December 05, 2017
That could have been the headline, at least if the New York Times article reporting on the action is accurate. The NYT told readers that when Clinton first created the Grand Staircase National Monument in 1996:
“When Mr. Clinton formed Grand Staircase, the move halted plans for a coal mining project there that would have brought desperately needed jobs to a poor county.”
Since the demand for coal is not hugely elastic, if coal was being mined from the area that became the monument, it would have largely displaced coal that was being mined elsewhere in the United States. As it was, employment in the coal industry fell from roughly 90,000 in 1996 (0.08 percent of total employment) to 52,000 in the most recent data (0.03 percent of total employment). The decline in employment in areas now producing coal would have been even sharper if the Grand Staircase had been open to mining, according to the NYT.
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