Coal mining 101? Talk about the mind being a terrible thing to waste.

The title of the article says it all:

Awaiting Trump's coal comeback, miners reject retraining

A career training center in Pennsylvania coal country offers over 100 courses. Federally-funded, so the price is right.

But when one fellow thumbed through the virtual course catalogue, there was only one that caught his eye: coal mining.

"I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner. (Source: Reuters)

Unfortunately, Mike Sylvester has been misinformed. By none other than the misinformer-in-chief.

"I have a lot of faith in President Trump," Sylvester said.

It is true that, since Trump took office, employment in coal mines has nudged up by a couple of thousand jobs. But these may be wiped out by coal industry bankruptcies and the continued decline in the number of power plants fueled by coal. (Renewables now account for the same percentage of electricity generated as does coal.) The stark truth is that at its peak, the coal industry employed 1 million miners. Today, it employees about 50,000.

Even a president hell-bent on rolling back any environmental regulations that peskily get in the way of us being able to grab lung-fulls of coal-infused air can’t hold back the tide that’s running against coal.

Still, in areas where there are still ample coal reserves – enough coal reserves to give people a glimmer of hope that coal with make a comeback - folks aren’t jumping into training programs, which are way undersubscribed.

Not that retraining will necessarily turn into new opportunities.

What many experts call false hopes for a coal resurgence have mired economic development efforts here in a catch-22: Coal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. The stalled diversification push leaves some of the nation's poorest areas with no clear path to prosperity.

One might well ask why the government is even offering courses in coal mining. It sounds so, well, buggy whip. Or teaching people how to operate a switchboard.

Well, the program the Mike Sylvester is interested in was set up by a company that’s looking for temporary “contract laborers” (for a whopping $13/hour) to help with a slight uptick in foreign demand, which some have described “as a temporary blip driven by production problems in the coal hub of Australia.”

Anyway, those who want to mine coal – even for $13/hour – want to mine coal.

In one coal country county, not even jobs in adjacent fields hold much appeal:

Not a single worker has enrolled in another program launched this summer to prepare ex-miners to work in the natural gas sector, officials said.

The economic development people often hope that a big company – think Amazon, with a distribution center – will save them.

But even if Amazon comes to the rescue, how long before most of those (ill-paid, backbreaking) distribution center jobs are automated out of existence?

Mike Sylvester isn’t the only coal miner wannabe out there.

Sean Moodie and his brother Steve spent the last two years working in the natural gas industry, but see coal as a good bet in the current political climate.

“I am optimistic that you can make a good career out of coal for the next 50 years,” said Sean Moodie.

Coal jobs are preferable to those in natural gas, they said, because the mines are close to home, while pipeline work requires travel. Like Sylvester, the Moodie brothers are taking mining courses.

We never seem to be able to have an adult conversation about the nature of work, and what people are going to do for work moving forward, when more and more old-school jobs are no longer needed and where every process that possibly can be automated will be.

I feel plenty of sympathy for those who want to stay close to home, who want to work at the jobs their families have worked at for generations. It’s hard – even in your thirties – to rethink your future and take a clear-eyed look at reality. But if folks just refuse to accept reality, if they’d rather listen to the snake oil salesman promising a cure-all elixir, rather than some scold telling them not to waste their money on snake oil, well, it’s hard to keep that sympathy going.