ACOSTA, PA. — On a warm June morning, a large crowd gathered in the lush, gentle folds of the Allegheny Mountains to hear President Donald Trump live on video.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to be speaking with you on this great, great day,” he said. “The miners of Pennsylvania are mining coal again.”

On a stage, five men unfurled a gold banner that blared, in large black letters: “Trump Digs Coal,” as the audience went wild.

For the first time in nearly a decade, a new coal mine has opened here, and a US president has rallied alongside an industry deemed by many as obsolete.

The Acosta Deep Mine in Somerset County marks a dramatic upturn for the area. And while President Trump cannot claim that he brought the industry back here personally (this new mine was already being developed before the election), he is an effective cheerleader for folks who’ve been discounted by the political elite.

“We will begin by employing 70 to 100 miners and we hope to open a total of three new mines in the next 18 months — and that will mean additional hiring,” said George Dethlefsen, CEO of Corsa Coal, which owns the mine.

More than 400 people applied for the first wave of jobs that will pay from $50,000 to $100,000, Dethlefsen said.

In a region where the median household income is $29,050, and nearly 12 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, the economic injection is huge.

‘I don’t think people outside of our small town understand how life-changing this development is.’

 – Greg Griffith, coal miner

It also creates a ripple effect: For every new job generated by the mine, even more jobs like waitresses, hotel workers, barbers or grocery workers are needed to support the community.

“The money essentially stays here in our hometown,” said Greg Griffith, owner of Griffith Excavating, who was working the mine last week with his crew. He has hired new people to take on the workload and will employ even more as the other mines open.

“I don’t think people outside of our small town understand how life-changing this development is.”

He’s right about that. Just days after the event, progressives on Twitter slammed the mine, comparing the opening of an energy-supplying coal pit to the launching a VCR factory in the digital age. In their minds, it’s a waste of time.

And the response from the people of Acosta? Stop treating other Americans like the enemy.

They also point out that the criticism is wildly misinformed. The coal from this mine is not going to be used for energy — instead, it will be used for the production of steel for the next 15 years. (According to the World Steel Association, coal is used to make 70 percent of the steel today.)

Every single one of us relies on steel in our daily lives. It’s found in our cars, bikes and public transportation. Those wind turbines so loved by environmentalists? Made of steel. The utensils we use to eat? Steel. Medical devices used to save lives? Steel.

Roads, bridges, appliances and even iPhones and computers all contain steel.

Meanwhile, digital business publication Quartz also knocked the mine, pointing out that 70 new hires is a significantly smaller number than the 92 jobs one supermarket opening would create.

But most folks in a grocery store don’t earn $50,000 to $100,000, and making an apples-to-oranges comparison (retail vs. mining) demonstrates a lack of understanding about coal country and its work force.

It also encourages the delusion that hiring just 70 people won’t create an economic engine for a community.

“That could not be more wrong-headed,” said Sean Isgan, president of CME Engineering, located right across the street from the Somerset County courthouse.

Because of the new mine, Isgan’s business will also expand. “We will hire geologists, surveyors, engineers, computer draftsmen, biologists, wetland people . . . you know, different kinds of sciences,” he said. “So they’re all good-paying jobs, full benefits.”

The life of a coal miner has changed dramatically in the past 100 years. Even in the last decade, the work has become safer, the processes better regulated.

“There is a tremendous amount of regulation that’s involved in coal mining, whether it’s environmental or safety, both of which are extremely critical and valued parts of our business,” Dethlefsen said.

His company has 20 staffers dedicated to environmental issues — clean water, clean air and reclaiming mine sites.

“We are committed to environmental protection, we are committed to safety, we are committed to restoring land to its original contours,” he said. “We do all those things every day, and we spend millions of dollars doing it. It’s a 24/7, 365-day-a-year effort. That is a big change versus the past.”

But many Americans aren’t aware of this modernization. So having a president who believes in this industry, and rallies publicly for it, means a lot. Trump has “created an optimism in the business community that has trickled down from big companies to small, and for all of their workers,” Dethlefsen said.

