Trump admin tries again to revive dying coal industry
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if you want to know what Trump is thinking just beat your head against a wall until you’ve got enough brain damage to inhabit his reality.
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I can't imagine any serious investors would want to invest in building a new coal plant. Unless of course there's a guaranteed government payback.
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Proudly speedrunning the country back to the 19th Century. Alas, in more ways than one.
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Let it die!!! Kill it if you have to. Coal isn't clean and cancers brought on by living in proximity to these coal fire plants aren't fun. We need to double down on renewables and quadruple down on safe storage.
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Honestly, does anyone want this? So many of these decisions seem to have zero purpose other than to make the opposition upset.
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I know the comments will be full of people calling him a dumbass and saying this is backwards, and all rightfully so, but every time there's a story like this, I'm left wondering why. Does he have a bunch of investments in coal? Is it about owning the libs? Is it simply to distract people from something else going on? Does he actually believe what he's saying? I truly don't get the obsession, and maybe it's stupid of me to try to determine the logic behind it, but dammit, there has to be SOME reason he keeps on harping on it.
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Sadly he doesn't even need investments. There are no laws for politicians anymore, people can openly just pay him and his family.
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I heard a diehard conservative red state local energy official discussing that state's progress on simplifying regional renewable projects mention the cost of keeping the obsolete coal plants OINO (online in name only) was a measurable component of why electricity rates are higher.
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There is always a new company with a family member on the board taking in money from each announcement.
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We have blown right past pre-dementia and are now living in a country whose leader is completely untethered from reality - he lives decades in the past. This man needs to be yeeted from the white house immediately (and then prosecuted, yes, but get him the hell away from the big red button quickly first)
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just another distraction from the epstein files, thousands of insider trades and directed pentagon contracts for his kids
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The length of his sentences before he veers into word salad keeps getting shorter.
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Oh, there are some, They are people who "donated" to Trump to get exactly this.
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As Trump hits his dotage, he dwells more and more on how he can exert his power by continuing to hurt the people he hates even after his death. He's trying to cut everyone who aggrieved him out of his will, and the longer he lasts, the more and more people that list will include.
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Yes, the Koch brothers continue to have significant coal related investments. They've been one of the largest GOP donors for nearly 20 years, so their interests are the GOP's interests.
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No amount of propping up by the current administration can save it from the fact that there are simply better options now. Renewables just have a better ROI and recieve much less pushback from the general populace.
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Almost a year old and still relevant, Real Men Burn Stuff https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/real-men-burn-stuff
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ReadandShare
Ars Centurion
MAGAs support Trump's coal and oil policies because ABORTION, WOKE, and BROWN PEOPLE - and good old fashioned nostalgia - oh, the glory days of the 1950s when men were men and coal and steel were kings!
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Quick google search:
"The U.S. Census Bureau identifies exactly 1,114 detailed industries across the economy, and the vast majority of these surpass 50,000 employees. Out of these, nearly 800 detailed industries (classified at the 6-digit NAICS level) individually employ more than 50,000 workers nationwide."
Another quick google search:
"There are approximately 42,000 direct coal mining jobs in the United States"
O'Reilly Auto Enterprises has "around 50,000 associates". That's one chain of auto parts stores.
At what point do we just start calling the GOP drumbeat over "saving coal jobs" what it is: a fetish.
"The U.S. Census Bureau identifies exactly 1,114 detailed industries across the economy, and the vast majority of these surpass 50,000 employees. Out of these, nearly 800 detailed industries (classified at the 6-digit NAICS level) individually employ more than 50,000 workers nationwide."
Another quick google search:
"There are approximately 42,000 direct coal mining jobs in the United States"
O'Reilly Auto Enterprises has "around 50,000 associates". That's one chain of auto parts stores.
At what point do we just start calling the GOP drumbeat over "saving coal jobs" what it is: a fetish.
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It's vice signaling that reinforces identity politics. The number of people involved in the coal industry is vanishingly small (see just above, which came in while I was typing). But the number of people whose identity is tied up into a nostalgia for when coal was king, the US was on top, and we didn't have to worry about complications like acid rain is large, and the Venn diagram between them and Trump's base is a circle. This is Trump's way of rallying support both by saying "we're going back to those days" and "fuck those people who tried to force us to deal with the complexities."
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I can only assume he wants to cater to large coal interests while fluffing his rural blue-collar base and "owning the libs". Whether they live in coal country, or just metaphorically roll coal in diesel pickups with illegal exhaust mods, they love it when he flips the middle finger at the environment.
