PodcastsJanuary 12, 2018

Trump Promised to Bring Back Coal. How’s It Going?

The Interchange is a weekly podcast on the global energy transformation, hosted by Stephen Lacey and Shayle Kann. When President Trump took office, U.S. coal was in a state of decline. Between 2007 and 2016, coal production and consumption both fell by more than a third, and mining jobs fell from 125,000 to 75,000. Trump promised to reverse that trend. Did his deregulatory agenda work? In 2017, U.S. coal production grew by 6 percent. That increase, however, came from a factor unrelated to Trump administration policy: demand in foreign markets. Meanwhile, domestic coal consumption fell by 2.4 percent last year. This week, podcast hosts talk with Trevor Houser, a partner with the Rhodium Group and co-director of the Lab, about where things stand in America's coal sector. It still doesn't look good.