THE SET-UP: “I call it clean, beautiful coal. You can do things today with coal that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago, 15 years. So I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word coal, only use the words clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?” - Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly
Trump is right … it does sound much better than the dirty, ugly coal we’re all familiar with. Dirty, ugly coal is the kind of coal we associate with black lung, mountaintop removal mining and acid rain. Dirty, ugly coal, as the US Energy Information Agency details on its “.gov” website, is the kind of coal that emits a whole bunch of bad stuff when you burn it:
Sulfur dioxide, which contributes to acid rain and respiratory illnesses
Nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog and respiratory illnesses
Particulates, which contribute to smog, haze, respiratory illnesses, and lung disease
Carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the primary greenhouse gas produced from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas)
Mercury and other heavy metals, which have been linked to both neurological and developmental damage in humans and other animals
Fly ash and bottom ash, which are residues created when power plants burn coal
Dirty, ugly coal is the kind of coal that produces the most climate pollution when it's burned. It’s also the kind of coal that still emits climate-altering methane from mines long after those mines have been abandoned. And it’s the main culprit behind China’s world-leading emissions.
In other words, dirty, ugly coal is … coal.
And even if you manage to capture and store the “fly ash” coal generates when burned, it can still leach into the ground and contaminate groundwater. All of that, along with the increasing cost competitiveness of solar and wind and battery storage, is why coal production has declined every year since the US hit peak production in 2008. The reality is that natural gas from the fracking boom and ever-cheaper renewables have simply priced coal out of the market.
But Donald Trump never let a little thing like reality get in the way.
So, his regime’s Energy Department is going to bail-out the fading coal industry to the tune of $625 million. Inside Climate News reports that the money will be used to...
…subsidize and support coal-fired plants, including $350 million for retrofitting and recommissioning coal plants at or near their retirement dates and $175 million for coal power projects in rural communities.
Because “clean, beautiful coal” is just doublespeak for coal, the EPA is, as The Hill explains,…
…proposing to delay by five years Biden-era standards that restrict power plants’ ability to release pollution into waterways.
But wait, there’s more!
It also indicated that it could take further steps to potentially weaken the regulation in the meantime, saying in a press release that it is requesting information on challenges related to the Biden-era rule to “inform potential future rulemaking.”
It must be one of those “stupid” regulations put in by “stupid people” who love windmills and hate America. Right?
The rule in question would have been expected to reduce pollution including releases of mercury and arsenic and result in fewer cancer cases as a result.
Oh.
Well, don’t worry about a little cancer. Just today, Trump signed an Executive Order to fix cancer! In particular, childhood cancer. He’s dropping $50 million into the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative and, as FOX News reports, his EO directs…
…Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission to work with the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy to employ AI on how to use it to diagnose and treat childhood cancers and identify new cures.
Coincidentally, AI is the reason why his regime is trying to resuscitate cancer-causing coal! That’s what Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Roll Call:
“Around the world, coal is still growing. People talk about peak coal, most consumption, but last year was the year that the most coal was used in the world, and of course we’re in a competition,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said, referring to the AI industry in China. “If we don’t lead in electrical production, we’re going to lose the AI arms race.”
The AI arms race! Whoa. Sounds serious … until you look under the hood a bit.
Noted tech journalist and commentator Cory Doctorow has looked under the hood, put it up on the rack, pored over the undercarriage and generally knows what the Hell he is writing about. And what he sees is an Edsel:
[T]he AI bubble is driven by monopolists who’ve conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. “pivot to video,” crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now “super-intelligence.” Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters (”humans in the loop”), which won’t work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging “foundation models” will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or “discouraged” and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations…
But isn’t the stock market hitting all time highs on the strength of AI’s booming, “transformative” economics?
Over to you, Doctorow:
This isn’t like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent “unit economics” – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – “dogshit unit-economics.” Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money
And that’s not all…
This week, no less than the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy, well-reported story (by Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan) on the catastrophic finances of AI companies.
The WSJ writers compare the AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom’s fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company’s CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history.
The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there’s pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips. That goes triple for GPUs used in AI data-centers, where it’s normal for tens of thousands of chips to burn out over a single, 54-day training run.
Data centers are at the center of Trump’s obsession with coal and his denunciation of renewables. The overnight crypto king is all-in on AI in no small part because it has made him the darling of Silicon Valley. The Tech Overlords want unlimited access to energy and they want to be completely free from regulation. Trump is ready to deliver … he’s even talked about building coal-fired plants next door to hyperscaled data centers.
But what if AI turns out to be another Silicon Bubble?
Once again, Doctorow … this time on “funny accounting in the AI bubble”:
Microsoft “invests” in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these “tokens” at Microsoft’s data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
That’s par for the course in AI, where it’s normal for Nvidia to “invest” tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The the same chunk of money being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).
Almost sounds like an “exotic financial instrument.” Remember “collateralized loan obligations”? Remember the Crash of 2008?
Well, it’s probably going to be fine.
We’re just guaranteeing a superheated world by burning coal that, in turn, will help us blow an economy-busting AI bubble. - jp
‘Mine, Baby, Mine’: Trump Officials Offer $625 Million to Rescue Coal
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/climate/trump-coal-revival.html
Citing ‘AI Arms Race,’ Trump Administration Announces Efforts to Rekindle US Coal Industry
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29092025/trump-administration-announces-coal-industry-efforts/
Trump administration eyes looser environmental restrictions to boost coal
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5527168-trump-coal-power-ai-interior/
Trump is handing out public land and millions of dollars to revive big coal, sending advocates reeling
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/climate/coal-power-trump-public-lands
US coal auctions will test industry appetite for Trump mining revival
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-coal-auctions-will-test-industry-appetite-trump-mining-revival-2025-09-30/
All Fired Up: West Virginia officials praise Department of Energy plan to reinvigorate coal-fired power
https://www.newsandsentinel.com/news/business/2025/09/all-fired-up-west-virginia-officials-praise-department-of-energy-plan-to-reinvigorate-coal-fired-power/
Did Trump Just Save the Dying Coal Industry
https://247wallst.com/investing/2025/09/29/did-trump-just-save-the-dying-coal-industry/
Why Trump’s coal revival may be short-lived
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2025/09/30/why-trumps-coal-revival-may-be-short-lived-00585346
Trump’s $625 Million Coal Plan May Raise Utility Bills for Millions of Americans
https://reason.com/2025/09/30/trumps-625-million-coal-plan-may-raise-utility-bills-for-millions-of-americans/
You Might Want to Ditch Your AI Investments Now That Jim Cramer Says No Bubble Is Coming
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/jim-cramer-ai-bubble