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My take is that Trump is an adversarial, zero-sum thinker. He believes that anything he can do that hurts his "enemies" helps him. Many of his perceived enemies like renewables. Therefore, if he can hurt renewables, he hurts his enemies.
My wife's take, which also seems to explain a lot of things, is that he's mentally stuck decades in the past.
Could be a little bit of both! Likely with a soupçon of dementia mixed in.
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I appreciate the honest phrasing because “incoherent” really isn't a word used frequently enough to describe this man's rambling.
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I assume the theory is that we are supposed to treat this as something being done about the self-inflicted energy cost issues stemming from our latest short victorious war in the middle east. Never mind the fact that, even if any of this were a good idea, it would have a nontrivial lead time.
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It's also rank corruption. A few very wealthy people base their wealth on the coal ecosystem (mining and downstream) and this boosts their wealth a bit.
It's true that Bob fucked off the mortal coil and the tech bros are moving in to take the place of the extractive bros. The economic transition is not yet complete. (And has precisely nothing to do with workers.)
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Tell you what, if new plants require zero quiescent upkeep and can be started up and run with minimal staff with no specialty training, I don’t know why we wouldn’t plop these down next to a sewage treatment plant right next to a big pile of coal as an emergency backup in case of gross failure of primary and secondary power generation methods.
If the tech doesn’t fit that use case, fuck off already.
If the tech doesn’t fit that use case, fuck off already.
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ubercurmudgeon
Ars Praefectus
You could clean a lot of coal in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, just saying. It's bigger than skyscrapers, apparently. Get visiting school kids to wade in and scrub chunks of the stuff with brushes. Teach 'em about the shameful history of exploitation of children by industry and/or prepare them for their exciting future careers in an AI-dominated world. One or the other.
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This. Trump ran in 2024 for three reasons and three reasons only:
- Stay out of prison
- Get revenge on anyone he considered an enemy
- Grift like no-one has ever grifted before
That's it, End of list. Literally everything else is just bullshit to keep people distracted.
Edit: corrected a typo.
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Correct.
Unless somebody can build it, take advantage of the gov handout, and then sell it to a bigger fool before the EPA regulates them out of business.
But given the timelines and the orange fascist bastard's health, I think building one of these, getting it operational, and then finding the greater fool would be difficult.
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I grew up in a coal mining town and while I believe there is value to coal (eg manufacture of steel), mining is an insane industry to try to prop up, especially IMO for production of energy.
The town effectively shuttered when demand (and therefore prices) collapsed, with the buyer deciding they had no more significant need for our production. Most of the inhabitants left over a few years' period, about three quarters were gone by the time my family left.
We were an open pit mine. My understanding now is that pit mines become more expensive to operate as the pit grows deeper and wider, as it becomes more arduous to move that material up and out.
Then you have the environmental responsibilities ... like managing the tailings ponds.
TLDR: Mining lasts until the math stops making sense, and isn't a long term proposition.
The town effectively shuttered when demand (and therefore prices) collapsed, with the buyer deciding they had no more significant need for our production. Most of the inhabitants left over a few years' period, about three quarters were gone by the time my family left.
We were an open pit mine. My understanding now is that pit mines become more expensive to operate as the pit grows deeper and wider, as it becomes more arduous to move that material up and out.
Then you have the environmental responsibilities ... like managing the tailings ponds.
TLDR: Mining lasts until the math stops making sense, and isn't a long term proposition.
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Your wife is correct.
Everything I hear from Trump is complaints I heard in 1983 from the average working man. Afraid of foreigners taking over (Japan in 1983), heartache over the loss of jobs in the rust belt, heartache over inflation, 'buy american', blaming unions, and pointing at the period between 1950 and 1970 as the time to go back to.
He's been stuck on concerns from that era since then. And it resonates with boomers.
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Steel manufacturing requires metallurgical coal — "coking" coal. It's chemically necessary and "coking" coal is about the dirtiest of all coals. Steel can be recycled which requires heat — but no new carbon.
Knowable but unknown to me: how much "new" steel do we need to manufacture?
Apart from manufacturing "new" steel, I can think of nothing else for which coal — in any form — is essential.
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I just got another negative electric bill. Was it because of "clean, beautiful" coal?
Of course it fucking wasn't because of coal. Jesus fucking Christ these people are fucking stupid. I want off this ride.
Of course it fucking wasn't because of coal. Jesus fucking Christ these people are fucking stupid. I want off this ride.
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