Total Coal Mining Jobs, in Thousands

Is Pruitt at least directionally correct that coal mining has sprung back to life under Trump? That’s a hard case to make. Coal-mining jobs grew by 1,000 in the five months between July and November 2016, when Trump was elected. Coal mining jobs grew by 1,000 in the five months between January and May 2017, when Trump was president. Not much acceleration there.

Total Coal Mining Jobs, in Thousands

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Trump has blamed Barack Obama for the steep decline in coal jobs in his first seven years in office. This is part of a longer trend. The number of people employed in coal mining fell from 178,000 in 1986 to 86,000 when Obama became president, and then declined rapidly in the last eight years. Why?

While the Trump administration focuses on Obama’s environmental regulations, Charles D. Kolstad, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, says a confluence of factors dating back to the 1970s are the better place to look. First, railroad deregulation in the 1970s made it cheaper for coal mined west of the Mississippi—which has been more productive for decades—to be shipped across the country. Since then, western coal output has grown by 200 percent, as more labor-intensive mining east of the Mississippi has declined. Second, new fracking technology and the natural-gas revolution shifted fossil-fuel production away from coal, as solar and wind technologies expanded. Natural gas's share of U.S. electricity has tripled since the late 1980s, growing by almost the exact share that coal has lost. In short, coal’s long decline has several structural causes, and it’s unlikely that environmental policies will dramatically improve the prospects of the industry. “We’re just simply never going to go back to the 1950s and the 1960s in terms of coal-mining jobs,” Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently told Vox.

But there is a broader point here. The Trump administration has held up coal miners and the steel industry as favored classes, worthy beneficiaries of the administration’s “America First” approach to governance. "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," Trump said in a speech defending his decision to pull out of the Paris Accords. But it’s strange to build a national economic policy—much less a global diplomatic policy—around an economic sector that employs just 50,000 people, far less than the number of jobs in the solar industry. In fact, Pittsburgh itself stands as evidence that coal and steel are no longer central to the economy: The city has dramatically changed its industrial mix since the 1970s and its largest employers today include the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Carnegie Mellon University.

When discussing coal jobs, Pruitt didn’t just demonstrate a disturbing carelessness with the truth. What’s worse, these bogus statistics are being used to support a backward policy, in which Trump is retreating from the United States’ global leadership position on climate change to save a handful of jobs in a small, structurally declining industry—when really, the future of economic growth is actually a lot like Pittsburgh’s—in technology, health care, and education.