Can Trump Turn Back Time On Coal Mining Employment?

President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday, repealing many of the environmental regulations introduced by his predecessor Barack Obama and rescinding a moratorium on the leasing of federal land to coal mining companies. In ‘ending the war on coal’, Trump tries to make good on his campaign promise to bring thousands of unemployed coal miners back to work and secure U. S. energy independence.
As Statista’s Felix Richter notes, Trump, like many of his supporters, blames Obama’s environmental policies for the coal industry’s decline, which, as the chart below illustrates, started long before Obama took office in 2009. While it is true that coal consumption and mining employment did drop significantly during Obama’s presidency, experts keep pointing out that the decline was caused primarily by the rise of natural gas and only secondarily by environmental regulation.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Mar 29, 2017.