When Donald Trump’s in a hole, he digs deeper.
As he does with other policies affecting immigration, trade and culture wars, Trump is still — or once again — pushing coal, beautifully clean coal as he calls it, as an energy goal. In pursuit of his belief that coal is being overlooked or displaced by “woke” concerns for solar, wind and alternative energy sources, last month Trump signed a series of executive orders towards reviving the dying coal industry.
Whatever political sense it makes for Trump to court miners (or mine owners) in West Virginia and Wyoming, his efforts seem a tad shy of recognizing environmental, economic or market condition realities. Apart from all else, Trump’s tariffs-driven trade war would seem on its face to discourage exports of coal to China and other Asian countries — the biggest markets for it.
To underscore the strategic pretzels being created around coal, China could turn to its increasingly warm ally Russia to buy yet more of its coal.
Earth.org, one of the myriad environmental groups critiquing Trump on coal, reminds us that coal remains the dirtiest fossil fuel, at 40%, the single largest source of fossil fuel carbon emissions and a major contributor to air pollution. “In fact, nations worldwide are turning away from coal,” the group said after the executive orders came out.
Similar coal promotion efforts during the first Trump administration fell flat and more than 100 plants shut down and others preferring cheaper, cleaner alternatives.
Trump on Coal
In four executive orders signed in April, Trump claims emergency authority to allow some older coal-fired power plants set for retirement to keep producing electricity to meet rising U.S. power demand amid growth in data centers, artificial intelligence and electric cars.
Trump has directed federal agencies to identify coal resources on federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands — ending a “war on coal.” Basically, the orders rescind any existing rule that gets in the way of mining coal or distributing it and calls for acceleration of coal technologies. Trump believes in “clean” coal technology that the industry itself finds overly expensive with questionable environmental gains. The difference concerns sulfur content, according to the Institute for Energy Economic and Financial Analysis says
As a further incentive to coal-fired power companies, Trump offered a two-year exemption from federal requirements to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic and benzene because, well, ridding of regulation and dismissing concern about pollutants apparently are good.
In particular, Trump’s orders push to use coal to power new artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, which strikes one as using outmoded, dirty energy to power something Trump sees as cutting edge and “clean.” For context, Microsoft wants to re-power the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to power its AI operations.
Together, the orders accept that coal is essential to national and economic security; he sees the supply as vast, while others see it as finite.
Of course, the coal promotion fits with incentives to the oil and natural gas industries and is meant to counter climate-driven government policies towards harnessing more solar, wind and nuclear sources — all part of the “Green New Deal” that Trump ridicules and hates. And, in the Trump way, the energy push is another national emergency that requires setting aside regulations and cutting Congress or courts out of policymaking.
The Environmental View
Consensus among environmentalists has been that Trump’s oil-heavy view of energy-at-any-cost policies are bad across climate, business and individual economics and strategic concerns, and that his chosen path to declare a national emergency to bulldoze over years of legislative and regulatory protections are a “sham.” We have Trump emergencies for immigration, tariffs, education, justice and more.
The Sierra Club says that since taking office Trump has weakened domestic energy production by pausing all wind projects, for example, and promising to slash hundreds of clean energy projects promoting under Joe Biden’s infrastructure project legislation.
Indeed, wind and solar now account for more U.S. energy power by percentage than does coal, which two decades ago reflected fully half of all electro power, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) predicts that Trump’s push will fail again. Coal is more costly, pollutes more and offers less reliability than other sources, and promoting it for power will increase consumer costs. No new plant has kicked in in more than a decade and the average age of existing plants is 53 years because coal has trouble competing. Studies suggest that emissions from it had a role in a half-billion U.S. deaths between 1999 and 2020.
Once again, coal policy offers us an interesting perch to watch the Trump administration at work. Clearly there are elements of politics at work here over, say, concern about environmental concerns, but we also see how anything related to “energy” that comes out of the ground is a personal trigger for Trump action. The idea that a nation could have some coal and some oil and some wind and solar just doesn’t seem to add up for Trump; to promote coal means to halt wind power — even as the world’s power needs as a whole are increasing.
Unless you are Trump or a fan, pushing coal to the exclusion of other energies makes little sense.
Photo at top is from Pixabay via Pexels
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