McConnell Admits Coal Jobs Not Coming Back - Now What?

Admitting that bringing back coal jobs "is a private sector activity", Mr. McConnell stated that "whether {rolling back coal-related environmental regulations} immediately will bring business back is hard to tell."

(Senator McConnell speaking at the University of Louisville's McConnell Center)

Senator McConnell and, we suspect, even Donald Trump know what most Americans who have studied US energy policy have known for quite a while now: the effects of automation and lower cost options like natural gas from hydraulic fracking are the primary reasons the US coal industry has been in decline.

As would be expected in a free market economy, the coal industry has been reducing its costs by employing machines to do much of what laboring men used to do in American coal fields. Likewise, US electric companies are reducing costs by converting their power generating plants from coal to cheaper natural gas. Further exacerbating the problem is that, in places like eastern Kentucky, the easily obtained coal is gone; to get at what is left will be even more expensive.

None of which is good news for our Appalachian communities that were built on coal and now are struggling. Nor is Senator McConnell's other piece of coal-related news: those coal communities better not expect any government help from the Republicans. "A government spending program is not likely to solve the fundamental problem of growth," McConnell stated. "I support the effort to help these coal counties wherever we can but that isn't going to replace whatever was there when we had a vibrant coal industry."

This attitude of the Senator's should be no surprise to anyone. The GOP is fine with bailing out Wall Street and giving tax breaks to the well off, but they aren't really interested in helping the average Citizen. This philosophy is the opposite of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, who actually had a $30 billion plan to help revitalize coal country (including bringing in renewable energy jobs) because she was willing to admit that coal jobs aren't coming back and because she cared about the people living in those communities.

(When Coal Still Was King - image from Montgomery County Va. Dems)

And yet Mrs. Clinton was pilloried by Republicans who ignored her policy proposals and, instead, took her statements out of context, quoting her as having said, "Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?"

What Mrs. Clinton actually said was:

"I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right? We're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories."

Although she used the word "we", Mrs. Clinton obviously was referring to the fact that "the U.S. economy" is going to continue to put coal out of business. And in making the effort to develop an economic plan for coal communities, she was expressing the real concern that Democrats feel about the human suffering these communities currently are facing and the suffering they will continue to face.

We hope our analysis is wrong on this one but, unless the Trump administration is willing to propose a Clinton-type plan of economic assistance, we don't see the tough times getting any better throughout Appalachia.