King Coal is a Bust

but Trump wants to use our taxpayer money to support it anyway

Author

Joe is Wypoxic
September 30, 2025

Today’s primer: coal, stupid subsidies for dying energy sources, and my take on why it won’t meaningfully create new jobs.

I live in a “coal” state. Coal provides the majority of funds for state government through severance taxes (taxes paid by companies who “sever” minerals from the ground for energy and other uses). Given that we have no state personal or corporate income taxes, this reliance on coal to fund education, roads, etc. creates perverse incentives – primarily propping up an industry from which the marketplace is rapidly moving away, that doesn’t create new jobs, and that uses its profits to primarily compensate C-Suite executives who live out of state.

But I digress.

Today’s chart and explanations come from my favorite economist Paul Krugman:

The truth, however, is that coal is a dying industry for very good reasons, and anti-wokeism is unlikely to revive it.

Coal stopped being a significant source of jobs decades ago:

At this point there are only around 40,000 coal miners left. In case you’re wondering, vineyards and wineries employ around 130,000 people, three times as many as the coal industry.

Where did all the coal jobs go? The answers may surprise you.

As you can see in the chart above, there was an epic decline in coal employment between 1950 and the 2000s, from half a million miners to around 80,000. But this employment decline didn’t reflect an economy turning away from coal. In fact, use of coal to generate electricity rose steadily over the whole period, peaking in 2008:

So what happened to all the coal jobs? Basically, workers were displaced first by giant power shovels (strip mining), then by explosives used to blow the tops off mountains, exposing the coal beneath. By using these techniques, in 2008 coal companies were able to produce twice as much coal as they did in 1950, while employing 80 percent fewer workers.

Coal jobs were cratering even before coal usage did! And while Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently said that boosting coal “will not sit well with the Chardonnay set.”, in fact, there are actually less jobs in coal than in making wine. And way less than in the renewable sector. In fact, a report from E2 in Sept of 2024 showed that there are approximately 3,460,406 total clean energy jobs. Of those, approximately 559,971 are in renewable generation.

Why are they doing this? Always follow the money (or in Trumpism, the whims of a demented pathologically lying malignant narcissist). Stupid is as stupid does.

Finally, back to Krugman’s point that coal jobs cratered even before coal use cratered. This is the inherent contradiction in capitalism and job creation. I’ve been an entrepreneur for a large part of my life, starting and running growth organizations. Based on my experience, this is one of WYpoxia’s theorems: On a macro level, capitalism is the best real job creating economic system devised by humans (so far). Yet, on a micro level, jobs/employees are a bug in the system, NOT a feature. The last thing companies want to do is hire more people, the first thing they do when things are not going well is lay people off, and if they can accomplish their mission more efficiently using technology/outsourcing instead of hiring, they will.

Using that theorem, coal jobs are not coming back in any meaningful way, even if coal production somehow increases.

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