Original article by Eloise Goldsmith republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
(Photo: Mandel Ngan / AFP)
“Donald Trump is not concerned with Americans’ health or economic wellbeing. He is only concerned with helping out his billionaire buddies in the fossil fuel industry,” said one climate advocate.
After U.S. President Donald Trump declared on Truth Social on Monday night that he is ordering his administration “to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL,” a leader at the grassroots environmental group Sierra Club quickly hit back, calling the move “completely delusional.”
Trump said he was announcing the move as a means to counter China’s economic edge. The announcement comes “after years of being held captive by Environmental Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals, and Thugs, allowing other Countries, in particular China, to gain tremendous Economic advantage over us by opening up hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants,” Trump wrote.
It was not immediately clear what Trump’s directive was referring to or how his announcement on social media would impact U.S. policy, according to Bloomberg.
“There is no such thing as clean coal. There is only coal that pollutes our air and water so severely that nearly half a million Americans have died prematurely from coal in the last two decades,” said Sierra Club director of climate policy Patrick Drupp in a statement Tuesday. “Donald Trump is not concerned with Americans’ health or economic wellbeing. He is only concerned with helping out his billionaire buddies in the fossil fuel industry.”
Trump’s cabinet includes a number figures who are friendly to the fossil fuel industry, such as Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who was a fracking industry CEO, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a known ally of oil and gas companies.
On his first day in office, Trump declared a national energy emergency to ensure “an affordable and reliable domestic supply of energy,” called for expedited “permitting and leasing of energy and natural resource projects in Alaska,” and withdrew the United States from the the world’s main climate pact.
The U.S. is mulling using emergency authority to bring coal-fired plants back online and halt others from shutting, Burgum told Bloomberg Television in an interview last week.
“Under the national energy emergency, which President Trump has declared, we’ve got to keep every coal plant open,” Burgum said while at the energy sector gathering CERAWeek. “And if there had been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back.”
Meanwhile, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin earlier this month announced a new effort to rollback a host of EPA regulations, including some that will impact coal producers.
The coal mining company Peabody Energy saw their stock rise 3.5% after Trump’s Monday post on social media about “clean coal,” according to Tuesday morning reporting from Schaeffer’s Investment Research.
As of 2023, coal accounted for 16.2% of U.S. electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That year, 21.4% came from renewables.
In its statement released on Tuesday, Sierra Club took issue with Trump’s assertion that investing in coal has provided an economic boost to other countries. “Trump refers to the ‘Economic advantage’ that burning coal has afforded other nations. In reality, renewable energy is quickly becoming more affordable and reliable than coal,” they wrote.
In 2023, the think tank Energy Innovation Policy & Technology released an analysis which found that 99% of coal plants are more expensive to run compared to replacing their generation capacity with either solar or wind power, when taking into account credits that were made available through the Inflation Reduction Act.
Original article by Eloise Goldsmith republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
