Trump says coal is "a great business." One in three veteran Appalachian miners has black lung
Trump says coal is "a great business." One in three veteran Appalachian miners has black lung Jason Weisberger 9:36 am Wed Aug 5, 2026 Black lung among veteran Appalachian miners is back to 1978 levels, at the same time the Trump administration has put stronger silica-dust protections on hold. After a century of mining, accessing Appalachia's remaining thin coal seams requires cutting through far more quartz-rich rock. This releases silica dust, which is 20 times more toxic than coal dust and scars miners' lungs with fibrotic tissue that cannot be removed.
- ▪Trump says coal is "a great business." One in three veteran Appalachian miners has black lung Jason Weisberger 9:36 am Wed Aug 5, 2026 Black lung among veteran Appalachian miners is back to 1978 levels, at the same time the Trump administra
- ▪After a century of mining, accessing Appalachia's remaining thin coal seams requires cutting through far more quartz-rich rock.
- ▪This releases silica dust, which is 20 times more toxic than coal dust and scars miners' lungs with fibrotic tissue that cannot be removed.
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/05/trump-says-coal-is-a-great-business-one-in-three-veteran-appalachian-miners-has-black-lung.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:36:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T16:45:47.416Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T16:45:47.416Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2s2NVl4-tQAl · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Trump says coal is "a great business." One in three veteran Appalachian miners has black lung Jason Weisberger 9:36 am Wed Aug 5, 2026 Black lung among veteran Appalachian miners is back to 1978 levels, at the same time the Trump administration has put stronger silica-dust protections on hold. After a century of mining, accessing Appalachia's remaining thin coal seams requires cutting through far more quartz-rich rock. This releases silica dust, which is 20 times more toxic than coal dust and scars miners' lungs with fibrotic tissue that cannot be removed. Miners working in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia who've had at least 25 years underground have the worst rate of coal workers' pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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