President spins coal industry in decline as success

PAGE, Ariz. — For decades, waves of electricity poured from this behemoth of a power plant on the high desert plateau of the Navajo reservation in northwestern Arizona, lighting up hundreds of thousands of homes from Phoenix to Las Vegas, Nev., as it burned 240 rail cars’ worth of coal a day.

But as the day shift ended here at the Navajo Generating Station one evening early this year, all but a halfdozen spaces in the employee parking lot — a stretch of asphalt larger than a football field — were empty.

It was a similar scene at the nearby Kayenta coal mine, which fueled the plant. Dozens of the giant earth-moving machines that for decades ripped apart the hillside sat parked in long rows, motionless. Not a single coal miner was in sight, just a big, black Chihuahuan raven sitting atop a light post.

Saving these two complexes was at the heart of an intense three-year effort by the Trump administration to stabilize the coal industry and make good on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to end “the war on coal.”

“We’re going to put our miners back to work,” Trump promised soon after taking office.

He didn’t.

Despite Trump stocking his administration with coal-industry executives and lobbyists, taking big donations from the industry, rolling back environmental regulations and intervening directly in cases like the Arizona power plant and mine, coal’s decline has only accelerated in recent years.

And with the president now in the closing stages of his struggling reelection campaign, his failure to live up to his pledge challenges his claim to be a champion of working people and to restore what he portrayed four years ago as the United States’ lost industrial might.

The story of the complex in Arizona demonstrates the lengths the administration went to in helping a favored industry, the limits of its ability to counter powerful economic forces pushing in the other direction and ultimately Trump’s quiet retreat from his promises.

In the years after Trump’s election, the federal government offered help valued at as much as $1 billion to keep this one power plant and coal mine up and running by embracing an industry plan to relax costly air-quality requirements.

A Republican lawmaker from Arizona sought to force one of the state’s largest utilities to continue to buy power from the plant. Peabody, the world’s largest coal company, offered to discount the price of the coal it was selling the power plant from the Kayenta mine.

None of it proved to be enough. By late last year, both the Kayenta mine and the Navajo Generating Station had gone o±ine, a high-profile example of the industry’s broader collapse and the resulting economic and political aftershocks.

To some degree, Trump was defeated by powerful market forces, primarily, low natural gas prices that made coal a less attractive fuel for power plants and the increasing economic viability of renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The pandemic made matters worse, slowing coal sales as energy consumption in the United States dipped.

The White House defended Trump’s record, saying he had reversed policies enacted by the Obama administration that were strangling the industry, and other officials said coal now had a better chance of remaining competitive.

Since Trump was inaugurated, 145 coal-burning units at 75 power plants have been idled, eliminating 15 percent of the nation’s coal-generated capacity, enough to power about 30 million homes. Far from bringing back jobs, the donturn has translated into 5,300 coal mining jobs, or nearly 10 percent, being eliminated since Trump took office.

At its peak in 1988, coal generated 57 percent of all of the electricity in the United States, while only 9 percent came from renewables, like solar, hydroelectric and wind.