A smarter idea would be to keep telling them that coal's dead and help massively subsidize vocational/trade schools for those that want it to get them set up in other jobs and actually be able to do something else.
Agreed with the last part...
We went through this in Oregon back in the 1980s and 1990s, when entire communities of rural and small town Oregon were hit massively by the inevitable decline in the timber industry driven by decades of over-harvesting of timber on public lands.
As part of the compromise worked out under the Bill Clinton administration, there was significant Federal monies invested in job retraining, support to school districts that were heavily dependent on timber dollars, promotion of "eco-tourism", and other means of mitigating the social impact caused by the dramatic permanent collapse of one of the key pillars of the state's economy.
I see no reason why a similar approach in coal dependent communities would not only be the ethical and right thing to do, since coal is essentially dying as a long term industry mainly as a result of free-market economic forces, and to a lesser extent the growth of renewable energy sources and also be something that in theory Republicans
should support but won't, because they are in the pockets of Big Coal and the Koch brothers.
Granted Clinton did talk about this during the WV primaries to some extent, but it was overshadowed by what appeared to many in WV (And Appalachia in general) as extremely insensitive comments.
