Obama Economy Was Better for WV Coal
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Date: September 04, 2019 11:22AM
It’s been two years since President Donald Trump took office and began rolling back environmental regulations on the coal industry.
At a November rally in Huntington, West Virginia, the president took credit for a coal comeback in front of a cheering crowd.
“We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal and we’re putting our coal miners back to work,” he said. “That you know better than anybody.”
But federal data about the industry tell a different story.
Mine operators and independent contractors are required to report regular employment information to the Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration, or MSHA. Preliminary figures for 2018 show 80,778 people were employed by mine operators and contractors. That’s a record low, and about a thousand fewer than were employed by coal in the last year of the Obama administration.