Affair with Coal...

Trump's Love Affair with Coal

Why a president who struggles to stay on topic has a laser focus on one shrinking industry.

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

In February, surrounded by coal miners at the White House, President Donald Trump signed a bill repealing the Obama-era Stream Protection Rule, which would have restricted coal companies from burying streams. “This is a major threat to your jobs,” Trump said, “and we’re getting rid of this threat.” He did not mention streams.

In March, this time surrounded by coal miners at the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump signed an executive order vowing to roll back Obama-era climate change policies, including the Clean Power Plan limiting carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. “C’mon fellas, you know what this says?” Trump asked. “You’re going back to work!” He did not mention climate or pollution.

So it was no surprise when, last week, Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, announced he was launching the formal process to repeal the Clean Power Plan in a speech to coal miners in the coal town of Hazard, Kentucky. He proclaimed, as his boss has many times, that “the war on coal is over.” There was once again little pretense that the move had much to do with the EP part of the EPA.

As the Trump administration has battled internally and seesawed publicly over issues like trade, health care, infrastructure and even immigration, there’s no issue where it’s been more consistent and emphatic than its support for coal. Miners held up “Trump Digs Coal” signs at his raucous campaign rallies, and sure enough, he’s been a relentless advocate for this small and beleaguered industry.

He has stocked his administration with coal veterans, hacked away at coal regulations, and done what he can to prop up struggling coal companies. He probably won’t be able to keep his promise to revive a once-dominant fossil fuel that has been declining around the world—and most rapidly in the United States—but he is already changing the policy landscape around our dirtiest source of energy. He is also sending a political message to his base that he is waging a war on the war on coal, standing with tough guys who earn their living underground against tree-huggers who whine about climate change and clean air.

So far, coal is continuing its slump despite Trump’s support. Utilities have announced the retirements of 12 more coal-fired power plants since he took office, including two massive ones in Texas added to the closure list on Friday. That announcement marked a milestone: Half of America’s coal fleet has been marked for mothballs since 2010, a total of 262 doomed plants. And as jobs go, coal mining is now a tiny sliver of the U.S. economy, employing about 52,000 Americans last month, down 70 percent over three decades. (The count is up about 4 percent since Trump took office, but mostly because a snafu in China’s steel industry temporarily boosted U.S. exports.) By contrast, the solar and wind industries employed almost 10 times as many Americans last year, and they’re both enjoying explosive growth.

Coal is America’s leading source of the carbon emissions that warm the planet, as well as a host of other air and water pollutants. And the economics of coal has cratered. Still, politically, the coal industry is one of the purest distillations of Trump’s base, uniting right-wing business executives who hate environmental regulations and taxes along with blue-collar miners who wish America was more like it used to be when coal was king. While polls suggest that fewer than one-third of Americans approve of Trump’s indelicate approach to the environment, more than two-thirds of the Republicans he’s courted approve. At the ceremony where he erased the stream rule, Trump ticked off a list of coal states—West Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming, Ohio—that all happened to have been big Trump states in November.

“Special people, special workers, we’re bringing it back and we’re bringing it back fast,” he crowed.

So even if Trump can’t stop the decline of coal, the industry is thrilled that he’s doing his part to try to slow it, especially after eight years of an eco-friendly, climate-concerned Democrat in the White House. Bob Murray, a prominent coal CEO and early Trump backer, says in a new Frontline documentary that he handed Trump a 3½-page action plan when he took office, and the president has already plowed through Page 1.

“From a government whose avowed aim for eight years was to destroy the industry, we’ve understandably benefited from one that for eight months has helped us,” says Luke Popovich, vice president of the National Mining Association.

Trump began by hiring coal-friendly aides like Pruitt, who had repeatedly teamed up with fossil-fuel interests to sue President Barack Obama’s EPA when he was Oklahoma attorney general, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the founder of a coal company that once had a deadly disaster in one of its mines. Trump’s nominee to be Pruitt’s deputy is a coal lobbyist; his nominee to be assistant labor secretary for mine safety and health ran a mining company with a checkered safety record.

The result has been a flurry of coal-friendly actions. Pruitt is taking aim not only at Obama’s carbon plan for the power industry but a host of other rules limiting mercury, soot, smog and other discharges from coal operations. The president defied the world by withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, specifically complaining that it was unfair to American coal. His administration has also lifted Obama’s moratorium on coal leases on federal land, ended Obama’s restrictions on financing coal projects overseas, and shut down a study of the health effects of coal mining that blasts away entire mountains. His energy secretary, Rick Perry, recently proposed new subsidies for coal plants that keep stockpiles of coal handy, galvanizing opposition from an odd coalition of renewable energy advocates, environmentalists, Koch Industries and other oil and gas interests, manufacturers and other electricity consumers.

At a hearing last week, a Democratic congressman asked Perry why he was pushing a plan that could prop up outdated coal plants and increase costs to ratepayers. The secretary’s response summed up the administration’s approach to coal: “I think you take costs into account, but what’s the cost of freedom? What’s the cost to keep America free? I’m not sure I want to leave that up to the free market.”

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Coal’s long decline did get worse during the Obama years—partly because of his anti-pollution regulations, partly because of the Sierra Club’s well-funded and well-executed anti-coal campaign, but mostly because of the cruel realities of the market: Natural gas and even renewables got cheaper. And the slump is only expected to accelerate, since scores of still-operating coal plants are already scheduled to shut down over the next few years, and nobody is building new coal plants. Even if the economics made sense, and even if utilities didn’t have to worry about carbon emissions, coal plants belch all kinds of pollution into the air and water; the American Lung Association believes its particulates kill about 7,500 Americans every year.

