Dem
47
GOP
53
Another claim that Donald Trump has made (and sold, with reasonable effectiveness) is that he will be the savior of all those coal-mining folks in places like West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Many thousands of people saw dad, and granddad, and maybe great-granddad live a fairly stable, middle-class lifestyle as a coal miner, and they want the same for themselves in the year 2025.
Consequently, Trump issued four executive orders on coal and energy production yesterday, most notably one with the title "Reinvigorating America's Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241." That title alone gives you a pretty good sense as to the President's "plan," and how little it has to do with the real world.
The XOs cover a fair bit of territory, but there are a few main thrusts. First, Trump wants future data centers, which are going to be very energy-intensive, to use coal to generate power. He doesn't really have much power to insist on this, so it's more of a "helpful" suggestion. Second, Trump wants Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to reclassify coal as a mineral, because that will subject coal to fewer regulations and will also open up funding for various forms of research into more aggressive use of coal. Third, Trump wants Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and the leaders of other agencies to reduce the regulatory barriers to new coal-production capacity.
Trump's basic framing here is that this is a battle between "real Americans," for lack of a better term, and mamby-pamby pinko-commie-liberal tree huggers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Hence his (completely false) claims that coal is "clean" and, in his press conference, that it's the cleanest form of energy known to man. In truth, it is the dirtiest source of energy in common use.
In any case, Trump is right that environmentalism is one of the factors that has led to the decline of coal production and use. However, it's not the most important factor, not by a longshot. The real problem is that other forms of energy, these days, are more profitable. Coal plants are very expensive to build; things like solar farms and wind farms and natural gas processing facilities are cheaper and more productive. Add on top of that the fact that any kind of energy production operation takes years to plan and build, and that no company wants to gamble tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars on a type of fuel that is not only less profitable, but that could be strongly disfavored once the Democrats retake the White House. For these reasons, no major new coal plant has been constructed in the U.S. in the last decade.
When Trump pumps out junk like this, it's sometimes hard for us to figure out if he's ignorant and/or stupid, or if he's just being disingenuous. In this case, however, the answer is pretty clear. Trump tried something very much like this during his first term, and it failed then, for the exact reasons we outline above. Nothing has changed since 2018 to make coal more viable. In fact, it is even less so than it was 7 years ago.
What actually has to happen, bitter a pill as it may be, is that communities that have been coal-mining centers since the days of Andrew Carnegie have to accept that coal is not coming back, that good-paying coal jobs are therefore not coming back, and that these coal-mining towns need to pivot. Some of those communities have done so, and if Trump actually wants to help the remainder, he should be looking for strategies to help encourage them to also take a new direction. But when Trump fuels their fantasies that we can get out the time machine and go back to 1955, it makes clear that his goal isn't to actually help improve these folks' lives, it's to get some cheap headlines, and to claim that he "did something" before he moves on to the next stunt. (Z)