By Stephen Macaulay
In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump was barnstorming with a message about coal.
“Clean coal,” he called it. Which, as is sometimes said, “isn’t a thing,” but we will let that go.
Trump would proclaim: “We’re going to get those miners back to work . . . the miners of West Virginia and Pennsylvania . . . Ohio and all over are going to start to work again, believe me.”
“We’re going to have an amazing mining business.”
They believed him. Trump won West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. And how did those miners do? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in November 2016 there were 50,400 people employed in the U.S. coal industry.
How did he do? How many of those people did he get back to “an amazing mining business?”
In September 2020, the number of people involved in the coal-mining industry is 44,500.
Note that this is not a COVID-19 phenomenon. Coal jobs have been on a decline throughout the Trump presidency. What’s more, in October 2019, Murray Energy, the “country’s largest privately held coal miner” filed for Chapter 11 in October 2019, according to NS Energy, which covers the coal industry among other energy-related subjects. It became “the eighth U.S. coal producer to file for bankruptcy in the past year.”
NS Energy noted that company owner Bob Murray “has long advocated for government support for his industry and was a strong critic of the country’s former president Barack Obama, whose time in office he described as ‘eight years of pure hell.’”
“The coal tycoon has long been a supporter of President Donald Trump, and is believed to have played a major role in the reshaping of environmental policies over the past three years… .”
One might change the verb in that statement to “dismantling.”
Still, that did not seem to work out so well. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, renewables, which it defines as “utility-scale solar, wind and hydropower,” is increasingly important. “Renewables have now generated more electricity than coal on 131 days in 2020 — more than three times the 2019 results and with some 80 days left in the year.”
IEEFA concludes, “the data show coal power’s economic viability continuing to shrink … .”
Working people need to take his claims about coal into account when he talks about the jobs he has created and will create. Trump undoubtedly created more wealth for his cronies than for the stalwart men and women who once worked the mines can ever imagine.
—–