The Trump administration is committed to the fiction that coal is the future, and if it costs consumers more money and kills more miners, oh well. That’s just the price of energy freedom.
On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping, nonsensical order declaring a “National Energy Emergency.” You won’t be surprised to learn that the nature of the “emergency” is vague, but the solution is an old favorite: drill, baby, drill, the environment be damned.
The problem for the administration is that most states and many energy providers are not nearly as besotted with coal. Even Texas, among the most hard-line fossil fuel states around, highlights the diversity of its energy portfolio, using solar power, nuclear energy, natural gas, and coal, and it brags about having generated more electricity from wind power than any other state. Energy providers understand that energy grids are more robust and reliable when there are multiple energy sources.
But an administration helmed by a man engaged in a holy war against windmills won’t stand by as states and power companies choose to diversify. The people will have coal, whether the people want it or not.
Under the guise of the energy emergency, the Department of Energy is forcing a 63-year-old coal-fired plant in Michigan to stay open an additional 90 days. That might seem like no big thing, but it’s catastrophically expensive. The plant had long been slated to close on June 1, and the state’s grid operator had no intention of using the plant this summer. The company that runs the plant learned of the so-called emergency on May 23, after spending years winding down operations.
Now the plant has to buy more coal and keep employees on at least another three months. For those three months, energy consumers in 15 states will have the privilege of eating the extra cost, which the chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission said could get as high as $100 million. But that’s surely worth it to ensure adequate energy during peak summer months? Perhaps … except the company that owns the plant already has a whole new natural-gas-fired plant ready to kick in when the coal plant is retired.
At least the Bull Mountain coal mine in Montana wasn’t already functionally shuttered before the administration swooped in. Signal Peak Energy, which owns the mine, had asked the government to expand the mine by several thousand acres, but the pencil-necks in the last administration insisted on frivolous things like environmental review. Trump’s Department of Energy quashed that right quick.
If the administration wanted an example of a high-quality coal mine where expansion would greatly benefit energy consumers and workers, Bull Mountain is not it. It employs a whopping 250 people, and the roughly 60 million tons that Signal Peak plans to extract are mostly intended for export to Asia. Sounds like a great deal for Signal Peak, but not something that fixes our supposed national energy emergency.
That said, Signal Peak probably needed the help. After one company executive embezzled about $20 million with the cooperation of Signal Peak’s then-president, he staged his own kidnapping in 2018 to dupe investors. Then there’s the cocaine trafficking, the bribing of employees to not report job-related injuries, the shell companies, and the ties to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
With leadership like this, Signal Peak’s safety record is exactly what you’d expect. In 2022, it was fined $1 million for illegally dumping a toxic mess, including arsenic and lead, into a disused part of the mine and for not reporting worker injuries.
These days, Signal Peak probably doesn’t need to worry about the environment or worker safety. The Trump administration is Making Black Lung Great Again by skipping mine inspections and firing employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health who monitor the disease. A federal judge ordered the administration to reinstate some of those workers, but that doesn’t mean you have to hand it to the administration. Left to its own devices, it would have happily abandoned those safety measures.
At the same time that it has waged an all-out assault on mine safety, the administration has also pushed for more people to work in the mines by posting job openings on X, a totally normal way for the government to do things.
So, we have a transparently fake national emergency. We have increased costs for everyday Americans. We have private companies lining their pockets while showing no regard for the safety of their workers or the preservation of the environment.
In other words, as far as Trump is concerned, things are going exactly as planned.