Trump and his dirty coalface

The Trump administration is unflinching in its misbegotten campaign to protect the coal industry from what has become an obvious and inevitable decline. The administration has killed, or is in the process of killing, rules that would prevent the dumping of coal mining wastes in streams, impose a temporary moratorium on new mine leases in the West, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants — one of former president Barack Obama’s most important efforts to resist climate change. All of this to prop up an industry whose workers would be best served not by false promises of new mining jobs, but by programmes to retrain them for a changing economy.

Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who has presented himself as an industry saviour, last week ordered a two-year postponement of the Obama administration’s tighter controls on lead, mercury, arsenic and other coal plant wastes that threaten human health. Delaying the rule’s effective date to November 2020, Pruitt said, merely “resets the clock”.

What it does, rather, is to try to twist the clock back to the day when coal was essentially a monopoly fuel, a day that practical-minded utility executives know is long gone. These executives are busily shutting down coal-fired plants in favour of more affordable energy sources like natural gas and wind and solar power.

While environmental rules have played some role in the closing of coal-fired plants, the main driver is cheaper and abundant natural gas. Coal’s use in power generation has been declining since 2007, and by 2016 coal-fired plants produced only 30% of the nation’s total generation, compared with 50% in 2003.

It is shocking that an administration deliberately overlooks the blossoming of profitable and cleaner energy products simply because of Trump’s hollow showmanship. /New York, September 18.