Still, Trump is a fan, and he’s unusually forthright in his fandom. He’s often either misleading or misinformed about the impact of his other policies—claiming his tax plan wouldn’t help the rich, or that his health policies would expand access and protect pre-existing conditions—but when it comes to coal, Trump is clear about his goals, and transparent about whose interests he’s pushing. Murray, the coal executive, was by his side when he signed the order attacking Obama’s climate policies. Vice President Mike Pence, Pruitt, Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have all toured coal operations this year.

So it was no surprise that the National Mining Association held a board meeting this month at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, putting money in its presidential benefactor’s pockets. And as the Washington Post first reported, three Cabinet secretaries spoke to the group—Perry, Ross and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who was once an attorney for a Murray Energy subsidiary in a dispute with its union. Zinke couldn’t make it, but he sent his deputy, former fossil-fuel lobbyist David Bernhardt, in his place.

The meeting was private, but an activist at the Climate Investigation Center sent me photos the group obtained of Bernhardt speaking to the group—including photos of his notes. They appear to show that Interior is “considering appropriate adjustments” to the Obama administration’s decisions to prohibit mining claims on certain environmentally sensitive public lands. Bernhardt’s notes described some of those decisions as “nothing short of uninformed, arbitrary, and frankly senseless.” Bernhardt had also jotted down the cellphone number of Luke Russell, vice president of external affairs for Hecla Mining. Hecla is seeking permits from Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service for two copper mines in Montana, and Russell said in an interview that the process has been dragging out for years.

“We’re encouraged by the actions of this administration to try to move things along and get to a yes or no much quicker,” Russell said.

The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment. But the department’s leaders have not been shy about their belief that Obama treated mining companies and other extractive industries unfairly. In August, for example, they rescinded an Obama-era rule that closed a loophole coal mining firms and other fossil-fuel companies were using to evade federal royalties on public lands. Zinke argued that the rule was causing too much “confusion and uncertainty” and holding back U.S. energy development.

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Trump administration officials often frame their attacks on energy-related rules as an aversion to “picking winners and losers,” accusing their predecessors of harming coal in order to help wind (which tripled its capacity under Obama) and solar (which increased about 40-fold). But environmentalists point out that Obama’s EPA, for example, never targeted the coal industry; it targeted pollution, and coal happens to produce an inordinate amount of pollution. Bruce Nilles, senior director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, says a distraught EPA career official recently told him the agency’s political bosses have given clear marching orders: Do whatever you can to promote coal. That certainly sounded like picking winners.

“The insanity is, it’s not a secret,” Nilles says. “They make no bones about it. They see their job as helping coal companies pollute as much as they want.”

The EPA’s focus has often shifted with the partisan winds, but it’s still a bit jarring to see an agency founded to fight pollution used so aggressively to assist some of America’s biggest polluters. Pruitt believes the EPA has strayed far beyond its original mandate, and he has been open about his desire to give the subjects of its regulations a break. He recently told a group of farmers that he’s often asked why he meets so much more with industry groups than environmental groups, and he was surprisingly forthright: “The answer is, you count more.”

Pruitt has tried to ditch or delay just about all of Obama’s coal regulations—prominent ones limiting carbon, mercury and ozone as well as lesser-known ones dealing with coal ash, “nonattainment areas” and “regional haze.” Two weeks ago, his agency gave one of the Trump administration’s most consequential gifts to the industry so far, gutting an Obama-era effort to force the state of Texas to rein in coal-fired pollution around Big Bend National Park.

But neither coal-friendly Texas nor the coal-friendly EPA could stop Luminant, considered one of the coal-friendliest utilities, from announcing the retirements of four Texas coal plants in the past 10 days. Coal used to be dirty but cheap, but now it’s just dirty—and utilities who have to make long-term investment decisions can’t assume that Trump’s willingness to ignore coal pollution will continue beyond his term in office. American Electric Power, a coal-heavy utility that is America’s largest carbon emitter, recently invested $4.5 billion in the nation’s largest wind farm—in Pruitt’s home state of Oklahoma.

The Supreme Court had put the Clean Power Plan on hold even before Trump took office, but the U.S. electricity sector has already met the plan’s 2030 target for reducing coal use, and it is on track to meet its overall emission goals next year. And while the EPA has not yet proposed a replacement for the plan, it is still bound by a Supreme Court decision requiring it to regulate carbon pollution, so it will have to defend whatever it decides in court. The same goes for Pruitt’s efforts to gut Obama’s other coal-related rules as well as unrelated rules. Rules are rules, and while it’s pretty easy for administrations to ignore them, it’s much harder to change them to guide future administrations.

Nilles talked to me from Oakland, where he could see haze from California’s historic wildfires, this month’s awful reminder of the dangers of climate change. I talked to him from Miami, where I could still see debris from Hurricane Irma, one of last month’s awful reminders of the dangers of climate change. Trump has described global warming as a hoax manufactured in China, and his newly announced chair of his Council on Environmental Quality is a climate denier who has written florid praise of carbon emissions. But the impacts are getting harder to ignore—even China is shutting down coal plants around Beijing—and the American executives making electricity investments do not seem to think they will be ignored for long.

“Trump can’t revive coal. The transition is already happening,” Nilles says. “What Trump can do is allow more pollution and death during the transition.”

The mining association’s Popovich pushed back a bit, noting that coal exports and production are up slightly so far this year, “thanks in part to this regime change.” But he says the Obama-era retirements have battered the industry badly, and even Trump’s support can’t magically fix a stagnant market.

“Conditions,” he says, “are still challenging.”