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Sullivan’s friends may not agree with this assessment, but the return of coal promised by Trump in the 2016 election campaign has not materialized, with his first term plagued by bankruptcies and closures of coal mines and power plants.
There are now about 5,000 fewer miners than when Trump entered the White House. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the decline: so far this year, US coal production has collapsed by more than 25% compared to the same period in 2019.
It has been a painful few years instead of the glorious new dawn promised when Trump donned a miner’s helmet, pretended to dig for coal and criticized Barack Obama’s “war on coal” in the election campaign four years ago. One of Trump’s first executive orders lifted the ban on coal mining on federal land and abandoned Obama’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “Come on guys,” Trump said at the signing of the order, where he was surrounded by beaming miners. “You basically know what this is? You know what it says right? You’re going back to work.”
Such assurances were enthusiastically accepted by the coal mining communities in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, who backed Trump and prepared for salvation. “When he took office, it was like someone pulled their finger out of the levee,” said Thomas McLoughlin, a former mining inspector who trains new miners. “It was flooded with new mining students. It was overwhelming.” McLoughlin said he would vote for president again because Trump was the only candidate prepared to defend the coal workers. “My business will not go under if he is reelected,” he added.
The Trump administration has set out to weaken or remove a number of environmental rules that bind industry, such as requirements that new coal-fired power plants capture their carbon emissions and that coal companies not release wastewater laced with pollutants. hazardous, such as lead, selenium, and arsenic, in rivers and streams.
Bob Murray, a major Trump donor and founder of America’s largest private coal company, has boasted of an “action plan” he gave the administration to undo what he called “eight years of pure hell” under Obama Much of Murray’s three-and-a-half-page wish list has been ticked off, including America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. One award in particular was the weakening of Obama-era standards for reducing mercury pollution from coal plants, a setback made after Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for Murray Energy, became the Agency’s administrator. of Environmental Protection.
“We are still feeling the effects of the damage from the Obama administration,” said Jason Bostic, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association. “The social devastation in mining communities has been staggering. Support for Donald Trump is as strong, if not stronger, than it was in 2016. West Virginia is a Democratic state that has turned bright red due to the last administration.”
But while Appalachia will largely stick with Trump in 2020, more coal capacity has been withdrawn under Trump than during Obama’s second term. “The coal has not come back,” as Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, sadly admitted last year. “No one saved the coal industry.”
Coal production fell so dramatically last year that renewable energy such as solar and wind surpassed it in generating electricity for the first time since at least 1885, the year Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was erected. America’s first skyscraper in Chicago and people burn more wood than charcoal. Murray Energy also filed for bankruptcy last year, one of half a dozen coal companies that did so that year.
Cheap and plentiful gas, recovered through fracking, and the advancement of renewables have been bigger causes of coal’s demise than any green regulation, experts say, making Trump’s rollbacks simply destructive to the economy. environment.
“The coal crash is first and foremost a market story,” said Daniel Kaffine, an economist at the University of Colorado who has researched the issue. “The days when coal supplied the majority of America’s electricity production is not coming back.” While metallurgical coal, necessary for steelmaking, will remain, the practice of burning thermal coal for energy is on “a death spiral,” Kaffine said.
There are about 45,000 coal miners left in the United States, half of those employed during Obama’s first term. Much political rhetoric surrounds a workforce that is actually quite small: There are twice as many flight attendants in the US as coal miners, for example, and roughly the same number of chiropractors.
However, entire communities sprung up around mining, which means that several dependent jobs are lost for each miner who is unemployed. The long decline in high-paying mining jobs, through machine automation and now progressive obsolescence, has left deep scars in Appalachian cities, now ruined by unemployment and opioid addiction.
“People drank Trump’s Kool-Aid and he hasn’t done it for them,” said Blair Zimmerman, a former coal miner who is now a Greene County, Pennsylvania commissioner. “I am very worried about the future because without mining our tax base would disappear and we would not be able to survive. People are leaving the area, it is difficult. We should have looked at other options a long time ago.”
Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has outlined a $ 2 trillion plan to create millions of renewable energy jobs, which could provide a new path for threatened coal workers. But coal mining has deep roots in communities that many are unwilling to leave. “It’s a bloody joke,” said Bostic of the West Virginia Coal Association. “It is an affront to a coal miner to say, ‘We will take your job for one who pays less well and, by the way, you have to pack up your family and move.’
According to Sullivan, coal miners feel they have few options. “The coal miner had no friends and he was desperate,” he said. “Nobody spoke for us and then Trump, so people backed him. The miners see him as their man.”
However, the externalities of coal go beyond the mining communities. As the most carbon-intensive fuel, coal is a key driver of the climate crisis, indirectly sparking the kinds of huge wildfires that have ravaged the west coast of the US this year, as well as continued deterioration of the polar ice caps that endanger the coast. cities through rising sea levels and storms.
Direct air pollution from soot and chemicals emitted from burning coal is also a great burden to health. Not far from Sullivan and his friends, the Cheswick Power Station, near the banks of the Allegheny River, is close enough to people’s homes that nearby residents have to clean the soot from their homes. Five miles downstream to Pittsburgh in the suburb of Verona, Laura Jacko suspects that the emissions from the power plant could be behind her husband’s asthma and respiratory problems for their son, who was born prematurely.
“There is nothing more horrible than holding your little baby to push a respirator,” said Jacko. “It affects me personally and I get quite angry.”
Environmental groups have long lobbied for the closure of Cheswick, which had previously received a civil penalty for violating pollution limits. In Jacko’s view, the age of coal must come to a managed but swift end. “My uncle was a coal worker and he had black lung,” a disease that develops from inhaling coal dust, he said. “I don’t want their jobs to kill them. I want them to transition. These jobs are going to go away, it’s just a question of when. Going forward with coal does everyone a disservice.”
This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration that strengthens coverage of climate history.
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