Donald Trump is wrong on so many things, it becomes hard to keep track. Really bad policy decisions with long-term consequences slip by public notice because of his repeated COVID-19 missteps, racist pandering to white supremacists, and his efforts to pack the Supreme Court with rightwing ideologues.
Among Donald Trump’s greatest environmental travesties is his denial of the science of climate change and his promise to revitalize the coal industry. Power plants using coal as a fuel are the largest source of climate altering carbon emissions in the United States. In 2016 Trump rallied working class American voters promising an end to “the war on coal” would provide workers in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Tennessee with high paying jobs. It may have secured Trump Pennsylvania’s electoral votes and helped to swing the election. Trump is making similar promises in 2020. Hopefully American workers will not be duped a second time.
As President, Trump appointed company executives and lobbyists to self-regulate coal at the same time he collected large campaign checks from the industry. The Trump administration also worked to undermine the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to cut carbon emissions by coal-fueled power plants.
But despite Trump’s promises and futile efforts, in the last three years seventy-five coal-burning power plants and fifteen percent of the United States’ coal-generated capacity has gone off-line. Another seventy coal plants are scheduled to close, the fastest decline in coal-fuel capacity in history. In 2017, over thirty percent of U.S. energy came from coal. It is estimated that in 2020, coal power will decline to only twenty percent. After Donald Trump promised his presidency would revitalize coal, coal-mining jobs have declined by 5,300 and 12,000 jobs were eliminated by coal-burning utilities.
The main reason for the steep decline is that coal can’t compete with other power generating sources, especially cheaper and cleaner natural gas. In the United States, energy companies are planning to add at least 150 new gas-power electrical plants. While natural gas is a hot house pollutant, it releases fifty percent less carbon pollution than coal. At the same time, renewable electricity produced by sun, wind, and water is expanding faster than predicted. Globally, it produces about one-fourth 26% of the world’s electricity, but that is expected to increase to thirty percent by 2024.
A November 2017 article in Politico declared that Pam Schilling of Johnstown, Pennsylvania was the reason Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Pam Schilling grew up in Cambria County, “the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners. She once had a union job packing meat at a grocery store, and then had to settle for less money at Walmart. Now she’s 60 and retired, and last year, in April, as Trump’s shocking political ascent became impossible to ignore, Schilling’s 32-year-old son died of a heroin overdose. She found needles in the pockets of the clothes he wore to work in the mines before he got laid off.”
Donald Trump held a campaign rally at the Cambria County War Memorial arena in Johnstown on a rainy night on October 21, 2016 before a crowd of 5,000. Desperate for change, people like Schilling, once reliable Democrats, “responded enthusiastically to what Trump was saying — building a wall on the Mexican border, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, bringing back jobs in steel and coal.” A year after Trump’s election, in the Politico article, Schilling declared, “I think he’s doing a great job, and I just wish the hell they’d leave him alone and let him do it. He shouldn’t have to take any shit from anybody.”
Commentators across the political spectrum have offered various explanations for Donald Trump’s election as President in 2016 and continued support from his political base. White working-class voters, particularly voters without a college degree, and especially white men from rural areas, turned against traditional Republican candidates and a Democratic Party they once supported because they felt abandoned by changes sweeping through the country and especially in their communities. The death of the bituminous coal mining industry meant the virtual death of many American small towns. Donald Trump lied when he promised to resurrect the coal industry and small town America. Let’s hope voters make him pay in 2020.
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