April 28, 2025 - Many West Virginians are feeling a renewed sense of hope after President Donald Trump issued new executive orders this month aimed at reviving coal.

Trump, who has pledged since his first run for the presidency in 2016 to "save coal," issued orders to allow mining on federal land and to loosen some emissions standards meant to curb coal's environmental impact.

"All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened, if they're modern enough," Trump said at the signing ceremony, "(or) they'll be ripped down and brand-new ones will be built."

The news was met with enthusiasm in West Virginia, where residents say the coal industry is misunderstood and that they are tired of feeling unheard by their fellow Americans. But others do not think Trump will be able to fulfill promises he has made to some of his most loyal constituents. 

Trump and his allies are "spinning a false narrative," said Tyson Slocum, who teaches energy and climate policy at the University of Maryland Honors College and is the energy program director for the nonprofit Public Citizen. He said market forces have shifted away from coal in ways that cannot be reversed, an opinion widely shared among economists.

"There's nothing that Trump can do that's going to materially impact the domestic coal market," Slocum said in a telephone interview. "The energy markets, the steel markets, have fundamentally changed. And learning how to adapt and how to provide the real solutions to the concerns and fears in coal communities would be a more effective strategy than promising them a return that isn't going to happen."

That was not the prevailing mood at a recent coal exposition in Charleston, attended by many who found encouragement in the Republican president's words, even if some expressed skepticism about his ability to make coal great again.

"For years, our industry has felt like it's been a little bit of a whipping boy, like a political, sacrificial pawn," said Steven Tate of Viacore, a company that makes an apparatus that helps mine operators limit the amount of coal dust in a mine. "We feel like we're finally starting to get the recognition that our industry deserves."

Some said Trump's orders demonstrated respect for workers who gave their lives in the mines -- 21,000 in West Virginia, the most out of any state -- and for a resource that helped build America.

In recent decades, the Democratic Party's aggressive push toward clean energy led to the installation of more renewable energy and the conversion of coal-fired plants to cheaper and cleaner-burning natural gas.

In 2016, Trump seized on the issue, promising to end what he described as Democratic President Barack Obama's "war on coal" and to save miners' jobs. It helped in West Virginia, where a majority of voters in every county supported Trump in three presidential elections.

Trump did not bring the industry back during his first term. In West Virginia, which employs the most miners of any state, the number of coal jobs fell from 11,561 at the start of his presidency to 11,418 at the end of 2020, perhaps slowing coal's steep decline but not stopping it.

Slocum said Trump can defang the federal Environmental Protection Agency and deregulate mining, but he cannot save coal.

"It's not the EPA, it's not Democrats that declared this war on coal," Slocum said. "It was capitalism and natural gas. And being honest about the reasons for coal's decline is the least we can do for coal-dependent communities instead of lying to them, which the Trump administration is doing. Sometimes people want to believe a lie, because it's easier than facing a hard truth."

In 2009, the EPA found that planet-warming greenhouse gases put public health and welfare in danger, a determination that new EPA chief Lee Zeldin has urged Trump to reconsider. Scientists oppose Zeldin's push, and Slocum said the endangerment finding and the need to move away from coal dependence "is not a theoretical debate. It is a factual, scientific one, albeit one that does not occur within the current Trump administration."

Still, there is no doubt that the culture of coal is woven into the fabric of West Virginia. A miner can be a coal industry worker, but also a sports team mascot, an image emblazoned on the state flag or the name of a breakfast sandwich at Tudor's Biscuit World.