Why President Trump’s Coal Comeback Keeps Falling Short
Picking battles in which the odds are stacked against you isn’t smart policy, and it might not be smart politics, either.
Promises won’t make America run on coal again.
Photographer: Ron Sachs/Pool/Getty Images
Remember that big coal-mining comeback promised by President Donald Trump? Well, employment in the sector did go up by 400 jobs in November to an estimated 53,200, the highest level since February 2016.1 The number has been oscillating in a narrow band around 53,000 since April, though, and in the grand scheme of things, even the 2,500 coal-mining jobs added since Trump took office in January 2017 really don’t amount to much.
Employment in coal mining peaked in the U.S. in 1923, at 862,536.2 Most of the decline since then has been about increasing productivity: Mining companies kept digging more and more coal out of the ground but did it with fewer and fewer people. They accomplished this in large part by shifting the core of the industry from Appalachia to the western U.S., where less-labor-intensive surface mining predominates.