“Given serious concerns raised about the federal coal program, we’re taking the prudent step to hit pause on approving significant new leases,” said Sally Jewell, secretary of the Department of the Interior, in a statement. At least until the review ends, ongoing coal-mining projects on federal land can continue.

Obama previewed the news on Tuesday during his State of the Union address, when he promised to “push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.”

Climate-activism groups largely celebrated the news.

“We opposed and defeated the Keystone XL pipeline because it would take more tar sands out of the ground and have a disastrous impact on the climate. The same goes for fossil-fuel development on our public lands,” said Jason Kowalski, a policy director at 350.org, in a statement. “It’s a positive step forward to see this ‘keep it in the ground’ principle being applied to more government decision making, but the clock is ticking.”

But energy-markets analysts said they weren’t sure the Obama administration’s move would have a major effect on energy markets. At least not yet.

“This doesn’t drastically change the overall trajectory for the coal business in the U.S.,” said Rob Barnett, an energy-policy analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Domestic coal companies are already having so much trouble with current market conditions—especially the recent EPA rules and state-level legislation—that their near-term outlook just can’t be damaged further by a moratorium.

“If you look from 2014 to 2015, coal production here in the U.S. fell by 100 million tons,” he told me. And Bloomberg’s analysis, he said, estimated coal production would fall another 80 million tons this year. Historically, the United States has produced about one billion tons of coal per year.

And since the new rules are likely to be litigated this year, their long-term success or failure is likely to depend on whoever wins the White House in November, Barnett said. “If you’re playing this out over a multi-decade period, and this really does ultimately become the firm law of the land, at some point it could become a binding constraint on the industry.”

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