VILLABLINO, Spain When the shutters come down on the last 10 privately owned pits in northwest Spains once mighty coal industry later this month, there will be tears and trauma in the region where the countrys mining unions were born.

There is also a fragile hope that a better, cleaner future could follow but a barely hidden warning that the despair that propelled Trump to power in the U.S. lurks in the wings if it does not.

Spains uneconomic coal industry has been killed by a pincer movement: cheaper imports from developing countries on one flank and falling renewable energy prices on the other, fanned by binding EU targets to reduce emissions and a dawning awareness of coals climate and other environmental costs.

Industry shutdowns are painful, especially in sectors like coal mining which go back generations. The risk is unemployment and social dislocation. But this one may play out differently: in a just transition deal brokered by unions and a new leftwing government that could have implications for other coal-producing countries, including the U.S.

Spain plans to support laid-off miners and their communities by plowing $285 million over a decade into compensation payouts, retraining for low-carbon jobs and environmental restoration work in pit communities. The aim is to ensure a safety net to catch those whose jobs will disappear as the economy shifts to a low-carbon one. Politicians and union officials say the deal will ensure both environmental and social protection as the economy shifts away from coal.

However, on the ground in Spain, there is suspicion about this promised new future from workers who have watched an industry, identity and way of life dying around for them for some two decades. More than a thousand miners and contractors will be laid off around Christmas, a third of them in the northern region of Castilla y Len, home to Villablino, and there is concern over whether new jobs will materialize.

New jobs are a utopia in our country, says Salvador Osario, a 47-year-old miner from Castilla y Len who took early retirement after 20 years of digging coal. The miners are alone. No-one wants to support us. Not the left- or the right-wing parties. Even the unions are divided.