When Donald Trump held a campaign-style rally in Harrisburg last weekend, he underscored that his administration has created 27,000 new mining jobs in his first 100 days, with more to come.

The casual observer might conclude from this remark that there are already 27,000 miners back at work in the coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania and Appalachia.Well, they are not. There are fewer than 80,000 jobs in the entire coal industry, meaning that it would have had to grow by 33 percent this year. Most of the jobs, according to the Department of Labor, involved support services for all kinds of mining, not coal-mining jobs, and here's the kicker: The statistic Trump cited goes back to last October, meaning that the president is including jobs created even before he was elected.Pennsylvania features three major anthracite coal fields. Parts of what are known as the middle and southern fields encompass portions of Carbon and Schuylkill counties; the northern field snakes through Lackawanna and Luzerne counties.Anthracite coal burns hotter and cleaner than bituminous coal, which is found principally in western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. Most of the anthracite mined is from the Hazleton area south. There are about a dozen active deep mines, most notably in Schuylkill County but also in Northumberland, Dauphin and southern Columbia counties.The era of deep mining was impacted greatly in the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre areas by the Knox mine disaster in 1959 when 12 miners died after the Susquehanna River came gushing into the mine and trapped the workers.Some analysts who study the coal-mining industry find it economically impractical for coal to make a resurgence. There might be minor gains as Trump reverses some of the Obama-era environmental regulations. The truth is, though, that coal's swoon started well before Obama's arrival in the Oval Office.The hydraulic fracturing (fracking) boom that began more than a decade ago has flooded the market with cheap natural gas that continues to eat away at coal's and oil's market share. Nine years ago, coal was the source of half of the electricity production in the United States; that has droppedto about 30 percent today.Utilities have been reluctant to build new coal-fired power plants because of air-quality issues. They want assurances that even if the Trump administration rolls back regulations that they will not be reinstated by a future president in the next decade.Then there is the pervasiveness of automation, which has claimed thousands of surface-mining jobs - the ones most prevalent in Carbon and Schuylkill counties. High-tech machines can do the work once performed by scores of miners in much less time and at a fraction of the cost.In the past few years, about 140 coal-fired plants were closed in our country. It is unlikely that Trump can do anything to resuscitate them. A former coal mining executive, Robert Zik, said that the older power plants that burned Eastern coal have been mostly torn down and dismantled.So why has Trump zeroed in on coal as one of the signature issues of his 2016 campaign, and why has he continued to emphasize it at rallies such as the one in Harrisburg?It started innocently enough when his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, seemed to disrespect miners by a misguided comment in March 2016."We've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels," she said in a CNN-sponsored town hall meeting. Despite her protests that her comments had been taken out of context, Trump seized on the news and, almost overnight, became the coal miners' champion.Trump's strategy paid off helping him carry Pennsylvania in a stunning and unexpected upset. He also did well in other coal-mining states.Coal industry leaders, however, are concerned that Trump's campaign promises and his reiteration of them now that he is president could raise unrealistic hopes among miners who lost their jobs to market forces and automation.We are, too, because the only thing worse than no hope is false hope.By Bruce Frassinelli |

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