How can we afford to lose more coal miners?

Re “The price of coal,” Opinion, Jan. 4

Bathsheba Monk appears to be unable to distinguish between supply and demand. She speaks of “appetites of both the mining industry and consumers with our insatiable greed for energy.”

Clearly the mining industry principally provides supply, rather than demand. Are cattle ranchers a significant component of hamburger consumption?

DANIEL D. BERGER

South Pasadena

*

We can grind rocks on Mars using a rover operated from Pasadena. We can perform salvage operations thousands of feet down in the ocean using remote-controlled submersibles. We can take out terrorists from unmanned airplanes flown with a joystick from half a country away.

So what is stopping us from using robotics to take human beings out of harm’s way in our coal mines? The technology exists to operate the machinery already in use in the mines via remote control from the surface.

Sure, people would lose their jobs and a time-honored way of life would disappear in coal mining regions. But maybe it would be better to be alive and looking for a job rather than in an early grave at the bottom of a cold, dark mineshaft.

JON ROWE

Costa Mesa