What if you threw a party to wreck the environment and nobody came?
As part of its comprehensive assault on renewables, the Trump administration tried to get some company somewhere, anywhere, to agree to buy 167 million tons of coal, to be extracted from public land in Montana. It did not really work out well, with the only bid being one for $186,000, or a fraction of a penny per ton.
The Department of the Interior rejected the sale, as the law requires bids to be at or above market value, and the last sale in the area was for about $1.10/ton. Not that laws matter at all to this administration, but pretending that they do is at least a way for it to save face after this disastrous sale attempt. Another proposed sale of 440 million tons of coal in Wyoming was postponed after the low Montana bid, with no word as to when or if it would be rescheduled.
“Winding down” by Mike Luckovich
How will the administration continue its quest to Make Black Lung Great Again if it can’t force people back into the mines? The people yearn to experience old-timey diseases!
The problem for the administration is that nobody really wants coal, even utility companies that are currently operating coal plants. The company that made the $186,000 bid provides fuel to power plants in Wyoming, and their plants are slated to stop burning coal in the next decade.
One solution the administration has hit on is forcing companies to keep their coal plants open after they were slated to be shut down. Sure, keeping those open is bad for the environment, but at least it’s also more expensive!
The administration also recently announced that it would shower coal plant owners with cash to keep that dirty fuel humming along, while also reducing the royalty payments required to extract coal on federal lands.
Related | We're getting coal, whether we want it or not
Well, perhaps they were planning on reducing royalty payments, but it seems no one wants to buy the filthy fuel that is dangerous to extract when there are other, cleaner, cheaper sources, particularly renewables, available.
Trump’s coal fixation is leaving America behind in energy growth as other countries adopt renewables at breakneck speed. Trump’s weird hatred of renewable energy is also set to hobble his desire to have the United States be nothing but AI data centers from sea to shining sea.
JP Morgan—not exactly a company dominated by Greta Thunberg-esque hippies bent on ramming wind down our throats—said that without renewables, the country won’t have enough energy for all the racist chatbots Elon Musk needs to make, or whatever other AI horrors are planned. JP Morgan is planning to invest $1.5 trillion in “security and resilience,” specifically in solar, wind, nuclear, and battery storage.
The horror. How dare the financial masters of the universe not sign on to Trump’s perverse, self-defeating efforts to force us backward?
It turns out that dragging America back into the coal age benefits no one—not even companies that mine coal.
