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coal
'Completely Delusional': Trump Calls for Reinvigorating Domestic Use of US Coal
"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.
Mar 18, 2025
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 toldBloomberg 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.
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Team Trump Tries to Export Its Fossil Fuel Madness
Mar 09, 2025
We’re reaching the point with the second Trump administration where, as Wall Street investors would say, the crazy is “priced in.” There’s absolutely no reason to expect anything other than aggressively dishonest and profoundly stupid governance. Would you say, at this point, that you’re surprised to learn that the new #2 at EPA, who will be running the day-to-day operations,
made nearly $3.2 million in 2024 representing a range of corporate interests against pollution cases and enforcement actions. His clients included Chevron, Sunoco Pipeline, and Energy Transfer, a major oil and gas company that is currently litigating a high stakes trial against Greenpeace, according to a recent financial disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics.
And he wasn’t even the most egregious EPA nominee—another high-ranking future official told the Senate that as far as he was concerned the job was not to prevent climate change, it was to adapt to it once it happened. Thanks!
These kind of things are terrible, and also at this point entirely predictable. Indeed, it was all foretold with breathtaking candor in Project 2025, and then the nation voted for President Trump anyway. (Perhaps someone actually believed his demurrals about his plans during the campaign). We need to resist at every turn—please join us at Third Act as prepare for the next big round of actions on April 5—but at this point there is great damage we simply can’t avoid.
It makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn't vote for this charlatan.
I think it makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn’t vote for this charlatan. News continued to flow in from around the globe last week of countries succumbing to White House extortion to buy more liquefied natural gas, on pain of getting tariffed otherwise. And then there’s Ukraine—and if you want to watch a truly stinging takedown of Trump’s treachery, check out this from a center-right French parliamentarian. Better yet, read Antonia Juhasz’s long account for Rolling Stone of the truly extortionate “mineral rights” deal that Trump is demanding from Zelensky. She quotes Svitana Romanko, who will be familiar to readers of this newsletter—a longtime climate campaigner who has emerged as Ukraine’s most passionate environmentalist.
I have no doubt that a hidden agenda is getting access and decision-making rights to gas and oil pipelines, especially gas that’s so critical given that the European market is so important for Russia and has always been.” This is “really threatening to everything we’ve done so far” to weaken Russia’s war-fighting ability and influence, including “getting the full ban on Russian oil and gas to the European Union,” she adds.
Though it gets drowned out in the news over Russia, Canada, and Mexico but just as disgusting and revealing was the initiative unveiled this week by America’s new energy secretary, fracking baron Chris Wright, who told his counterparts from across Africa that the future was…fossil fuels, above all coal. The Africans were gathered at a Marriott across from the White House for some sense of what would happen to them now that the Trump administration has summarily shut down Power Africa, the program begun by President Obama that has connected tens of millions of homes on the continent to electricity.
According to Times reporter Max Bearak, Energy Secretary Wright sold the shutdown as a gift. “This government has no desire to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It’s a paternalistic post-colonial attitude that I just can’t stand.” He then went on to say:
“We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” Mr. Wright said. “That’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense. Coal transformed our world and made it better.”
And while Mr. Wright said climate change was a “real, physical phenomenon,” he said it wouldn’t make a list of his top 10 problems facing the world.
The amount of actual nonsense crammed into those two paragraphs is…amazing. Yes, coal transformed the world during the industrial revolution. But now it’s transforming the world again, by altering the climate—which is not only the world’s biggest problem by far, but is making all the others much worse. African countries worry about public health, about hunger, about building infrastructure: here’s what the World Meteorological Organization calculated in 2023:
On average, African countries are losing 2–5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and many are diverting up to 9 percent of their budgets responding to climate extremes.
More to the point, the idea that coal is the answer for Africa is belied by history. Which is to say, we’ve known about coal—and natural gas—for a very long time, and there are somehow still 600 million Africans unconnected to the electric grid. If coal was going to do the job, perhaps it would have done so by now.
The problem, in Africa, is the lack of a grid—the huge and hugely expensive collection of poles and wires that distributes power from centralized coal-fired power stations. I remember sitting in Tanzania, years ago, with a Silicon valley entrepreneur named Xavier Helgesen: “The belief was, you’d eventually build the U.S. grid here,” he said. “But the U.S. is the richest country on earth, and it wasn’t fully electrified until the nineteen-forties, and that was in an era of cheap copper for wires, cheap timber for poles, cheap coal, and cheap capital. None of that is so cheap anymore, at least not over here.”
