Donald Trump Orders Pentagon: Buy Coal Power, To Whip The Kaiser!
Also, the industry gave him its new Coalpile Peace Prize.
In his latest attempt to keep the doomed coal industry alive for a few more years, Donald Trump yesterday ordered the US military to enter into long-term contracts to buy electricity generated by coal-burning power plants. He also announced that the Energy Department would be throwing away $175 million to modernize six aging coal plants in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia.
At the White House ceremony where Trump signed his executive order, grateful members of the “Washington Coal Club” — a front for America’s filthiest energy industry — presented him with a Major Award that they created just for him because he’s a special boy. It’s a trophy depicting a very hunky underground miner carrying a pick, with the title “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal” inscribed on the base.
Maybe it’s just the power of suggestion, but the 1997 sculpture of the little coal hero (guess the industry had a few boxes of the things on hand) even looks a bit like Trump, at least the youngified version of him in AI slop where he’s a great big manly muscular action hero. We think we found the original item for sale ($950), and the face on that one looks … less Trumpy? There could be a fun little investigative story to be done on how this thing came to be.
Weird accolades from polluters notwithstanding, let’s just keep in mind that coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, a huge source of planet-heating greenhouse emissions, and a pollutant that threatens human health. It’s also far more expensive than nearly every other energy source except nuclear, which is why coal now generates only 16 percent of US electricity, down from 51 percent in 2001. Abundant fossil gas unlocked by the fracking boom of the last 25 years (a decidedly mixed bag, environmentally) has simply been far cheaper than coal, no matter how much Trump may lie about Democrats doing a “war on coal.”
It was capitalism all along.
As for the executive order, it tells Pete Hegseth to put down the authentic hillbilly coal-miner moonshine for a minute and to create long-term contracts for military bases to get their electricity from coal plants all over the country, with the aim of propping up the industry by locking in purchases of its more-expensive energy.
The order doesn’t actually specify how much the Pentagon must spend on coal power, but Trump confidently lied, “We’re going to be buying a lot of coal through the military. […] It’s going to be less expensive and actually much more effective than what we have been using for many, many years.”
Again, coal can’t compete on price with gas, or with renewables like solar, wind, and storage.
Yesterday’s order for the military to get more dirty energy from external coal-fired power plants also reverses the Defense Department’s pre-Trump plans to improve energy security on military bases through building on-site renewable microgrids with solar arrays and rooftop solar, backed by battery storage. The National Laboratory of the Rockies — which had to change its name and mission under Trump; it used to be the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — determined that onsite microgrid systems could greatly improve the resilience of energy on military bases during blackouts on the grid, at “little to no added cost” over existing offsite power purchases.
No more of that “energy security” nonsense for Trump! There’s a dying dirty energy industry that needs to keep making money as long as Trump can find ways to throw taxpayer funds at it. The attempts to subsidize coal and to kill off clean energy like offshore wind won’t be enough to bring coal jobs roaring back; those jobs were primarily lost to mechanization, as well as to coal’s high costs. But it will delay the final collapse of the 19th Century’s top energy source, and that’s all that matters to Trump.
Under Trump’s stupid “energy emergency” order last year, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has tried to protect coal from the mean old free market, like forcing five huge coal-burning plants to stay open even though their operators don’t want them, and have scheduled them for closure. Big surprise: That’s not cheap, and the costs of keeping the old plants running get passed along to ratepayers, as the Washington Post explains (gift link):
The result, according to Ari Peskoe, an energy scholar at Harvard University, has been to “raise energy bills while providing negligible benefits to consumers.”
“Each of the five plants were slated to retire because they are expensive to operate and there are cheaper sources of power available to meet consumers’ needs,” Peskoe said. “Plant owners aren’t just flipping a switch to turn the plants back on — they are spending millions on maintenance, renewing expired coal contracts and rehiring workers.”
But at least it will raise your energy bills for decades, all to keep coal producers profitable until Trump is done and the market kills coal once and for all. Utility operators who would rather not keep throwing money at obsolete plants are suing to block Wright’s orders, and 15 state attorneys general are also suing to overturn Trump’s “energy emergency” declaration, too.
In further bad news for the planet, the administration is set to formally roll back the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” today, which Trump, Wright, and other fossil fools have hankered to do since Day One. That’s the EPA legal/scientific finding that carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that “threaten human health and welfare.” Adopted during the Obama administration, the finding provided the legal basis for regulating greenhouse pollution under the Clean Air Act. The sorta-good news is that the flimsy report that’s the basis for the decision is crappy science, and the new EPA rule will be locked up in court battles for years before it can be implemented.
So far, Trump hasn’t demanded that the Navy retrofit its nuclear aircraft carriers with coal-fired engines at a cost of trillions of dollars. But it may just be a matter of time until someone shows Pete Hegseth a WWI photo of manly muscular boiler stokers with black soot on their faces and bare glistening sweaty chests. Then we’re done for.
[CNBC / Bloomberg via MSN / WaPo (gift link) / Grist / Inside Climate News / Landmark Earth]
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EVERY FUCKING THING THIS MAN DOES IS MONEY LAUNDERING.
If you're going to create a statue of a coal miner, even in 1997, it wouldn't be a guy with a pick axe. It would be and industrial mountaintop removal machine.