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While presenting a series of executive orders conceived to increase electricity generation from coal, President Donald Trump misleadingly suggested that environmental regulations were to blame for the industry’s decline, wrongly said that coal plants are being opened “all over Germany,” and misleadingly, and repeatedly, referred to coal as “clean.”
Experts agree the main culprit for the decrease in coal-fired power in recent decades was the surge of more cost-effective and cleaner kinds of energy, especially natural gas. In Germany, a handful of old plants were fired back up in 2022, but were closed again in 2024. Germany plans to end coal-fired power generation by 2038. Also, coal combustion emits more carbon emissions than any other fossil fuel used to produce power, not to mention other pollutants.
“This is a very important day to me because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was just about the best — it is certainly the best in terms of power,” Trump, who promised and failed to revive the coal industry during his first term, said on April 8, surrounded by coal miners. “Today we’re taking historic action to help American workers, miners, families and consumers — we’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all.”
Coal consumption and production in the U.S. have declined over the last two decades, according to the Energy Information Administration. Although coal fueled most of the country’s power plants until a decade ago, in 2023 only 16% of the electricity produced in the U.S. was generated by coal-fired plants. The coal workforce went from nearly 90,000 in 2012 to about 40,000 this year, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump’s new plan to boost the industry includes a series of actions that, as a Department of Interior press release details, include reopening federal lands in Montana and Wyoming to coal leasing, removing “regulatory burdens” for mines, and lowering the amount coal producers pay the government for extracting coal on federal lands. The plan also grants coal power plants a two-year reprieve from regulations that limit mercury and other toxic emissions. The administration said there was a need for an increase in electricity generated by coal to satisfy a growing demand for electricity for domestic manufacturing and artificial intelligence data processing centers.
During his speech, the president praised coal’s reliability and durability but also called it “clean,” “cheap” and “incredibly efficient,” adding that people have bemoaned and decimated the industry “for absolutely no reason.” He also criticized “the green new scam,” a phrase he used to refer to “restrictions” and climate change policies generally, and he blamed former President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers for trying “to abolish the American coal industry” and “destroying” the lives, and jobs, of “thousands and thousands of coal miners.”
(During Biden’s presidency, however, the number of coal mining jobs increased slightly, by 3,400, to 41,300. In January, employment was 4,700 below the pre-pandemic level in February 2020. Coal mining jobs decreased by 13,100 over the entirety of Trump’s first term. Job losses were exacerbated by the pandemic, but even prior to the pandemic, there was a loss of 5,000 coal mining jobs under Trump.)
“We will end the government bias against coal and we’re going to unlock the sweeping authorities of … the Defense Production Act to turbocharge coal mining in America,” he said, referring to a law first enacted in 1950 during the Korean War to give the president broad authority to “influence domestic industry in the interest of national defense,” as explained by the Library of Congress.
But several experts told us blaming environmental regulations and claiming coal is cleaner, cheaper or more efficient than its alternatives is misleading.
“The coal industry’s decline is due first and foremost to cheaper alternatives, namely natural gas but also renewable energy,” Sanya Carley, faculty director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, told us in an email. “It is more economically efficient and less carbon intensive to build gas units or renewable energy such as wind and solar than it is to build a coal plant.”
Environmental Regulations Didn’t Kill Coal
Trump’s comments about “bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” ending “government bias” and “slashing unnecessary regulations that targeted the beautiful, clean coal,” leave a misleading impression about why coal production has decreased.
Studies analyzing the factors that led to the decline of the coal industry have concluded that although environmental regulations have played a role, it hasn’t been a significant one.
As we reported in 2017, after Trump’s claims on reviving coal then, a Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy study found the main culprit for the collapse of the industry was cheaper natural gas production driven by the shale revolution, followed by lower-than-expected demand and the growth in renewable energy.
Similarly, a 2017 policy brief by Charles D. Kolstad, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, concluded that “environmental regulations did not kill coal”; progress did.
Kolstad explained that the main environmental law affecting coal combustion is the Clean Air Act of 1970, signed by President Richard Nixon. Strong demand and a lack of competition fueled a boom in new coal-fired plants in the 1970s and 80s, despite the regulations, which resulted in an expansion of coal production. Plants met the limits on sulfur emissions by burning low-sulfur coal and then, after a requirement of a 1977 Clean Air Act amendment, by adding devices, known as scrubbers, that remove sulfur from smokestacks.
But coal-fired plants built before 1970 were exempt from sulfur regulations, which, as Kolstad explained, provided an incentive to keep them operating for longer rather than retire them. The eventual retirement of these old plants is what marked the decline of coal in electricity generation starting in 2015, he explained, not the additional environmental rules set to limit the pollution coming from them.
