Trump says he resurrected the coal industry but there are fewer miners today than at the beginning of his term

By Jessica Calefati -

On October 13, President Donald Trump returned to Pennsylvania for the first time since his hospitalization for COVID-19 and told supporters at an event in Johnstown that he had revived the country's coal industry.

"We're going to put our great coal miners back to work," Trump said.

We wonder if the president kept a campaign promise he made four years ago to revive the coal industry.

It may have stopped the bleeding, but it hasn't revived the industry.

Before the pandemic, the United States had about the same number of coal miners as when Trump took office, about 50,000.

This stability was a great improvement compared to the great losses that the industry suffered during the administration of President Barack Obama, when the workforce was reduced by 40%.

Still, the resurrection Trump promised never materialized: There are 6,400 fewer miners today than at the beginning of his term.

What happened?

One of Trump's first executive orders repealed the ban on coal mining on federal lands, as well as Obama's plan to cut carbon emissions.

“Come on guys,” Trump told the miners who gathered at the signing ceremony for that order in March 2017, “basically, you know what this is?

You know what it says, right?

They will go back to work ”.

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The Trump administration repealed several environmental rules that had hurt the industry and tried to prevent them from shutting down coal-fired power plants, investing $ 1 billion in the industry to develop smaller infrastructure to more efficiently meet fluctuating demand from the power grid. .

But coal production has dropped 31% since Trump took office, and by some estimates, more than 60 coal-fired power plants have shut down.

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"The coal crash is first and foremost a story of the market," Daniel Kaffine, an economist at the University of Colorado, told The Guardian last month.

"The days when coal produced most of America's electricity will not be back."

And while some coal is still needed to make steel, the practice of burning coal for power is "dying fast," he added.

Utilities continue to prefer the much cheaper natural gas, and there is little that Trump (or any president) can do about it.

More than 20 US power companies, including Duke Energy Corp. and Southern Co., have committed to net zero emissions by the middle of the century and there are no plans to build new coal-fired power plants, according to E&E News.

And since these changes require large capital investments from service companies, they are not easy to undo.

"Removing environmental regulations has not really helped that much, since leaving coal behind is something dictated by the market and not by regulatory factors," said Anna Mikulska, a researcher at Rice University, "the cost of natural gas and renewable energy it has steadily decreased and coal cannot compete ”.

There was a time when coal accounted for more than half of all U.S. electricity generation, but the Energy Information Administration expects that this year coal is already only 18%, for the first time a percentage lower than The renewable energies.

Pennsylvania's mining industry is also suffering.

In April, Consol, the Pittsburgh-area mining giant, cut production at its Enlow Fork mine in Washington County due to low demand.

And in West Virginia, across the border, Longview Power, the most efficient coal-fired power plant in the country, filed for bankruptcy that same month due to the pandemic.

Our rating

Trump said he would put the coal miners back to work.

It stabilized the industry after years of losses under Obama, but then the pandemic began and the resulting crisis accelerated its nosedive.

The loss of 6,400 jobs in recent months in the mining industry goes hand in hand with the shrinking demand for coal from service companies.

Therefore, we

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