Some number of years ago, Donald Trump heard or came across the phrase “clean coal.” While this flatly contradictory phrase was originally used to suggest that tech added on to power plants or smokestacks could render the dirty fossil fuel cleaner in terms of its pollution and carbon emissions, our big smart boy internalized it as meaning something quite different.
“We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal,” he said way back in 2017, and probably a hundred other times as well. “It’s just been announced that a second, brand-new coal mine, where they’re going to take out clean coal — meaning, they’re taking out coal, they’re going to clean it.” And so on, in various iterations, over the years — including up to early in his new term, when he spoke to the luminaries at Davos about building power plants to fuel the AI boom: “They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup. Good, clean coal.” He genuinely thinks there is a cleaner kind of coal that can either come out of the ground that way or, who knows, get “washed” somehow on its way to the power plant. This belief, stuck in his moldering brain with no possibility of removal, has convinced him that a coal revival is just the thing the country needs.
Multiple outlets reported on Tuesday that Trump will sign executive orders aimed at propping up the clearly dying industry, allowing or forcing coal-fired power plants to remain open past scheduled retirement dates in theory as a way to meet rising electricity demand from the AI and data center boom. This is, quite obviously, an absurd policy move, from a human health perspective as well as a climate change perspective, not to mention a sheer economics perspective.
The new orders will apparently direct agencies to identify coal resources that could be mined on federal lands and smooth the road toward increased mining output. They will reverse an Obama-era moratorium on coal leasing on those lands, push for development of new coal power tech, and use the president’s emergency authority (though no such emergency exists) to let existing power plants keep running.
Though there is still a coal industry and a coal lobby in the US, it is more or less dragging itself along by a sort of sense memory rather than any real economic or even cultural heft. There aren’t that many coal workers anymore; hundreds of coal plants have retired in recent years, with only about 140 still operating; economic analyses have shown that keeping them running costs more than actually building new solar and wind power — in 99 percent of cases.
If Trump succeeds in keeping any coal plants running longer than planned, that will literally kill people. The particulate matter from coal power pollution is twice as deadly as similar particles from other sources, and studies have found that almost half a million deaths from 1999 to 2020 can be pinned on the pollution from coal power plants.
“Forcing coal plants to stay online will cost Americans more, get more people sick with respiratory and heart conditions, and lead to more premature deaths,” said Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous, in a statement. “Donald Trump’s plan is as despicable as it is reckless and ill-conceived.”
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