Happily, there’s now a way around that problem: it’s called distributed solar power. And, as I’ve been writing, it’s exploding in Africa. I saw some of the first solar mini-grids on the continent five or six years ago—now there are thousands. There was a World Bank effort launched last fall to find $90 billion—one quarter of an Elon at today’s market prices—to provide power for 300 million of those 600 million Africans. (That one man could electrify the whole continent and still have $180 billion left over gives you some sense of the grotesque inequality now haunting our earth). But if that happened, it would be another step leading the world away from fossil fuels and the “energy dominance” that the Trump team dreams of.
“When we say ‘all of the above,’ you might ask, is that code for carbon? And yes, it is code for carbon,” said Troy Fitrell, a senior State Department official and former ambassador to Guinea. “There are no restrictions anymore on what kind of energy we can promote.”
In case you’re wondering how all this is going to happen, it’s worth remembering that one of Trump’s first acts in office was to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign governments. As the evangelical magazine Christianity Today (in an earlier day, evangelicals had actually argued for the law, on the grounds of, you know, honesty) pointed out yesterday,
Taken by itself, the FCPA freeze could merely be a messy attempt to limit the authority of the DOJ and the SEC. But halting FCPA in tandem with limiting enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force poses a shift in American policy likely to affect not just American oversight of American bribery abroad but also the US government’s ability to monitor foreign agents in America.
If the U.S. is able to bully or bribe African governments into building more coal-fired power plants, let me make a prediction. Just as we’ve seen in Pakistan this past year, the expensive and unreliable power those plants deliver on underbuilt grids will be one more factor pushing people towards cheap solar. In fact, as I’ve described in this newsletter already, that process is underway across much of Africa already, as people and companies buy up cheap Chinese solar panels and liberate themselves from the status quo.
It would be cheaper, and provide more power more quickly to more people, to do this systematically with solar minigrids, as Power Africa has been envisioning, instead of one roof at a time. But the turn to the sun will happen eventually anyway; in the end, the greed unleashed by Trump, Wright, and their friends will be insufficient to alter either physics or economics. Much damage will be done in the meantime, though—to Africans, to the climate, and to whatever remains of the idea of American leadership. The Chinese are doubtless chortling; indeed by this point the laughter must be nonstop. If you want to read one account of China’s rise to the renewable pinnacle, this Washington Post piece might be it. Among other things, it makes clear that as the U.S. pushes coal, Beijing is actually offering something people want and need:
In 2024, Chinese exports of EVs, batteries, and solar and wind products to the Global South surged to account for a record 47 percent of the total.
“It’s probably a good thing for the climate because these clean technologies are diffusing all over the world,” says Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who was a senior adviser on Chinese climate issues in the Obama administration. “But it is also probably resulting in the United States losing even more market share globally.”
At this point we sure deserve that loss. Here’s the big and wonderful news from China this week: gasoline sales fell…9 percent last year, as EVs took hold in the country. If I were Big Oil I’d be desperately trying to leverage the White House too, I guess.
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A Dispatch From the Trumpocalypse
The long and short of it is that the world was going in the wrong direction even before Our Trump returned that second time and turbocharged that all too unfortunate trajectory.
Jan 22, 2025
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet light, warming the planet. It actually absorbs infrared light, and the article has been edited to reflect this.
My name isn’t important, only what I have to say. I’m writing with a pencil because I need to conserve my batteries tonight. It’s Year 24 of Our Trump (though he himself, of course, is no longer with us, just his kids who are running things). I feel like I should try to explain our era to whoever opens this time capsule a century from now, though you may need scuba gear to get at it. A lot of records could be lost by then. The Chinese climate hoax was less of a hoax than we thought at the time. Forgive me, Donald, but despite what the New Evangelical Church says, you were anything but infallible—even if I still can’t say so publicly.
I’d like to move away from the coast, maybe even go north. But real estate in the interior is too pricey, especially at higher elevations away from the flood plains. Looking on the bright side, though, my bunker has held up alright so far, even during the usual Cat 7 hurricanes, and I’ve stocked plenty of canned soup. I do worry, though, about being submerged by a storm surge. No one wants to end up like those poor people in Galveston.
In short, we used up our carbon budget twice as fast as anyone had predicted, though I wasn’t paying attention at the time. My friends then would have thought me crazy if I had.
