The new mines that are scheduled to open, including in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, are ones that will produce metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel. This coal is used to produce coke, which is then used to blast the furnace to create metal. It’s different from thermal coal, which is burned for steam to produce heat and electricity.

For both kinds of coal, there are limited markets. In the case of coal used to general electricity, that market is steadily shrinking as natural gas and renewable sources replace coal in the marketplace. Coal is being forced out for a simple reason: Cost. It’s not just the cost of coal, it’s the cost of handling coal at the plant, the cost of dealing with coal ash, and the cost of removing ash from emissions. It’s the sheer size of equipment needed to make coal plants practical.

Natural gas, wind, and solar can be added more quickly, more easily scaled to fit needs, expanded more readily, and positioned more flexibly. Coal is simply losing out because it has massive disadvantages.

For a long time, coal was the primary source of power because there was simply no choice. Natural gas fluctuated wildly in both cost and availability. That unreliability limited gas to use in “peaking” plants that could supplement coal or nuclear. Wind and solar were simply too expensive or too experimental to serve as a significant source.

None of that remains true. LIke it or not—and there are a lot of reasons not to like it—fracking has made natural gas cheap and abundant. It will stay that way for at least a decade, if not longer. At the same time, wind and solar have become literally orders of magnitude cheaper and more available. As enormous as the national power grid may be, the pressures are there to drive coal’s percentage of the market down, down, and down. There will not be new coal jobs, simply because there is nowhere to see more coal.

The other trend in coal mining has been long term, ongoing automation. Automation in this case doesn’t mean computerized systems running mines like a robotic factory. It means bigger mechanical equipment in mines that produce tens of millions of tons of coal a year. A single mine in Wyoming produces as much coal as all of Pennsylvania, and Ohio put together. Right next to that mine is another that produces enough to cover Illinois and Indiana. With massive trucks carrying 450 tons and multiple draglines each of which stands as tall as a 15-story building, they simply move more material per person than any mine in the east could ever hope to match.

The biggest factor in killing mining jobs was simply cheaper mining with bigger equipment. That’s what killed 80 percent of all mining jobs in the country before Barack Obama became president.

The result now is that there are fewer coal mining jobs than there are yoga instructors. Fewer coal mining jobs than there are workers at Whole Foods.

The two largest U.S. coal companies are just emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and you’ll hear some good news in terms of their numbers. But it has nothing to do with Trump.

The increased demand for steel and metallurgical coal from China has raised prices worldwide. U.S. coal companies are now emerging from bankruptcy, and some of them are going public with new investors. And the United States now has a coal-friendly administration, with a president looking to push for an infrastructure deal that could increase the domestic demand for steel.

Does that mean a flood of new metallurgical coal jobs in the U.S.? Nope. It means that many large coal mines in Australia are owned by American companies. Those mines will expand production to meet the need in China. So some American corporations will see improved bottom lines, a fact that Trump is sure to note, but the actual coal mining jobs will be on the far side of the world.

Trump won’t create coal jobs. Trump can’t create coal jobs. There are no such jobs. There haven’t been for years in many areas, decades in others. Nothing Trump says about Paris will make them return.