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Coal has been good to Donald Trump. He began denouncing Obamas war on coal long before he launched his run for President, apparently liked how it played, and has not stopped banging the drum since. Last month, when he announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord, he dwelled on the hardships that the agreement would allegedly impose on the American coal industry, adding, and I happen to love the coal miners. (The White House went a step further last week, suggesting that the United Nations Green Climate Fund be used to build power plants fired by clean coal.) The Washington Post reported recently that candidate Trump made two hundred and ninety-four references to coal miners during his campaign. He never appeared to know anything about the coal industry, as he promised to bring back jobs that every miner knows are not coming back, but his shtick drove Democrats and environmentalists crazy, which seemed to be good enough for him. It also helped to tip Pennsylvania and Ohio into his column on Election Day.

The symbolic appeal is obvious. Coal miners are hardworking, courageous, the salt of the American earth. Their heyday was the industrial age, the time before political correctness, which Trump has vowed to re-conjure. Thanks to a powerful union, built through brutal struggle (the history of American mining contains more than its share of massacres), the wages of modern miners are excellent. Strong communities could be built around them. The work is dangerous, its health consequences often disastrous. But the more general disaster came when the jobs began to vanish. Mining employment peaked at more than eight hundred thousand, in 1923. There were still a quarter of a million jobs in the early nineteen-eighties. Today, as Eliza Griswold recently wrote , there are fifty thousand. Its easy, but inaccurate, to blame the Obama Administrations Clean Power Plan or its efforts to mitigate environmental damage for the inexorable decline of the coal industry. The main culprits are automation, cheap natural gas, and, to a lesser extent, the development of renewable energy. Coal simply cannot compete, and coal-fired power plants have been closing by the hundreds.

Inaccuracy has never stopped President Trump, of course, who has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency (which needs a new name) to gut the Clean Power Plan. He has signed executive orders lifting a temporary ban on federal coal leases and removing a rule protecting streams near coal mines, and last month he took credit for the opening of a new coal mine in Pennsylvania that he and his Administration had nothing to do with. The mine, southeast of Pittsburgh, had been planned for years, and construction began last September (during a different Presidency), in response to a global shortage of what is known as metallurgical coal. This is the coal thats used to make steel. Production delays in Australia and China have created a demand spike, and the Pennsylvania mine, called Acosta, was developed to fill that demand. The Acosta mine will create up to a hundred much-needed jobs. But, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, exports of metallurgical coal , which accounts for only ten per cent of U.S. productionelectricity is generated by thermal coalare not expected to rise over the long term.

Nonetheless, Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, has been so eager to get into the coal-promotion act that he claimed, on Meet the Press, that the Trump Administration had created fifty thousand new jobs in the coal sector. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the increase in the number of coal jobs since the end of last year is thirteen hundred. That rise is probably due to the increased demand for metallurgical coal. Indeed, during the last months of the Obama Administration, coal jobs had been rising at a slightly faster rate, probably for the same reason. The federal government does not create coal jobs.

One of the many funny-painful moments of the 2016 campaign came during a Trump rally last May in Charleston, West Virginia. Trump was presented with a white miners hardhat, which he reluctantly put on. Then he began to mug, very strangely, with pursed lips and thumbs raised, seemingly playing a pouting club character of some type. He pantomimed a couple of swipes with a shovelthat thing that miners presumably do. Afterward, he fussed for a long time with his hair, asking the crowd for reassurance that it looked okay after the hat interlude. The crowd cheered.

Trumps romance with coal country may be reaching its natural end. Since 1965, a federal program called the Appalachian Regional Commission has spent twenty-three billion dollars helping hundreds of counties in thirteen states cope with the decline of the coal industry, funding job retraining, land reclamation, and desperately needed social services. A.R.C. is credited with having helped to cut regional poverty rates almost in half, double the percentage of high-school graduates, and reduce infant mortality by two-thirds. Trumps first proposed budget, released in March, eliminates A.R.C. Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader (and the senior senator from Kentucky), quickly said that that was out of the question. Trump did not, as far as we know, respond. A more recent, more detailed White House federal budget again eliminates A.R.C. It was sweet while it lasted.

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Is Donald Trump Already Forsaking Coal Country? - The New Yorker