Obama did some things, but the main driver was the market. In politics it makes sense to take credit/blame depending on side. Trump can remove whatever Obama did and the jobs are not coming back for market reasons.

It's the same thing with factory jobs. The US produces more than it ever has (at least the last time I checked), but many of those jobs were automated away.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-outpu...

Same thing for gas. Obama did nothing to lower gas prices. But imagine if for whatever reason (say a hurricane came through and knocked out US refining capacity two months before the election), he would've got the blame for high gas prices. And not just Obama, the same situation kind of happened to Bush when Katrina knocked oil infrastructure offline.

There are around 6,000 coal mining jobs in Pennsylvania out of around 6,000,000 jobs total; I doubt it made a big difference in the election.

https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/

http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.pa.htm

I am of the opinion that the reasons the industry lost jobs, are primarily:

1. Price of natural gas is very competitive. 2. Automation. Mechanisation inside coal mines becomes more effective. 3. As old coal plants are retired, their replacements require exceptionally high capital expenditures. While running an already built coal plant can be feasible, competition for building new plants is not economically competitive.

In the end, it is the free market that took those jobs. In the end, the market always wins.

Doesn't really matter 83k unemployed people aren't going to care about the nuances of which factors contributed how much.

If the industry was already on it's way down the smart thing to do would have been to let it run it course instead of pushing regulations that wouldn't matter any ways and swung the state against you. Similarly if the factors killing coal really are not driven by government regulation than installing a pro-coal guy at the EPA shouldn't have any effect.

Coal was regulated before concerns of climate change became mainstream because it kills people. The pollutants it releases poison people not just in the state where the plant is located, but in neighboring states.

None of the costs of medical treatment or loss of life were borne by the coal industry itself prior to regulation.

um... Pennsylvania hasn't been reliant on coal since the 60's. it's all natural gas now. go visit Pittsburgh and compare it to pictures from the 50's and 60's.