“The trends that we were seeing before the president took office for coal, there were climate regulations, there were other local pollution regulations, there were market forces like the lower cost of solar and wind. Natural gas, at least over the last couple decades, has been relatively cheap for the most part, so those were headwinds to coal,” says Noah Kaufman, senior research scholar at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. “All of those things have shifted in the past year.”