Donald Trump is heading to West Virginia Tuesday for yet another in his string of traveling Nuremberg rallies, a fact that he naturally announced by tagging it with the magic phrase “Clean Coal!” And those words are magic. Magic in the sense that they have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
The term “clean coal” was a marketing term invented by coal companies specifically to denote a series of technology around carbon capture. Those technologies were supposed to go into a $1 billion project called “Future Gen” which would be a model for a new generation of coal power plants. That project collapsed. Was resurrected. Collapsed again. The closest thing the nation got to building a plant with any of these technologies was the Kemper County Energy Facility. But despite a $2.4B initial budget, and an actual expenditure of $7.3B, last year Kemper had to pull the plug. The nation’s first and only “clean coal plant” isn’t burning coal at all. It’s using natural gas.
But Trump has been on a clean coal tear of late, but his use of the term doesn’t even connect with the way the phrase was created by the PR department at coal companies. Trump’s use of the words clean coal doesn’t mean anything at all. Except that it encapsulates everything about Trump in a nutshell: The illusion of progress created from a dirty lie. And there’s no doubt that Trump will cap his visit to West Virginia by bragging about new rules from the EPA, now under the leadership of coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, which would not only end the Clean Power Plan, but allow states to relax more existing regulations.
It’s a change in rules that, as the New York Times reports, will not just increase carbon emissions at a time when the devastating effects of global warming are visible across the country, but directly cost lives. Specifically, the EPA predicts—not some outside group or some obscure panel, but the same agency that is proposing these new rules—that its plan will bring “between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths annually” from an increase in airborne particles. If any company was publishing a report saying “Hey, this will make our profits on your car or phone higher and all it will cost is a thousand lives a year” there would be outrage. But that’s exactly what the EPA is doing: Putting American lives on the altar for coal company and power company profits.
And the most horrible thing about the whole thing might not even be the increased pollution, the heaps of lies, or the lives lost. The most horrible thing is it won’t work. Coal is going to fail despite everything Trump is doing. All he can manage to do is make that failure slightly longer, slightly more profitable for mine owners, and much more painful for everyone else.
Right across the state line from where Trump will be Tuesday night, Eastern Kentucky is going through a crisis. As the Lexington Herald Leader reports, coal jobs are continuing to crash in the area. And even when national incomes have crept upward, the grinding poverty in the region—the poorest area in all of Appalachia—continues to deepen. And the poverty-stricken region has another bonus for the extraction-dependent population. As reported by Inside Climate News, declining population in the area, a falling revenue base for public-private partnerships, and fewer industrial customers means that the infrastructure cost of coal-based power plants is increasingly falling on the shoulders of those same residents who are seeing their incomes evaporate. The coast of coal-based power is going up sharply while the cost of power from other sources is coming down.
Residents of both Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia are suffering expressly because Trump’s policies are allowing utilities to keep running aging, anything-but-clean power plants. And leaving them to deal with both the cost of the power and the cost of cleaning up waste from mines and coal ash.
"They're doubling down on coal at a time when coal is not competitive," said James M. Van Nostrand, a professor at the West Virginia University College of Law with decades of experience in the energy field. "It's really tragic."
Trump tweeted his own mini-example of this tragedy posting an article from The Atlantic about the owner of a small mine in Alabama making a purchase of a used overburden shovel. What Trump didn’t say was just how sad that article was for the industry. The $2 million purchase of a beat-up shovel isn’t even a blip. Large mines don’t use shovels for overburden, they use draglines. A new dragline costs over $200 million. Large mines have multiple draglines. The man in the Atlantic article was an example of the kind of small operator who nibbles around the edges, usually working at coal part time with equipment mainly employed with construction tasks. It’s the kind of mining that results in unstable, short term, low benefit jobs and also the kind most likely to leave behind unreclaimed land and toxic waste.
And even that guy is likely to lose money. Directly because of Donald Trump. Because if coal wasn’t dying quickly enough on its own, Trump took the one move that could actually kill it when he instituted tariffs against China. The one area of the US market that was actually growing was exports, and the number one market for those exports was China. But as Bloomberg reports, the trade war Trump inaugurated has killed that market.
Just two weeks ago, the Chinese government was said to be considering buying more American coal as part of an effort to narrow its trade deficit with the U.S. Now, in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s duties on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, it’s looking to impose tariffs on imports of U.S. coal, along with a raft of other American goods.
That’s something Trump isn’t going to be bragging about tonight in West Virginia.
Pollution, climate change, falling wages, rising prices, and hundreds of deaths a year. That’s what Donald Trump’s coal policies are delivering. And his tariffs are the final nail in a coffin already being buried under toxic sludge.