In rallies across coal country, Donald Trump made a big, crowd-pleasing promise: He'd bring back the mining jobs, NBC News reported.
"We're gonna open the mines," he said to big cheers in Charleston, West Virginia, as if the shuttered mines across eastern America's coal country could hit a switch and reinstate the jobs once he won the White House.
But experts say despite Trump's election, those jobs aren't coming back.
While regulation sped the shuttering of older coal mines in the last decade, experts say it was natural gas that turned the screws on the industry. Cleaner and cheaper, the natural gas market share is growing rapidly and putting as much — if not more — pressure on the coal industry as regulations.
