Can Trump Revive "Beautiful, Clean Coal"?
The last time he was in office, he failed. Odds are he will fail again.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once jokingly observed: “A diamond is a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.”
While diamonds are still highly valued, coal—one of the biggest threats to the climate—is under increasing pressure to compete with cleaner and cheaper energy sources, namely wind, solar and fossil gas.
Donald Trump wants to reverse the U.S. coal industry’s fortunes, hoping that the export market can pull it back from the brink of extinction.
Long a champion of what he absurdly calls “beautiful, clean coal,” Trump—who insists climate change is a hoax—failed to achieve his goal to revive the industry during in his first term. Nearly 40 percent of the U.S. coal industry shut down over the past decade, including 48 gigawatts of coal power capacity during Trump’s term, the biggest decline during any administration since that of George W. Bush. The coal industry currently employs only 42,600 people, due in part to the fact that more than 40 percent of U.S. coal comes from Wyoming, where large, mechanized mines require fewer workers than mines in Kentucky, West Virginia and other states.
This time around, Trump is again pushing hard to resurrect dying U.S. coal electric plants, using his signature executive orders to try to coax the coal market back to life.
“We're bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” Trump declared at a signing ceremony last April for four executive orders promoting coal. “All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened if they’re modern enough, or they'll be ripped down and brand-new ones will be built.”
Those executive orders are expansive, requiring federal agencies to end moratoria on coal leasing on federal land and encourage companies to mine it. They even go as far as directing agencies to exclude coal mining under the National Environmental Policy Act, which would curtail environmental safeguards and limit public input on federal projects.
The administration considers coal to be a key way to power artificial intelligence (AI), and to further its agenda, Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin announced yesterday that the agency wants to repeal rules limiting carbon emissions as well as mercury and other toxic emissions from coal and fossil gas power plants.
“Rest assured, President Trump is the biggest supporter of clean, beautiful coal,” said Zeldin, who, like Trump, has received substantial fossil fuel industry funding. “We will use coal for power generation, to mine for critical minerals, and to export to our allies.”
Of course, the EPA’s action will be contested in court, but it indicates just how far the Trump regime will go to gut public health and environmental protections. During his first term in office, the Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules.
Shipping Coal Overseas
Serving the needs of AI here at home may not be enough to resuscitate coal, so the Trump administration is pinning its hopes on the export market. One of Trump’s coal-related executive orders specifically directs the Commerce Department to promote coal and coal technology exports, which, according to the law firm Holland & Knight, a coal industry lobbyist, “signal[s] a major shift in U.S. energy policy, positioning coal as a strategic resource for both domestic and global markets.”
While U.S. coal consumption has been on the decline after peaking in 2008, coal companies have been exporting more to feed rapidly growing economies in Asia, especially in India, which consumes a quarter of U.S. exports.
China, meanwhile, consumes only about 6 percent of U.S. coal exports, and they are expected to drop due to the trade war Trump recently instigated. China is still the big kahuna when it comes to burning coal, accounting for more than half of the world’s coal market, but experts predict its coal consumption will peak in 2027, when its climate policies promoting renewable energy will begin to supplant it.
That’s not the case with India, the world’s No. 2 coal consumer. Its domestic energy demand is climbing so rapidly, it plans to increase its domestic coal consumption by an astounding 42 percent by 2030. But as it expands its own coal production, it is expected to import less coal. That’s bad news for U.S. coal producers.
Beautiful, Clean Coal?
The Trump administration fails to acknowledge that coal is the greatest single contributor to global carbon emissions that fuel the climate crisis, representing 40 percent of all carbon emissions from fossil fuel use. China alone emits 50 percent of the world’s coal-powered carbon pollution, followed by India, which emits about 75 percent less. Scientists say that nations need to dramatically reduce their consumption of coal and other fossil fuels to meet international climate goals. But most countries, especially the three worst polluters China, the United States and India, are far from meeting those goals.
Coal pollution is also responsible for multiple respiratory diseases as well as premature death. In the United States alone, the National Institutes of Health estimates that coal pollution caused some 160,000 deaths between 1999 and 2020. Another study, published this year, found coal plant emissions cost communities across the country as much as $26 billion in additional health care costs every year. And then there is the ongoing threat to coal miners, who suffer from such lethal diseases as black lung, which still kills 1,000 U.S. miners a year.
Buying the GOP
It’s a very different story for the Republicans in Congress who have benefited handsomely from the industry’s largesse.
“The coal mining industry provides the biggest source of campaign dollars within the mining industry, and has supported Republicans in each of the past 13 election cycles,” reports OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan campaign finance group. According to the organization, the two top coal industry contributors, Cumberland Development and Alliance Resource Partners, gave Republicans about $2.75 million and $2.34 million, respectively, in the 2024 election cycle alone, when GOP lawmakers received 97.8 percent of the industry’s contributions.
But money can only buy so much. Despite Trump’s efforts to jumpstart the coal market, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), says coal’s future looks bleak. “Rising mining costs, increasingly stringent environmental regulations, and competition from other sources of electric power generation,” EIA concluded in April, “have contributed to domestic coal production declines.”
That’s a reality Trump can’t change with the stroke of a pen. We will all breathe easier because of it.
Rocky Kistner, Money Trail’s associate editor, previously worked as a reporter and producer at ABC News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, HuffPost, Marketplace and PBS Frontline.
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