Trump’s vow to bring back coal gives hope

Associated Press

WILLIAMSON, W.VA.

The hard-eyed view along the Tug Fork River in West Virginia coal country is that President-elect Donald Trump has something to prove: that he’ll help bring back Appalachian mining, as he promised time and again on the campaign trail. Nobody thinks he can revive it entirely – not economists, not ex-miners, not even those recently called back to work.

But for the first time in years, coal towns are seeing a commodity that had grown scarcer than the coal trains that used to rumble through around the clock: hope.

Around here that hope is measured. Still, most voters saw Trump as the only choice for president. He vowed to undo looming federal rules and said President Barack Obama had been “ridiculous” to the industry. Trump told miners in Charleston: “We’re going to take care of years of horrible abuse. I guarantee it.”

West Virginians went all in, backing Trump and electing a coal mine-owning billionaire, Democrat Jim Justice, as governor.

But a lot of people had gone under already.

“Lost my home, vehicle, everything,” said Roger Prater. Wearing the miner’s telltale blue pants with reflective strips on the legs, Prater would be heading underground that night. He’d been laid off for 20 months but now benefits from a small hiring surge that started before the election.

At 31, Prater said he can get everything back, but he’s uncertain for how long.

“In Trump’s term, I feel we’ll do good, but after that who’s to say?” he said.

That skepticism is supported by industry analysts, who say any recovery won’t be centered in the eastern coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia and will never bring U.S. coal back to what it once was.

Last year, the nation had about 66,000 coal mining jobs – the lowest since the U.S. Energy Information Administration began counting in 1978. That’s down 20,000 since a high point in 2008, and preliminary data show 10,000 more lost this year.

Mines out west stand to gain the most under Trump because of the huge reserves beneath public lands in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Utah.

In January, the Obama administration – prompted in part by concerns about climate change – imposed a moratorium on new lease sales pending a three-year review of the federal coal program. Trump has vowed to rescind the moratorium, which could open huge coal reserves.

Burning them would unleash an estimated 3.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide – equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from 700 million cars, according to Environmental Protection Agency calculations. But Trump has promised, too, to roll back Obama’s Clean Power Plan, emissions restrictions that would make it more expensive for utilities to use the fuel.

Such proposals would “level the playing field for coal,” allowing it to better compete with natural gas and renewable energies, said coal analyst Andy Roberts with the firm Wood Mackenzie.