The Great Coal Mining Jobs Boom Has Been Postponed

President Donald Trump talked a lot about coal mining during his campaign, and he has kept talking about it since. "We have ended the war on clean coal," he declared in his State of the Union address just this week. I'd take issue with the phrase "clean coal" (more on that later), but it is definitely true that the Trump administration has, with its plans to repeal his predecessor's Clean Power Plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, taken some of the pressure off the coal industry.

So far that has not really equated, though, to putting coal miners back to work, something Trump has pledged to do again and again and again. There was a modest rise in coal mining employment starting in autumn 2016 -- the product mainly of strong global demand for the hot-burning metallurgical coal used in steel manufacturing, which accounts for less than 10 percent of U.S. coal production -- but it seems to have petered out.