It’s this support that compelled the people of Somerset County to give Trump their vote. His loyalty won them over months ago, and it won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

President Trump promised to revive the coal industry while on the campaign trail and his efforts are falling into place.

For the first time in about seven years a coal mine has opened in the United States. The Acosta mine, in Somerset Country Pennsylvania, is open for business sparking optimism about the sector.

Last week, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the coal industry is on the upswing, hiring thousands of workers since President Trump’s election.

“We’ve had almost 50,000 jobs created in the mining and coal sector alone. In fact, in the month of May, almost 7,000 jobs,” Pruitt told Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday. “

In an interview with FOX Business’ Stuart Varney, the CEO of one of America’s largest coal companies agreed with the EPA chief’s coal job assessment and said President Trump will continue to restore coal country.

“He’s [Trump] already save 25,000 coal mining jobs alone on his clean power plant overturn on top of the 46,700 jobs in mining that he’s restored that saves 25,000 jobs on top of the 63,000 that the Sierra Club, Silicon Valley, Democrats, liberal elitist and the media destroyed under eight years under Obama,” Murray Energy CEO Bob Murray said.

According to Murray, 30 percent of America’s electricity is produced by coal mining plants and any reduction will leave the U.S. with an unreliable electric grid.

“Anyone that says we go below that [30 percent] will force people to freeze in the dark, people die in the operating table,” he said.

Despite all the attention paid to the convulsive political change President Trump has brought to Washington, relatively little attention has been focused on a very significant policy shift. For the first time in almost a decade, the Department of Energy (DOE) will once again manage energy issues instead of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Imagine that.

Most Americans probably can. It would likely strike them as sensible to move the EPA back to basics so that it can once again focus on its core mission of clean air and water under Administrator Scott Pruitt — and leave the stewardship of the nation’s electricity grid to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

But as so often happens, what middle America views as sensible strikes Washington as deeply concerning. Take the recent announcement that the DOE will study the impacts of federal regulations on America’s electrical grid. Perry said he will examine “critical issues central to protecting the long-term reliability of the electric grid,” including whether “regulatory burdens” and “mandates and tax and subsidy policies” for renewable energy are forcing coal units into retirement.

This fundamental consideration was completely ignored by the Obama-era EPA while it busily cobbled together the Clean Power Plan. And the Federal Energy Reliability Commission (FERC) also declined to assess the plan’s impact despite the wholesale “transformation” of the power grid promised by an agency heavily staffed with air quality statisticians and wetlands hydrologists.

The results of these regulations are now painfully evident. In 2012, the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards rule — which limits emissions from power plants — alone forced almost 20 percent of coal plants into retirement, and saddled the power industry with almost $10 billion in annual costs — and all for a mere $6 million in public benefit. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that the Clean Power Plan would cut coal production by 240 million tonsannually.

And contrary to the self-serving argument that natural gas, not EPA regulations, caused coal’s decline, researchers at the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment reported that government regulations threatened the viability of more than half of the country’s coal plants while low natural gas prices threatened less than 10 percent.

All of these findings suggest the need for just the kind of impact study the administration is now proposing.

Evidently, though, Perry crossed a red line. In an April 28 letter to the secretary, the nation’s wind and solar trade groups expressed shock at the audacity of the Energy Department to study energy.

Why? Because his findings could raise awkward questions about the massive impact of regulations and renewable energy subsidies on grid reliability and energy diversity. Even some in Congress weighed in against the secretary, accusing him of a “thinly disguised attempt” to harm renewables in favor of “less economic electric generation technologies” like coal.

This is nonsense. Since 2008, the EPA has enjoyed an unprecedented authority over the U.S. energy grid, giving renewable fuels a free ride. Federal portfolio requirements, net metering — which gives consumers credits for returning unused energy to the power grid — and annual subsidies have sheltered the renewable energy sector from market competition. And what amounted to roughly $1 billion in assistance 10 years ago has swelled to more than $11.6 billion today.

Now that Pruitt is getting the EPA out of the energy business, energy supply issues are sensibly being handed back to the DOE. Thus there are palpitations aplenty among fledgling renewable projects, fearing a less generous benefactor may force them to struggle in the Hobbesian “war of all against all” energy market ruled by natural gas.

