As he introduced President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden yesterday, Vice-President Mike Pence said the president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord was his way of putting “forgotten men and women” first.

And if anyone had any doubt who those “forgotten” souls were, the president himself departed from his prepared remarks to riff, “I happen to love the coal miners”.

But observers of the energy industry say it’s not that coal miners are forgotten. Instead, a perfect storm of workforce automation, a glut of natural gas, and consumer preferences has combined to make them obsolete.

“There are huge tectonic trends that are almost all mitigating against any near-term recovery of coal,” said Mark Muro, director of policy at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. “It simply is not needed given the onset of extremely cheap and clean natural gas and the onset of renewables.”

On Friday, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn was asked about the administration’s emphasis on employment in a shrinking industry. Cohn told CNBC, “At some point in the cycle, coal will be competitive again. We want to keep coal available, we want to be in the coal business.”

But modern technology – particularly in the large-scale open-pit mining centers of the west, far from the Rust Belt – means that “even if demand for coal returned, the jobs wouldn’t. It’s pretty devastating,” Muro told MarketWatch.

It’s very challenging to break out how many people are employed in any part of the energy industry, in part because there are so many different components to each. There are jobs created in the initial energy generation process, and then there are support categories: manufacturers and installers of rooftop solar panels, for example. The Labor Department classifies many of those installation jobs within the construction industry, for example.

The Labor Department reported earlier this month that 51,000 people were employed in coal mining in May. But BLS doesn’t break out employment in other forms of energy production in any way for comparison.

In January, the outgoing Obama administration Energy Department released a report on energy and employment that showed that over 370,000 people were employed in the solar industry, compared to 86,000 in the coal industry. Over 101,000 people work in the wind power generation industry.

It’s worth noting that solar is so labor-intensive now in part because it’s just gaining a foothold. About 37% of solar electric generation jobs are construction and installation, the Energy Department’s report noted. So it’s likely that over time, solar won’t be as much of a job creator as it is now.

In 2011, Brookings released a substantial research report on what it termed the “clean economy,” which delved more deeply into job categorizations, among other things. The researchers noted that green energy efforts are beneficial in many ways, including by being manufacturing and export intensive. In 2009, the authors wrote, 5.3% of all U.S. goods exports were from “clean economy establishments.”

The clean economy also “offers more opportunities and better pay for low- and middle- skilled workers than the national economy as a whole,” the report noted.

In May, the International Renewable Energy Agency said the number of people working in the renewables sector internationally could more than double in the next 13 years, “more than offsetting fossil-fuel job losses and becoming a major economic driver around the world.”

Read:Clean-energy jobs seen rising to 24 million by 2030, international energy agency says

Muro told MarketWatch that he views Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris accord “a devastating, unnecessary abdication of world leadership. But there is lots of reason to believe that the overall decarbonization of the economy is going to proceed, and that states, regions and corporations are going to assume the mantle of perhaps even more intense efforts to reduce emissions.”

Late Thursday, after Trump’s announcement, prominent CEOs expressed their disappointment with the decision, and many said they would depart from working relationships with Trump. “Industry must now lead,” GE GE, +0.99% chief Jeff Immelt tweeted.

Municipal leaders, including Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and governors of California, New York, and Washington, also responded. Peduto tweeted that Pittsburgh would follow the Paris agreement, and the governors announced the formation of a climate “alliance.”

“While this is an unnecessary blow to U.S. prestige, it needn’t and likely won’t be a major disruption of the US economy,” Muro said. But that’s not to say the national economy faces zero friction. The people left behind as technologies change and jobs are lost deserve more attention, Muro noted.

Far from being a local or corporation-specific problem, “we’re now realizing that there’s massive disruption sweeping through many industries. There is a perennial, constant need for readjustment for all kinds of workers. I think the nation should be very sympathetic, and move to provide far better support, including retraining, mobility subsidies, and wage insurance,” he said.