I only hope that the state police won’t find my solar panels, which charge my contraband batteries to keep the AC going down here. We’re all haunted by that Black August in Palm Beach. It turns out that they had 100% humidity then. Combine that with temperatures reaching 120ºF and it dead-on kills you. Your sweat just can’t cool you down anymore, and you end up with terminal heat stroke. Of course, most of them could have been saved by air conditioning if it hadn’t been for the blackout at that new nuclear plant. Bad timing. It turns out such plants use water for cooling and, that day, the local water was so hot they had to shut the plant down.
Tipping Point
There was an unforeseen climate tipping point we blundered into. Looking back, I now realize that the U.S. put out 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the year before—yes, before!—the Second Advent of Our Trump. Horrific as that may have been, it was only about 11% of total global emissions, which hit 41.6 billion metric tons that year before the Second Advent (up from 40.6 billion tons in 2023). In short, we used up our carbon budget twice as fast as anyone had predicted, though I wasn’t paying attention at the time. My friends then would have thought me crazy if I had.
Even a few years ago, such facts and figures would have seemed unbearably wonky to me. I didn’t realize my wife would divorce me over them and I’d end up alone here in my bunker, doomscrolling the dark web looking for the catastrophes they don’t let the mainstream media report anymore. Don’t worry, I use a virtual private network and I don’t think the NSA can trace me. The long and short of it is that the world was going in the wrong direction even before Our Trump returned that second time and turbocharged that all too unfortunate trajectory.
Some people think we should flee the Big One. For me, it’s too late. The highways are a parking lot, and the price of gasoline is too steep because of the fracked fields going dry. Maybe Our Trump shouldn’t have banned EVs. And I can’t fly out of here anymore (even if I could afford to). It’s too hot for the airplanes to take off. I hadn’t known it, but flying depends on the air having a certain thickness, and hot air has less volume because the molecules speed up and spread around. That’s what Alfred, my PAIC (Personal AI Chatbot), told me when I asked him. Not sure I understand, but it doesn’t matter. The planes are grounded, and so am I.
The Resurrection and the Triumph of Coal
When Our Trump and Secretary of Energy Joe Manchin put billions into reviving Big Coal, that shot U.S. emissions up to 6 billion metric tons of CO2 in just a couple of years, then 7 billion, and so on, launching an international trend as Trumpist-style parties took over ever more governments globally.
As you might expect, once Elon Musk bankrolled the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and helped put it in charge, its Fourth Reich held huge rallies in soccer stadiums where they piled up banned solar panels and wind turbine blades and burned them. Then they rounded up immigrants to use as slave labor in Germany’s revived coal mines. When the European Court of Justice ruled against them, the fascist government in Berlin promptly annexed Belgium. And that essentially marked the end of the European Union.
The Queens neighborhoods near Jamaica Bay are thoroughly waterlogged. Wasn’t Our Trump originally from Queens?
Russia also doubled down on coal. Even in the early 2020s, its Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia was one of the world’s largest coal producers. When Our Trump gave Eastern Europe back to Moscow, the Russian Federation prohibited electric cars and heat pumps so it could sell its oil and gas. Poland predictably returned to being all coal all the time and the Le Pen cartel in France, taking its marching orders from Russia, soon legislated the same prohibitions on green tech. Europe’s carbon dioxide production soon skyrocketed.
But the worst problems lay in Asia, an area about which I’ve only recently started to get up to speed. The leaders of China and India insisted that they were damned if they would make sacrifices and risk labor unrest shutting down their coal industries, when the U.S. and Europe were planning to go all out promoting theirs. Imagine the Chinese communists being afraid of their own workers and, worse yet—something I hadn’t faintly realized then—but at the time half the coal mined in the world came from China and even before Our Great Leader came to power a second time, the Communist Party already had plans to mine a billion more tons of it per year.
With America’s implicit permission, Beijing promptly ramped up production. I found out that they were already putting out 70% of the world’s methane emissions from coal mines in the early ’20s. Even then, there were 1.5 million Chinese coal miners while more than 6% of that country still depended on coal plants for electricity. All those numbers only went up when the Communist Party, citing Our Trump, ramped up coal production, sending billions of tons more CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. Alfred says methane is up to 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even if for a shorter period of time.
In the early part of this century, India was already increasing its coal-fired power plants. When the Hindu nationalists fell in love with Our Trump, however, they became yet more bullish on coal. Their CO2 emissions went through the proverbial roof. They say that, given the smog in New Delhi, the capital, nowadays you can’t see two feet in front of you on a typical day, and 10% of Indians have chronic bronchitis.
