Increased automation guarantees a bleak outlook for Trumps promises to coal miners.

[Cattledog]

http://linkis.com/www.brookings.edu/bl/3OYVr

President Trump has made empty promises to make the coal industry great again, vowing to reverse decades of the industry’s downward employment trajectory. In previous blog posts (see here and here), we have shown how his promises to put coal miners back to work will be a tall order. Here, we introduce another reason why coal will face an uphill battle: automation.

The problem facing the coal industry is not unique: Automation is rapidly reducing employment in mining and manufacturing. Across a wide range of industries, from car manufacturing to computing, robots or artificial intelligence are increasingly taking over roles traditionally performed by humans. The same is true for coal mining.

More importantly, automation has been eating into coal jobs over a long period of time—years before concerns about climate change led to the environmental regulations that President Trump solely blames for the industry’s decline. Nationwide, employment in the coal mining industry peaked in 1920, when it employed roughly 785,000 people. The more recent decline started in 1980, when the industry employed approximately 242,000 people. By 2000, 15 years before the Environmental Protection Agency first proposed the Clean Power Plan and released new pollution guidelines to cut toxic emissions from power plants, industry employment had dropped to 102,000. By 2015, coal mining had shed 59 percent of its workforce, compared to 1980.

[nikibatts]

1. Not just coal miners. For the rest of us also.

I guess the only good jobs will be in the military industrial complex.

[spanone]

2. i'm shocked i tell ya!!!!

trump knows no shame, but shame on him for duping those miners.