Donald Trump was just kidding about bringing back coal mining jobs
In Politics by Jamie Peck
While on the campaign trail in coal country, Donald Trump seized upon Hillary Clinton’s out of context soundbite about putting “ a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” as a chance to score political points by promising to bring coal jobs back to the region. Now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has walked that promise back, admitting a lot of it will be up to the private sector.
At a press conference at the University of Louisville Thursday, McConnell was asked how the incoming Republican administration would make good on its promise to, as Trump said at a Louisville rally in March, “bring the coal industry back.” ( The full quote: “Obama has decimated the coal industry, and we’re going to bring the coal industry back. The coal industry is going to make a very big comeback.”) His response was more qualified than Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric.
McConnell, via USA Today:
“I certainly would like to see the war on coal come to an end. As I’ve said repeatedly over the last few years, the war on coal was not a result of anything Congress passed, there was no new legislation. This was all executive orders or regulations that the president was involved in, unilaterally, on his own.
So we are going to be presenting to the new president a variety of options that could end this assault. Whether that immediately brings business back is hard to tell because this is a private sector activity.”
Of course, what McConnell knows full well — and hinted at in that last sentence — is that
it’s not just environmental regulations hurting the coal industry. It’s competition from natural gas, which is cheaper and cleaner. Additionally, as the easier-to-obtain coal get depleted, it’s becoming more expensive to extract coal from the earth. Even if the Republican-led government takes the uncharacteristic step of actively intervening in its favor, the coal industry is fucked.
What we should be talking about now is not how to bring back those difficult, health-ruining, environmentally destructive jobs, but how to provide for those the economy has left behind.
Attention current and former coal miners: Your man lied to you. It’s time to join the resistance. |
