But these regulations did not kill coal-fired plants, and rolling them back, as Mr. Trump is doing, will not stop the unforgiving forces of the market, chiefly the switch to cheaper natural gas, and renewables’ increasing competitiveness. These are the forces that have been largely responsible for the decline in mining jobs and the closing, or conversion to natural gas, of hundreds of coal-fired plants.

What miners need are real programs to help transition them to new jobs, not promises of “beautiful, clean coal.” That, incidentally, is not a new promise. Clean coal technology involves turning coal into a gas, then stripping out the carbon dioxide and burying it so it cannot pollute the atmosphere. Many environmental groups (and this board) hoped it would work. It hasn’t. In 2015, the Obama administration finally pulled the plug on a clean coal experiment called FutureGen; then the Southern Company gave up on a clean coal venture in Mississippi after spending billions of dollars.

America’s leverage in world markets has indeed improved, due largely to a spectacular surge in domestic oil and gas production from big shale deposits in Texas and North Dakota. Domestic production recently hit 10 million barrels of crude oil a day, a figure not seen since 1970. Oil imports have steadily dropped. This has helped change the old dynamic in which the United States was forced to rely too heavily on unstable parts of the world for its oil supply.

All this production, however, has a dark side, rarely mentioned in the huzzahs about the 10-million-barrel milestone: the continued carbon-loading of the atmosphere as global temperatures rise, as one extreme weather event follows another, as almost all mainstream scientists say that to avoid a climate catastrophe, the world must leave a big chunk of its fossil fuels in the ground and spend heavily on more benign forms of energy. That is one reason Mr. Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, did not approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s oil sands.

Such concerns are nowhere to be found in the playbook of a man who says that climate change is a hoax. Hence, full speed ahead, at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, with Mr. Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda, and with the overturning of rules that seek to balance conservation and commercial exploitation, and the opening up of nearly all of America’s offshore waters to drilling — whatever the risk, and however small the need.