Pres. Obama Declares 3-Year Moratorium on Coal Leasing Program

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These mainly affect open pit mines which has more ephemeral employment than the shafts which carry  (carried, anyway) entire communities for decades. So not terrible for unemployment. Bit terrible for lazy/feckless state legislatures who thought they could get away with not having a remotely feasible tax system if they could cover it up with fossil revenues "that would be there forever" (which, norwegian left-wing aside, applies to literally every single government that finds itself sitting on natural resources in history).

I think chucking the bipartisan support for coal (by dumping support for Blue Dogs) was the worst mistake the coal industry could have made - and the coal industry as a whole have been making an astonishingly farcical series of mistakes in recent years, so that's saying something. Because if Obama had tried to do this in his first term, or even in 2013, there would have been uproar amongst a large swathe of the party. Now, with them all defenestrated, there's crickets.

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There is also a announced package which would redirect fossil fuel royalties towards fossil-fuel dependent communities. I don't know how wooly it is (I read a glowing summary on Vox, but you know what Vox can be like), but it's not like he's pissing over Appalachia.

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The reason the coal industry has historically a source of often violent union conflict and radicalism is that coal mining (despite its romanticism) is a filthy, highly dangerous job. I think it's a tragedy what has happened in Appalachia and I hope the government forms some sort of solution soon, but the answer isn't to bring back these jobs ... somehow (de-mechanisation? public subsidy).