Trump Will Force Energy Industry To Buy More Coal Over Everyone's Dead Bodies
Much safer than wind power since that gives you wind cancer.
Donald Trump spent lots of time and energy (haha) in his 2016 campaign insisting he would revive the coal industry, only for his efforts to do so in in his first term to fail badly. That’s because coal is dirty, inefficient, and far more expensive than fossil gas, which has become the primary fuel for power generation over the last two decades, as fracking (with its own environmental awfulness) unlocked huge reserves of oil and gas. That market-driven transition away from coal was the single biggest factor in America’s progress in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, according to 2023’s National Climate Assessment. There’s also the simple fact that for years now, renewable energy (wind and solar, supplemented by storage) has also been far cheaper than coal, and is rapidly becoming cheaper than gas.
But in Trump’s weird delusions, coal didn’t simply lose in the market, it was murdered by mean liberals who regulated it out of business. That’s demonstrably not true: It was primarily due to economics, and only partly to regulations. The disappearance of coal mining jobs is similarly due to both lower demand and to technological changes, particularly the shift from underground mining to strip mining. Currently, a record-low 40,200 people are still employed in coal mining, per the St. Louis Fed.
But now that he’s decided to go full dictator, Trump on Tuesday issued four broad executive orders that he promised will bring back coal, because he is the boss and it must happen even if the industry doesn’t wanna. Spoiler warning: It still isn’t going to happen, beyond keeping some existing coal-fired plants in operation for a few years past their planned retirement dates, because coal is a shitty, polluting, expensive fuel that harms public health and increases death rates, not that human lives matter to Trump. Besides, Joe Biden did add regulations that would have helped hasten coal’s death in the US, so Trump has no choice but to reverse them, no matter the cost. It’s a compulsion.
Predictably, at Tuesday’s press conference announcing the new orders, Trump ignored coal’s decades-long economic decline and instead pretended that eliminating climate regulations would make the energy industry decide to switch back to an expensive, polluting, inefficient fuel that it’s already abandoning. He very pointedly didn’t mention fossil gas at all, blaming coal’s steep decline on “radical green” policies instead. In mere reality, the low price of gas drove virtually all coal’s losses in the energy market, according to a 2019 study, which also noted that “Environmental regulations had little effect on these outcomes.”
But reality is boring and dirty energy makes Trump rock hard, like the rock from which coal used to be dug. With several human props in full underground mining gear there to add testosterone to the carbon, Trump explained that he’s told everyone in his administration to talk like him, because he’s a fucking idiot and everyone else has to be, too.
“I call it beautiful, clean coal — I tell my people to never use the word ‘coal’ unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it,” Mr. Trump said in the East Room of the White House surrounded by dozens of mostly men in hard hats. “We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all.”
Seriously, Trump just couldn’t stop talking about how much he loves miners and wants to be surrounded by miners. It’s almost as if he was grooming miners!
At the White House ceremony on Tuesday, he repeatedly referred to the burly men who surrounded him, joking about whether the stage could handle their collective weight and about arm wrestling several of them. He recalled how during his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, she was talking about job retraining for miners. “She was going to put them in a high-tech industry where you make little cellphones and things,” he said as he gestured daintily and laughed.
This administration really does have less interest in capitalism than in a weird kinky masculinity — and given coal’s harm to health, in this case it’s literally the toxic kind (Dok typed effeminately with his uncalloused hands).
As for the actual executive order, which really is titled “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” Trump demands that coal be reclassified as a “critical mineral” for energy, and orders government agencies to sweep away all regulations that might slow the development of new coal mines, to speed up granting new coal leases on public lands, and creates a special exemption for coal mining from the National Environmental Policy Act. Yeah, the lawsuits against that one alone will be epic.
The order also calls on agencies to eliminate any regulations that “seek to transition the Nation away from coal production and electricity generation,” as if that would make coal any more competitive with gas or renewables on cost. And of course the order directs federal agencies to push new coal power to meet the needs of all those AI data centers that may or may not need all our electricity in coming decades, a claim that many energy experts consider grossly overstated anyway.
Another of Trump’s orders directly interferes in energy markets, ordering Energy Secretary Chris Wright to forbid utilities from shuttering costly, inefficient coal plants, because of course we’re in an “energy emergency.” (Trump’s stupid “emergency” declaration seeks to prevent deployment of new wind, solar, and storage, even though they can be brought online faster than new gas plants.) And who’s going to pay to keep those far more expensive coal powerplants in service? Local utility ratepayers, of course!
Even with all that shit, the most that Trump is likely to accomplish is keeping aging coal plants in business a few years longer while adding far more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, worsening warming. An energy executive told Politico that American utilities have zero interest in building new coal plants with an operating life of 40 years, both because gas and renewables are far cheaper, and because they know a future administration can simply reverse Trump’s executive orders.
As it is, even the coal plants that stay open will likely only run when they’re needed to meet peak demand, because for most needs, fossil gas and carbon-free sources (including hydropower and nuclear, plus wind, solar, and storage) can do the job for less money.
But as we say, this isn’t really about economics, or even American “energy dominance,” at least apart from Trump’s “dominance” kink. If Trump were serious about unlocking vast new energy resources, he’d be pushing renewables, which continue to be the most quickly growing segment of US energy. It’s really about revenge and turning back the clock, even when it defies economic sense.
Oh yes, and here’s a teaser for our next piece on energy: Trump also issued an executive order yesterday aimed at blocking states from taking action on climate, because he has to control everything and he hates clean energy, especially if it’s in California or New York. We’ll tackle that tomorrow and look more closely at how Trump’s energy policy simply doesn’t add up, even as a plan to push fossil fuels.
[Politico / Climate Council / NYT / RAND Journal of Economics / White House (beautiful clean coal EO) / Heatmap / Canary Media / White House (state law EO) / WaPo (archive link) / E&E News]
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You know, I'm honestly a little grumpy with myself that I didn't also point out that while Trump has adopted the phrase "beautiful clean coal," he isn't even talking about the never-successful attempt to come up with a process that would capture all or most of the carbon and other pollutants. The pilot projects all failed.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/carbon-capture/us-government-squandered-hundreds-of-millions-on-clean-coal-pipedream
After the government and industry blew hundreds of millions on the attempt, the technology never came together. But Trump latched onto the name, even though he's only talking about plain old dirty coal. I assume most of us already knew that, but I meant to make a note of it in the article.
Funny how he did that by reversing the meaning of "fake news," too.
Holy fuck, Rep. Stephen Horsford (D-NV) just absolutely torched Greer.
"The trade rep hasn't spoken to the President about a global reordering of trade but yet he announced it on a tweet? WTF? Who's in charge?"
"It looks like your boss just pulled the rug out from under you...you just found out three seconds ago"
"This is amateur hour, and it needs to stop! What does this even mean for your negotiation strategy? How are you in charge of negotiation if the President is tweeting about this from wherever the hell he is?"
*slamming his fist on the dais* "What billionaire just got richer? And all the while, there are not even any Republicans left in this hearing. They all left, because they don't even want to defend this!"