THE SET-UP: Few things epitomize the gap between Trump’s rhetoric and reality like his promotion of coal. He claims it is clean. It is not. He claims it is cheaper than renewables. It is not. And he claims to be championing coal miners who’ve been left behind. He is not.
Of those contradictions, it’s that last one that’s particularly galling, and not just because coal mining is a dangerous, deadly business that seems incredibly anachronistic in the 21st Century. Amazingly, his regime is cutting programs designed to help coal miners hobbled by black lung. And if you can believe it, Reuters reports that the cuts come even as the mining-caused disease is on the rise:
NIOSH estimates that 20% of coal miners in Central Appalachia now suffer from some form of black lung disease, the highest rate that has been detected in 25 years, as workers in the aging mines blast through rock to reach diminishing coal seams.
Reuters also notes that black lung’s two decades-long rise “has increasingly been reported by young workers in their 30s and 40s despite declining coal production.”
But Trump is not satisfied with making black lung great again for the shrinking coal mining industry … he wants to share coal’s toxic gift with millions of Americans. That’s the upshot of a proclamation designed to undermine the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). Of course, his relaxation of the rule raises the question of why coal needs relief from pollution regulations if it is, in fact, “clean.” It’s a question answered by NorthWestern Energy’s coal-burning electricity plant in Colstrip, Montanta. Per NonStop Local news in Billings:
The Colstrip plant is known for emitting more toxic air pollutants than any other facility of its kind in the U.S. Congressman Troy Downing expressed his support, tweeting that he welcomes Trump's actions. Governor Greg Gianforte also thanked Trump on social media, stating, "American coal-fired power plants will continue to support thousands of jobs and homes and schools and businesses."
Northwestern Energy also claimed relief from MATS “ will enable them to reduce energy costs statewide.”
But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
A recent piece in The Conversation examined “levelized cost of electricity calculations” by Lazard. The global asset management firm found that “coal is one of the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it less competitive compared with solar, wind and natural gas.”
The simple fact is that time and economics are not be on coal’s side. Unfortunately, you might have to hold breath until we get to the other side of Trump’s regime … particularly if you live downwind from that electricity plant in Colstrip. - jp
TITLE: Insight: As Trump eyes coal revival, his job cuts hobble black lung protections for miners
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/trump-eyes-coal-revival-his-job-cuts-hobble-black-lung-protections-miners-2025-04-21/
EXCERPTS: Josh Cochran worked deep in the coal mines of West Virginia since he was 22 years old, pulling a six-figure salary that allowed him to buy a home with his wife Stephanie and hunt and fish in his spare time.
That ended two years ago when, at the age of 43, he was diagnosed with advanced black lung disease. He’s now waiting for a lung transplant, breathes with the help of an oxygen tank, and needs help from his wife to do basic tasks around the house.
His saving grace, he says, is that he can still earn a living. A federal program run by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) called Part 90 meant he was relocated from underground when he got his diagnosis to a desk job dispatching coal trucks to the same company, retaining his pay.
“Part 90 – that’s only the thing you got,” he told Reuters while signing a stack of documents needed for the transplant, a simple task that left him winded. “You can come out from underground, make what you made, and then they can’t just get rid of you.”
That program, which relocates coal miners diagnosed with black lung to safer jobs at the same pay – along with a handful of others intended to protect the nation’s coal miners from the resurgence of black lung – is grinding to a halt due to mass layoffs and office closures imposed by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to Reuters reporting.
Reuters interviews with more than a dozen people involved in medical programs serving the coal industry, and a review of internal documents from NIOSH, show that at least three such federal programs have stopped their work in recent weeks.
A decades-old program operated by NIOSH to detect lung disease in coal miners, for example, has been suspended. Related programs to provide x-rays and lung tests at mine sites have also shut down and it is now unclear who will enforce safety regulations like new limits on silica dust exposure after nearly half of the offices of MSHA are under review to have their leases terminated.
The details about the black lung programs halted by the government’s mass layoffs and funding cuts have not previously been reported.
“It’s going to be devastating to miners,” said Anita Wolfe, a 40-year NIOSH veteran who remains in touch with the agency. “Nobody is going to be monitoring the mines.”
The cuts come as Trump voices support for the domestic coal industry, a group that historically has supported the president.
At a White House ceremony flanked by coal workers in hard hats earlier this month, Trump signed executive orders meant to boost the industry, including by prolonging the life of aging coal-fired power plants.
“We’re going to put the miners back to work,” Trump said during the ceremony. “They are great people, with great families, and come from areas of the country that we love and we really respect.”
TITLE: Trump grants exemptions from mercury rules for coal-fired power plants
https://www.alleghenyfront.org/trump-exemptions-mercury-pollution-coal-fired-power-plants/
EXCERPTS: Trump signed the exemptions for the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) on April 8 via a proclamation, which called coal “essential to ensuring that our Nation’s grid is reliable and that electricity is affordable for the American people, and to promoting our Nation’s energy security.”
The order gives plants a two-year reprieve from meeting the new standards, which were set to go into force in 2027. The administration can renew the extensions at a later date.
The standards were finalized in July 2024 under the Biden administration and designed to limit the spread of the neurotoxin mercury and other hazardous air pollutants.
The EPA estimated the updated standards would prevent 9,500 pounds of mercury from being emitted into the air between 2028 and 2037.
Mercury is particularly harmful to infants and young children. Prenatal exposure to mercury through a pregnant mother’s food “has been associated with developmental neurotoxicity and manifests as poor performance on neurobehavioral tests, particularly on tests of attention, fine motor function, language, verbal memory, and visual-spatial ability” among children, according to the EPA.
Under the Clean Air Act, the president can exempt a source of pollution for two years if “the technology to implement such standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests.”
Trump’s exemption order states that the MATS rules call on coal plants to implement “emissions-control technologies that do not yet exist in a commercially viable form.”
Joe Goffman, assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation under Biden, disagreed with that assessment.
“The [EPA] went through with lots of public input and input from the industry in order to answer the question whether technology was available,” Goffman said. “And the agency came to the conclusion (that) the technology was available.”
The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule was first enacted in 2012. According to the EPA, the rule reduced mercury pollution from the electric power industry by 90 percent.
“It was a huge public health victory,” [said Thomas Schuster, director of the Sierra Club’s Pennsylvania Chapter]. “Even with that, coal-fired power plants are still the largest source of mercury pollution.”
So last year, the agency strengthened the rule and mandated that all plants install continuous air monitoring on their stacks.
Those actions were opposed by the coal industry, which challenged them in court. For starters, the industry objected to the pricetag for compliance, which the EPA estimated could add up to $860 million.
In 2015, the Supreme Court determined the EPA should have considered costs when crafting the rule. After the EPA recalculated those costs, the Supreme Court upheld the rule the following year.
TITLE: Trump’s Misleading Promotion of ‘Clean’ Coal
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/04/trumps-misleading-promotion-of-clean-coal/
EXCERPTS: 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.”
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.