More on coal and states

Today's accomplishment: tracking down a bunch of new info on coal-by-state stuff. This led to lots of little observations that interested me, but most importantly, I can start talking a little more intelligently about the importance of coal by state! Sadly, I still don't have the industry-as-a-percent-of-state-income numbers, but I can talk about two other useful measures:

1) Employment: this is just numbers of people actually employed in coal mining, so it's by no means a sum total of all coal-related employment. In fact, even in the coal-heaviest states, as a percent of the workforce, it's still only 2.5% or so. I'm making the assumption that the ranking of states this produces, however, roughly tracks to the ranking that would be produced by a more complete accounting. This yields a list of states of interest as follows:

Effect Seems Highly Likely:
West Virginia
Wyoming

Effect Seems Possible:
Kentucky
North Dakota
Montana
Alabama

Effect Seems Unlikely:
New Mexico
Utah
Pennsylvania
Virginia
Indiana

2) Use of coal for electricity (again, this should be converted to percent of power generated from coal, but... I didn't find the right numbers for that today, so we're going with raw numbers):

Texas
Indiana
Illinois
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Missouri
Kentucky
Michigan
Georgia

Though I clearly need to rerun this with percentages to eliminate the state size issue, it's not a pure restatement of size. California, New York, and Florida fall off the list, while Missouri moves up significantly. Hard to say what this means, other than that CA, NY, and FL don't burn as much coal as the "should" while Missouri burns more.

So, comparing the three lists:

Using coal/oil production as a metric gives us: Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Montana, Alaska, and Louisiana

Using percent of workforce employed in coal/oil yields: West Virginia, Wyoming, Kentucky, North Dakota, Montana, Alabama, Texas, Alaska, Louisiana (I add the final three to account for oil; haven't run the numbers but am pretty confident they'll pan out).


Using raw coal electricity numbers gives, though this list probably isn't very useful in its current form: Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Kentucky, Michigan, Georgia (oil isn't generally burned much for fuel, though I should check to see if there are any exceptional states.)

Once I've got the coal electricity numbers worked out as percentages of total generation, and updated the list, it would be interesting to see if one of the lists predicts voting better than another - though the sample sizes are to small, I suspect, to have any rigorous meaning.