At the same time, Kolstad explained, productivity in the coal industry increased due to innovations, which led to a reduction in the workforce. And the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the development of shale deposits led to a revolution in the oil and gas industry that resulted in a big drop in the price of natural gas.
Kolstad told us his analysis still stands today.
“While coal might be beautiful to some, the main reason production is down is that demand is down, mostly because of cheap gas,” he said in an email. “Employment is down further because of productivity gains (coal output per miner).”
Christine Shearer, project manager of the global coal plant tracker at the nongovernmental organization Global Energy Monitor, which compiles and analyzes energy data, agreed. “[T]he main thing that killed coal in the U.S. was gas,” she told us in an email.
“Low natural gas prices, capital costs, and build times of combined cycle gas-fired power plants in the 1990s led to a large expansion in U.S. gas-fired capacity in the beginning of this century. As new gas plants were built, aging coal plants were shut down,” she told us. Fracking further lowered the price and increased the use of natural gas to produce electricity, she added.
Shearer shared a report co-authored by Global Energy Monitor that shows more coal power capacity was retired under Trump in his first term than under Presidents Barack Obama or Biden. That’s “because coal plants closing has primarily been a function of economics, and it is hard to reverse,” she said.
Globally, coal power plants in the world have retired on average when they’re 37 years old, Shearer told us. Coal plants in the U.S. are now, on average, 43 years old, she added.
“Not enforcing existing environmental regulations and further delaying pending regulations on carbon dioxide emissions,” she added, “might squeeze a few extra years of life out of these old coal plants, but it won’t bring back a coal renaissance.”
Germany Is Not Going ‘Back to Coal’
In his remarks on April 8, Trump referred to two other countries’ use of coal in recent years. While he correctly noted China’s continued reliance on coal and its construction of new plants, the president wrongly claimed that Germany is “back to coal” and that coal plants are being opened “all over Germany.”
Germany brought four previously closed coal plants back online in 2022, likely due to concerns about energy availability after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those plants were closed again in 2024, and Germany has not opened a new coal plant since 2020, according to Global Energy Monitor. Germany is planning to end coal-fired power generation in the country by 2038 or earlier.
But at the opening of his remarks at the signing of his executive orders, Trump said, “Other countries went to beautiful, clean coal, and they’ve stayed there for many years like China. China is opening two plants every week. Germany went green, very green. They went so green they almost went out of business. Germany was finished; they went to wind. The wind wasn’t blowing too much, and they went to all sorts of other things.”
Trump continued: “You know, the green new scam hit Germany too and guess what? Now they’re back to coal. They’re opening up coal plants all over Germany.”
It is true that China began construction of 94.5 gigawatts of new coal power projects and resumed 3.3 GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in that country in 10 years, according to a collaborative report issued in February by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor. That’s likely not “two plants every week,” as Trump said, since an average coal plant generates 1 GW but it takes a couple of years for a plant to be built and come online in China, Shearer, of Global Energy Monitor, told us in an email.
“Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas,” Flora Champenois, an analyst at Global Energy Monitor and one of the report’s co-authors, told NPR.
But Trump misrepresented Germany’s current and future plans for the use of coal.
Shearer explained that in recent years the U.S. has been replacing old coal plants with lower-cost natural gas, as well as solar and wind power. Germany, however, did not have “a big expansion in gas power like the US, and on top of that Germany has been phasing out its nuclear power. So what has been replacing coal (and nuclear) in Germany is solar and wind power.”
Germany did reopen four mothballed coal plants in 2022 to operate through 2023, “most likely to fill in for high gas prices following [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Shearer said. But those coal plants “were all retired in 2024. The year 2024 was actually a record year for coal power retirements in Germany, totaling 6.7 GW – 2 GW above U.S. retirements” under Biden.
Asked about Trump’s claim that coal plants are opening throughout Germany, Shearer said, “No, Germany has not opened a new coal plant since 2020.”
“Germany’s July 2020 Coal Power Exit Law established an end to coal-fired power generation in the country by 2038 at the latest, and possibly by 2035,” Shearer said. “A follow-up analysis expressed ambition to phase out coal ‘ideally’ by 2030.”
A spokesperson for the German economy ministry, responding to Trump’s remarks, said, “No new coal-fired power plants will be built” in Germany, the Associated Press reported.
We reached out to the White House for information to support Trump’s statements about Germany’s coal plants, but we didn’t receive a response.
‘Clean Coal’? Not Really
On top of incorrectly suggesting that environmental regulations caused the downfall of the coal industry, Trump insisted on calling coal “clean.”