The Indians had rejected criticisms of all those carbon-dioxide emissions from low-lying Bangladesh as “anti-Hindu propaganda.” Our Trump used to say that we’d just get more top-notch beachfront property out of sea-level rise, but now I realize that was a sick joke. If you keep heating up this planet, it melts the surface ice, which goes into the ocean and does indeed cause its level to rise. Warmer water also takes up more space, contributing to sea-level rise. So, the Bay of Bengal did indeed rise to claim the capital, Dhaka, along with 20% of the rest of the country. Famine left tens of millions of its people gaunt or skeletal. When millions of Bangladeshi climate refugees then tried to get into India, its army committed what’s now known as the Great Bangla Genocide. Historians say killings on that scale had never been carried out before.
Goodbye to Trump Tower
At an old, banned National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration site on the dark web I found a document that said, “Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever—accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced during human existence.” That was from 2024, and whoever wrote it may now be in one of those reeducation camps for Beijing Ministry of State Security spies accused of promoting what the Trump Environmental Protection Agency branded “the climate hoax.” I might find myself there, too, if anyone discovers just how I feel these days.
I now realize that scientists have known for over a century that carbon dioxide absorbs the infrared light reflected off the Earth’s surface, keeping more of the sun’s heat in our atmosphere. I guess those UV rays used to hit this planet and then radiate back into outer space at a significantly greater rate, leaving us so much cooler than we are now. I never paid attention to any of this back in the twenties of this century. Since then, however, I’ve had time to get up to speed. After all, what else is there to do in this bunker?
Believe me, it was kind of embarrassing in 2034, even to me, when The Tower of Our Trump collapsed in Manhattan. Of course, as he said then, it was absolutely not his fault. Instead, he blamed the immigrant construction workers who built it, but they weren’t to blame, either. These days, at least 3 or 4% of the buildings in New York City are at risk from groundwater table rise. And it isn’t just that. Every time another big storm hits, flooding damages tens of thousands of buildings and turns the subway into a swimming pool.
Worse yet, more than a third of the buildings in New York are at risk from storm surges in year 24 of Our Trump. I read somewhere that the southern tip of Manhattan, the East Village, the Upper East Side, and the Tribeca and Canal Street areas now flood for some months of the year. Likewise, the Queens neighborhoods near Jamaica Bay are thoroughly waterlogged. Wasn’t Our Trump originally from Queens?
And to jump across what’s left of this country for a moment, today I caught someone on the dark web reporting from Phoenix, Arizona. It seems like the population there is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago. Half of the year now it’s dangerously hot and there isn’t enough water. And the electricity blackouts that take out your AC are evidently a nightmare and a half. Same problem, hot river water can’t cool the plant equipment.
That fellow reporting from Phoenix said those local diehards who refuse to leave call themselves Fremen like in the remake of the Dune film and say they need stillsuits. When the Proud Boys won the election for city council there, Our Trump told them to deep-six the local climate action plan, which he swore was for “pussies.” Painting everything white, he insisted, made the city look like a tomb and he wanted the urban tree cover to be cut down for firewood.
Trump’s will be done, as they say.
At least Phoenix is still there. Los Angeles wasn’t so lucky. As it got drier and drier every fall, the Santa Ana winds regularly whipped up wildfires, and one neighborhood after another was turned into cinders. When Beverly Hills went up in flames the way Pacific Palisades had 20 years earlier, that was the nail in the coffin.
The Big One?
Now, I spend my days thinking about the Big One, about how it could all go down. When Chinese forces fired on that American destroyer off Taiwan, the Trump dynasty went ballistic. They said they would bring pain to Beijing like the world had never seen before. They didn’t want to send in ships or troops though, claiming their Dad had been against wasting money on foreign wars.
That was when someone on Fox & Friends (the only “news” show still allowed) suggested a symbolic response, an attack on that big new Chinese military base on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The Trump family immediately ordered a nuclear strike there. I hear Tiffany was the only one who didn’t think it was a good idea. But it melted a lot of the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and the rest of it slid into the ocean. They say it will raise sea level by two feet globally and pretty darn quickly, too, because of that nuke melting so much surface ice. Count on one thing: it will truly be a Trumpocalypse.
That would put my bunker under, of course. I only hope it’s watertight.
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