So, where are the promised coal jobs?
Donald Trump came into office vowing to give new life to U.S. mining. At rallies in Pittsburgh and elsewhere he pledged to boost coal mine employment. He again touched on the subject during a rally last Wednesday evening in Duluth, Minnesota.
The results so far have been less than stellar. As of May, there were some 53,200 coal mining jobs nationwide. As the clock ticked down on the Obama administration, the number of jobs in the U.S. coal industry stood at 50,400, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This modest increase — which does not include so-called mine “contractors” — has been accompanied by Trumpian hyperbole. Early in the administration he invited a group of coal mine executives and miners to the White House for a ceremony marking a turn in fortune for the industry. “You’re going back to work,” he said.
Historically, of course, the needle points down, not up, for mining jobs. Once among a time, many years ago, there were between 500,000 and 600,000 American miners, and those were just the members of the United Mine Workers.
The last time the industry topped the 100,000 figure was in 1995, which was — hold on, folks — during the Clinton administration. A decade earlier, there were as many as 170,000 U.S. coal-related jobs.
During a 10-year span, from the midpoint of the Reagan era to halfway through the Clinton years, the industry lost some 70,000 jobs. Since then, the decline has been slower but just as steady. Eighteen years ago, at the start of the 21st century, there were some 75,000 active miners in the U.S. Today, there are about 20,000 fewer such jobs.
Certainly, advances in mining technology account for a good chunk of the decline. Mining coal was far different in 1930 than it was, say, in 1990. By 1960, policymakers were already expressing worry about automation and “what happens when machines take the place of men” digging for coal in the dark underground caverns of the earth.
In recent years, the chief impediment to coal employment had been the use of alternatives to coal in the production of electricity.
(Currently, 80 percent of all the coal mined in the United States goes to power generation, which by itself is quite a change from past practice. Back in the day, coal was used extensively, and directly, to heat homes and buildings. During the bitter winter of the 1922 coal strike, it was not unusual for homeowners and apartment-dwellers to raid coal-carrying trains for the mineral.)
According to a Department of Energy report in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, “the U.S. electrical industry is facing unprecedented changes: last year, for the first time in history, natural gas replaced coal as the leading source of electrical generation.”
The DOE report provides small solace to critics of the Obama administration’s policy of targeting coal in its efforts to cleanse the atmosphere of carbon emissions and stave off the effects of climate change.
The same report declared that “the biggest contributor to coal … plant retirements” — read Hatfield power plant in Greene County — “has been the advantaged economics of gas-fired generation.”
That’s government-speak for it’s cheaper to use natural gas than coal. Forget about “Obama’s war on coal.” Blame it on fracking.
Despite the trendline against coal, the Trump administration is not giving up on its efforts to kick-start more coal mining jobs. A leaked internal DOE memo to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island “suggests,” according to The New York Times, “the Energy Department could try to circumvent these (economic) forces by ordering (electric) grid operators to buy electricity at above market rates from certain at-risk coal and nuclear plants for at least two years.”
According to the confidential memo, now online, there exists “a growing threat” to the nation’s electrical grid by terrorists and state-sponsored cyber attacks which can be best met by increased stockpiles of power grid coal.
Just as foreign threats have been called on to justify enhancements to the border with Mexico and the imposition of trade sanctions on Canada and the European Union, the president hopes to fulfill yet one more wayward campaign pledge by leaning on national security.
But the argument isn’t likely to fly. As Samantha Gross, an energy expert with the Brookings Institution, told me: “I don’t believe that non-economic coal and nuclear plants are necessary to ensure grid security. Much of the cyber security risk is in the power transmission and distribution system, not in generation.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com