“I call it beautiful, clean coal,” he said during his speech on April 8. “I tell my people, never use the word coal unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.”
But the reality is that coal is not clean. As the Energy Information Administration explains, producing and using coal has several negative effects on people’s health and the environment. When coal is burned to produce electricity, it emits pollutants, including gases and particulates. Coal mining sometimes requires removing mountain tops with explosives or altering valleys and waterways. Streams can be polluted by runoff from the mines.
Coal combustion puts out more carbon emissions than any other fossil fuel used to produce power, the Environmental Protection Agency explains. Although carbon dioxide is naturally present in the atmosphere and is not directly harmful when breathed in normal concentrations, CO2 is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. In 2022, coal combustion accounted for 55% of carbon emissions from the electric power sector, while representing only 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S. that year, according to the EPA.
As the EIA explains, burning coal also emits toxic pollutants linked to respiratory illnesses and lung disease, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter — criteria air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act — and other pollutants such as coal ash and mercury.
“At the present time, coal is not cleaner than its alternatives,” Joost de Gouw, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told us in an email, noting that most coal-fired plants already use systems to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. “Compared with natural gas power plants that use combined cycle technology (the industry standard), current coal-fired power plants emit roughly 10 times more nitrogen oxides and 100 times more sulfur dioxide per kWh of electricity produced,” referring to kilowatt-hours.
A study published in Science in 2023 showed that exposure to the fine particulate pollution from coal plants is associated with 2.1 times greater mortality risk than exposure to such pollution from other sources. Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor of environmental and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University and one of the authors of the study, told us that although there are devices that can remove up to 99% of certain pollutants emitted during the combustion of coal, they don’t make coal “clean.”
Scrubbers, or flue gas desulfurization units, can remove about 95% of sulfur dioxide emissions from a coal plant before they’re released into the atmosphere. The installation of these devices, the closure of coal-fired plants and the decline of the industry have resulted in a significant decrease of pollution from coal-fired plants, as a separate study by Henneman and colleagues showed.
But although these devices can reduce pollution from coal power plants “they do not eliminate them,” Henneman told us, adding that as his second study showed, “most of the exposure to power plant air pollution emissions after 2015 was from power plants with scrubbers.”
The waste created from scrubbers, which needs to be stored near the power plants or placed in landfills, can also cause a problem when it spills and contaminates groundwater, he said. The trains used to transport coal also pollute, he added.
Trump said his administration will be “crushing Biden-era environmental restrictions” that target mercury and other toxic emissions because the regulations make it “impossible to do anything.” His plan includes a two-year delay (from July 2027 to July 2029) for coal plants to comply with a revision of the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards finalized last year. Trump said that the technologies needed to control emissions are “not commercially viable.”
At the same time, the president said he directed Energy Secretary Chris Wright to use billions of federal dollars “to invest in the next generation of coal technology — which is an amazing technology in terms of getting the full potential of coal and also doing it in a very clean environmental way.”
We reached out to the White House to ask which technology Trump was referring to. In response, a press officer from the Department of Energy directed us to an April 8 CNBC interview in which Wright mentioned scrubbers.
“Scrubbers do not do anything about carbon dioxide, so even a coal plant with a scrubber will still warm the planet,” Shearer, from Global Energy Monitor, told us.
Some carbon dioxide can be removed from coal power plants, but Shearer told us none of the techniques used globally result in coal being cheaper or cleaner than natural gas.
“China now primarily builds ultra-supercritical coal plants that it calls ‘high efficiency, low emissions’ but at the end of the day they still emit more CO2 than a gas plant,” she wrote. “Japan and South Korea have also been pushing for ammonia co-firing at their coal plants, calling it ‘clean coal’, but again even 50% co-firing ammonia at a coal plant results in higher CO2 emissions than a gas plant, and it’s far more expensive.”
As we‘ve written previously, it’s possible to capture some carbon emissions and either store it or use it for another purpose. But experts told us that such carbon capture utilization and storage, or CCUS, technologies are very expensive, energy-intensive and haven’t been used on a large scale.
“Coal without CCUS is already not competitive economically, so adding CCUS makes no sense economically,” Shearer added.
Despite his focus on the term “clean coal,” Trump also indicated in his remarks that climate change isn’t a problem.
“You don’t have to worry about the air is getting warmer. The ocean will rise one-quarter of an inch within the next 500 to 600 years, giving you a little bit more waterfront property,” he said, repeating once again his absurdly low estimates of sea level rise. As we’ve explained, the current rate of sea level rise is already a bit more than one-eighth of an inch each year.
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