Johnson’s gamble may be rooted largely in faith: faith in regulatory rollbacks to come, faith that the market will only get better under this president’s watch. But the Trump administration’s support of coal isn’t just rhetoric either. Apart from proposing the new coal-buying quotas for energy-grid operators, Trump has eliminated the Stream Protection Rule. The law, intended to protect waterways from coal-mining waste, was considered one of the key environmental measures of the Obama era. The regulation sparked massive backlash across the industry; water treatment is expensive, and the rule promised to slow down an already convoluted approval process for land permits. In February 2017, as one of the first acts of his presidency, Trump signed a bill undoing the law entirely.

It’s the elimination of such regulations that has helped turn miners like Johnson more bullish about reentering the industry. “We know you ‘get it’ and you love America and coal miners,” Johnson wrote recently in a letter to the White House. “Keep fighting for us and we will stand with you.”

In 1990, Johnson helped found the Alabama Coal Co-op, which allows smaller mines like his to pool their coal reserves and compete against the major ones. In the decades before, the state’s mining industry had enjoyed a healthy run, in large part because of the gargantuan presence of U.S. Steel in Birmingham. Even as the local steel industry receded in the mid-1990s, international demand for coal remained high.

Demand fluctuated by the early aughts. And that was normal: Energy markets, especially for the kind of coal used to make steel, have long been unpredictable. But demand for thermal, or steam, coal—used to generate electricity—took a decided hit during the Obama era.

The reason why depends on who you ask. Johnson and others in the coal community argue demand diminished not because mining companies couldn’t compete with natural gas, but because, given the onslaught of new regulations—including carbon-emission controls under the Clean Power Plan—they essentially weren’t allowed to. Ultimately, the reason for thermal coal’s decline is likely a combination of the two. Under the Clean Power Plan’s emission standards, power plants were pressured to look to renewable energy sources and natural gas. And with natural gas cheaper than ever, state public-utility commissions were more willing to acquiesce to those standards, rather than challenge them. So plants across the country began taking their coal units offline.

From 2008 to 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the number of coal mines across the country decreased by roughly half. From 2012 to 2017, miner labor hours declined 39 percent.

Hardest hit were people like Barry Chambers: longtime private contractors who relied on mines for income. Chambers, who’s based in Fairview, Alabama, told me he enjoyed steady work for three different coal companies before the Obama era. He administered ground control and water control, engineered catch ponds, and even contracted some mining work from the companies looking to open new fields. “The Obama administration just killed me,” he said. “It started to where they couldn’t afford to use me no more as a private contractor, and then eventually they shut down altogether.”