyclone floor — cost $31,584 a year. I haven’t spent that either. The respirators remain unbought. I reupholstered the club chairs at the lodge in September. Full leather. $14,200. They’re comfortable. The cyclone room still doesn’t have an enclosure.
Milo is a forklift hand on the same floor. Same prep plant, same margin, one rung deeper into the same arithmetic. He hauls what Deann washes — 2-ton loads, 40 trips a shift, diesel, in a sealed room where the coal dust and exhaust settle into the same air because the windows won’t open and the ventilation doesn’t reach. The switch to electric forklifts costs $52,000 each. He drives 3. $156,000. The diesel costs me $0.31 per operating hour less than the electric per charge-hour. I keep the $0.31. Milo keeps the exhaust.
Now here is the principle the case was only an example of.
The lawsuit in Boulder is about the end of the chain — the smokestack, the carbon, the molecule in the atmosphere. Yoo is right that the federal government owns that question. I am at the beginning of the chain. Nobody sues the prep plant. Nobody audits the cyclone room. The PEL is a number on a page, and the page is on my desk, next to the enclosure bid, and neither one has moved.
I am the arrangement the regulation was supposed to interrupt. The interruption is ending.
The prophet Amos priced a different commodity in a different century. The arithmetic is the same.
“Hear this, O ye that oppress the poor, and crush the needy, saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; and sell the refuse of the wheat.” — Amos 8:4–6
The ephah was small. The shekel was great. Twenty-eight centuries, and the only thing that changed is the commodity. The refuse of the wheat is the chart I send to the limited partners on the second Tuesday of every quarter.
I am not unusual. I am a curriculum. 31 years ago I stood in a seminar room at the Kellogg School and learned the calculus of substitution: the cheap respirator in place of the right respirator, the dry run in place of the wet run, the lamp in your kitchen in place of the lamp in Deann’s chest. The graduates of that seminar sit in the firms that set your wage. One of them priced your last raise. One of them set the price of the bond that funded the dry run. The best of them run the subtraction faster than I do, and I say that with pride.
The demand for cleaned coal is not declining. I don’t need a forecast to see it — I have a queue of railcars extending through 2031. I haven’t looked past the queue. Someone sent me the cost of the ten-year. It’s in a folder I have not opened.
Deann’s pulmonary function test showed a 22% decline in forced vital capacity over 14 months. Her physician sent the results to my office, as required by the medical surveillance rule for coal dust. I read the letter. I did not order a follow-up. The physician is not required to schedule one unless the employer requests it. I did not request it. The test is not mandatory. The decline is.
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” Genesis 3:19. The Lord is consistent.
Every expense is met on my side of the wall. The water in the river is clean on the page I send. The respirator she wears is $11.99. The lamp in your kitchen is on. The coal is loaded by 6. The barge leaves at dawn.
The dust is still rising. The yield holds.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.