The Trump administration has announced a plan to redirect millions of taxpayer dollars from your pockets to coal barons.
Of course, they’re not calling it that. No, they’re calling it something much less accurate, and much more Trumpy: “Interior Unleashes American Coal Power in Bold Move to Advance Trump Administration Priorities.” Apparently “unleashing” the power of coal is going to be expensive for everyone—except the coal companies.
The plan outlines giving $625 million to coal plant owners to upgrade their existing, aging coal plants instead of shuttering them, and opening 13.1 million acres of public lands for coal mining. Additionally, it reduces the royalty payments that coal companies usually have to make to the government for extracting coal on federal land.
So we’re looking at the private use of public land for private profits. Cool! Man, old-timey coal barons probably never had it this good.
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What do the rest of us get, besides greater opportunities for jobs that feature the decidedly old-school possibility of getting black lung disease? Well, how about skyrocketing energy costs?
If West Virginia is any guide, that’s indeed what the American people will be rewarded with. In the Mountain State, aka the heart of coal country, electricity rates have gone up about twice as fast as the national average over the past 15 years, with some residents now paying over $750 per month to their electric company. That’s just the price of unleashing freedom, baby. West Virginia votes deep red, but that isn’t going to stop the administration from screwing over the people who live there.
The Trump-loving state isn’t an outlier or an isolated data point. More coal plants do not equal cheaper energy. Generating electricity from coal is more expensive than other wussy woke ways, like solar. Maintaining coal plants is expensive, so the government is going to pick up the tab.
The Department of Energy has already forced one aging coal-fired plant to stay open for an additional three months for some unspecified energy emergency, even as the plant’s owners were winding it down. This move could cost as much as $100 million—which gets passed on to the customers, of course.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to kill every cost-efficient non-fossil fuel source it can find. Sure, that’s partly because President Donald Trump is irrationally terrified of windmills, but also because it’s way more fun to send all that taxpayer money to your pals who own coal and oil companies.
At least the administration dropped its embarrassing effort to encourage people to explore careers in coal mining. Well, we’re presuming it dropped whatever minuscule effort that tweeting about it might have represented, as they’ve since deleted the post.
Despite the administration’s best efforts to Make Mesothelioma Great Again, there’s just no untapped market of coal mining jobs to be unleashed. Those jobs have been falling steadily for decades, with a whopping 40,000 people or so currently in the industry.
Or, as people like to point out, fewer than the number who work at Arby’s. Why aren’t we seeing a whole-of-government effort to prop up failing Arby’s in rural communities? The people cry out for easy access to Horsey Sauce.
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All of this is a perfect ouroboros of corruption. Taxpayer dollars will be used to pay private companies to keep aging coal plants open despite their inefficiencies and massive pollution risks. Taxpayer dollars will go to drilling on public lands, but we’ll make it real cheap and easy for private companies to profit from that.
And somehow, if West Virginia is any guide, all of this will result only in higher energy costs for all of us.
It may be a “Bold Move to Advance Trump Administration Priorities” for the coal companies, but for the rest of us, it just sucks.
