Last year was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad one for the U.S. coal-mining industry. Freshly publicized federal data showing that U.S. coal production is down to its lowest level in four decades throws into stark relief the decline of American coal mining as it faces stiffer competition from cleaner and cheaper sources of power. That low point comes even as President Trump has tried to marshal the power of the federal government to reverse the trend and rescue the industry.

That decline, driven by market forces and activist pressure, has deep implications for combating climate change. Former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is vowing to wean the country’s power plants of fuels that contribute to heat-trapping pollution to the atmosphere.
The United States mined 706 million tons of coal in 2019 — the lowest total since 1978.

That’s a 7 percent drop from the previous year, continuing a decade-long decline in overall output since the coal-mining sector’s peak production in 2008.

Wyoming, the top coal-producing state, saw a 9 percent drop in 2019. Arizona stopped mining coal altogether after the Navajo Generating Station, the largest coal-fired facility in the western United States, and the adjacent mine both closed.

And it marks the lowest level of coal mining since a national coal miners’ strike in the late 1970s ground most of the country’s production to a halt.  With the coronavirus pandemic leading to a decline in demand for electricity, the U.S. coal sector is on pace for even bigger drop in 2020, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration projecting in a blog post Monday mining levels “comparable with those in the 1960s.”