US coal production

As US coal production has declined, bed-fall deaths have risen, a negative correlation of -0.982 that adds fossil fuel extraction to the inverse bed-fall catalog: the companion series for things that went down while the aging population went up. The mines close, the beds betray, and the chart records both with the mechanical precision of a coefficient mining data from opposite seams.

Coal production declined from about 1.1 billion tons to under 540 million between 2005 and 2021. Bed-fall deaths rose with the aging population. One smoothly declines, the other smoothly rises, and the negative correlation is the mathematical consequence of opposite monotonic trends across seventeen years. Coal declined because of the energy transition; bed falls increased because of demographics.

Seventeen years of less coal and more bed falls is the inverse bed-fall correlation at its most industrial: the mine shaft closes, the bed becomes hazardous, and neither transition was managed as carefully as it should have been. The seam is depleted, the mattress is unsecured, and the coefficient is the same -0.98 it always is when you compare a declining industry to an aging population.