Apparently, it’s okay for coal to struggle against cheap natural gas. But renewable fuels would rather not, thank you very much.

The problem isn’t the undeniably impressive growth of wind and solar power. It’s how this growth has come about. Consider the largesse extended to renewables in recent years: When a friendly government lowers your operating costs with tax breaks, raises your competitors’ costs through regulations and mandates a market for your product — all while shielding your customers from paying for the grid they use — that growth isn’t real, much less revolutionary. It’s easy to get pricing power if you have enough political power.

Subsidies are never free, though, especially not for the millions of Americans who now describe themselves as “lower class.” Even measured by the jobs required to generate electricity, renewable fuels are costly. Wind creates 2,200 jobs per megawatt hour, while solar creates 98 jobs. But coal creates a whopping 7,800 jobs per megawatt hour.

To some, green subsidies are necessary sacrifices that taxpayers must make to help wind and solar win the race for power market domination and potentially help affluent consumers indulge their green vanity. But U.S. taxpayers left paying more for energy — and for a smaller supply of it — may soon disagree.

Publication of the Associated Press article, “Ex-coal mining CEO asks Trump to resist punishing coal exec,” is another example of the Herald-Leader negatively impacting perception of the coal industry.

Don Blankenship does not speak for the industry and, more specifically, does not speak for Kentucky’s coal industry. Nevertheless, the Herald-Leader chose to run with an article presenting irrelevant, uninformed, and biased opinions because it might help promote anti-coal views and the false notion of coal executives who do not care about employees.

Over the past eight years, Kentucky coal production has fallen from 121 million tons in 2008 to just 42 million tons in 2016, directly resulting in the loss of over 11,000 jobs. The impacts of the “war on coal” have devastated our coalfield economies. However, during this unprecedented decline of the coal industry in Kentucky, through cooperative efforts with state and federal regulators and the hard work of producers, coal mines are safer than they have ever been.

In fact, the injury rate for underground coal miners has declined 30 percent since 2008.

Our miners work extremely hard to provide for their families and provide America’s source of affordable, reliable energy. This resource provides a competitive advantage for all manufacturing industries, especially those vital to Kentucky such as aluminum, automotive and steel. Whether they are executives or equipment operators, they approach their jobs every day with the best interest of all employees and coworkers at heart. The real stakeholders in the coal Industry are committed to working toward new and innovative ways to improve mine safety.

There is certainly room for a healthy and honest discussion regarding the proper size, extent and effectiveness of regulations related to the mining industry. Unfortunately, that becomes considerably more difficult when newspapers like the Herald-Leader continue to give a voice to outsiders in order to fuel their own biased agendas.

A new coal mine is opening up in western Pennsylvania, signaling a small reversal of fortune for the beleaguered coal industry.

The Acosta Deep coal mine will create 70 to 100 direct full-time jobs and another 500 indirect jobs, according to Corsa Coal, the company building the mine. The site is expected to produce 400,000 tons of coal a year, mostly for U.S. and Chinese steel companies.

“The opening of the Acosta Deep Mine marks a return to coal industry job creation in Somerset County, Pennsylvania,” Corsa Coal officials said in a statement. “Metallurgical prices have risen to record levels on the strength of strong steel demand and supply scarcity.”

The Acosta mine is the first of four new coal mines slated to open up this year as coking coal prices continue to soar. The price of coking coal, which is used in steel making, doubled in the last year because of supply disruptions in Australia and Chinese policies to curb some coal-fired energy production.

China also halted coal imports from North Korea and began importing U.S.-mined coal.

Hundreds of coal mines shut down during the Obama administration and thousands of miners lost their jobs under the pressure of stricter federal regulations and decreasing demand for coal.

There were 86,000 coal miners in January 2009, but that number dramatically shrunk to 50,000 just eight years later, according to employment data from the Federal Reserve.

The Acosta mine will begin commercial operations in June. Corsa Coal funded the new mine with private capital and a development grant from the state of Pennsylvania.