The fossil fuel industry has never been shy about using people of color as human shields against criticisms, for example Peabody Energy’s exploitation of the 2014 Ebola outbreak to push its coal as a cure for poverty and disease.
Last week in the LA Times, Sammy Roth explored how gas companies are continuing the rich tradition of fossil fuel companies exploiting people of color, like using Native Americans as a front for the“Western States and Tribal Nations,” so that it looks somewhat less like the methane gas-backed entity that it is when it lobbies for more gas and less climate action.
Many of the examples from the gas industry Roth describes are pretty sophisticated operations, targeting local communities and tailoring content to specific audiences, as professionals do.
However, in the time since Peabody Energy went bankrupt, came out of it, and is now potentially about to go bankrupt again, the sorts of pro-coal pundits they funded are still making the same stupid arguments, but now somehow even more stupidly.
Specifically, Kathleen Hartnett White and Caleb Rossiter have an op-ed in the Washington Examiner calling on Trump to issue an executive order so that (supposedly “clean”) coal plants can be sold to and built in Africa. “When it comes to the improvement in health that universal electrification will bring,” they conclude, “African Lives Matter.”
As a reminder of the author’s credibility, Hartnett White’s byline notes she was a “top pollution regulator” in Texas and “nominated by President Trump to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.” For additional context though, our own reminders: as Texas’s top regulator, she instructed staff to hide radiation exposure from residents, let polluters get by with minimal fees, resisted efforts to strengthen regulations, and wrote that coal ended slavery.
And all that was before her CEQ nomination hearing where she was so ill-prepared and incapable of answering basic scientific questions that the Trump administration rescinded her nomination. Her co-author Caleb Rossiter, on the other hand, is the former professor who snowflaked his way out of American University and into a job at the CO2 Coalition, a transparently pro-pollution climate denial outfit.
Together, what these two write is that “President Trump can save up to 439,000 lives a year” by letting coal companies get public money to build in Africa, where indoor air pollution from wood, charcoal and dung stoves causes those nearly half a million deaths a year.
Now, obviously, there’s probably nearly half a million reasons why it doesn’t make sense to build coal plants, even supposedly “clean” ones, when cheaper and more easily dispatchable renewables are available for the parts of Africa that are still without regular electricity.
But even if one denies the direct pollution and the climate pollution from coal plants, using African lives as an incentive still isn’t a smart way to get President Trump to do it!
Because after Trump's four years as President, the coal industry is no better off than it was when he campaigned on reviving it to its former glory. And even the Washington Examiner’s reporting side recognized that Trump’s re-election campaign dropped coal for a focus on oil and gas.
So it should be clear that Trump never cared about coal miners, he only sought to use them as props to tap into the petromasculinity that runs like an undercurrent through conservative climate denial. But having done exactly nothing for them with the power of the Presidency, it’s clear Trump never cared about coal country dying. Hell, he clearly never cared about people across the entire country dying, either from the pollution caused by his regulatory rollbacks as acknowledged in his administration’s own filings or more recently and directly, the hundreds of thousands who have died from the coronavirus pandemic.
As evidenced by his four years as President, all he cared about was golf and grifting. If Trump obviously doesn’t give a shit about American lives, why do they think he’d care about African lives in countries he called shitholes?