Much of the pressure for Trump to pull out of the Paris agreement has come from coal state politicians like the attorney general of West Virginia and businesses like Murray Energy Co. , who say the agreement hurts their industry. But the real enemy of coal is progress — both the progress of science that has taught us the harm of coal mining and energy to both miners and our planet, the progress of technology that has invented cleaner and cheaper forms of energy, and the progress of time as coal sources have been depleted. In fact, in a September 2015, research note, Goldman Sachs told investors that we may have already reached “peak coal” — which means that we’re now running out of coal in the earth to be mined. Pulling out of the Paris accord is throwing a bone to an industry that is dying not because of anything Barack Obama did, but because of its own obsolescence.