Krugman is Right on This: No Way is Trump Going to Be Able to Pull This Off

Trump: "We're going to put our miners back to work" No, we aren't. Decline of coal not the fault of the EPA pic.twitter.com/cwTulESZGf

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) February 24, 2017

Employment in the coal industry has been on a secular decline in the United States since the 1920s. Coal employment peaked in 1923. Machinery has replaced the majority of manual workers in the sector.

The Environmental Protection Agency didn't even come on the scene until 1970 by way of a Nixon executive order.

Office workers in the coal industry started to be counted as coal workers in 1973 by the Department of Labor that's why you see the bump up in the number employed in the coal industry that year, in charts.

 -RW