Why is Coal Still Mined? Insights from Asbestos and the Structures of Risk Invisibilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The deleterious consequences of coal mining are well known, but little attention is paid to the most egregious of all: black lung disease. The 21st-century resurgence of black lung sheds light onto the persistent inability of regulations to address this problem. Despite this, voices seeking the fading out of coal mining based on health concerns are scarce. This paper examines why coal is still mined in the United States through a comparison with asbestos mining in Quebec, Canada, which ended in 2013 for similar health reasons. Drawing on archival research, I argue that the persistence of coal is the result of greater risk invisibilization. I rely on a structural approach to risk construction and highlight how macro-level factors shape the social construction of risks downstream. Three factors explain the unique trajectory of coal: labor’s cooptation of black lung activism, the bottom-up formulation of the federal regulatory framework, and the concentration of health risks within mining communities. This paper specifies conditions under which certain regulatory issues can become visible and lead to reforms, while others remain on the margins of the political agenda.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".