|
President Trump, it's time we left coal behind ... Coal isn’t the future of the American economy – it’s renewable energy. The sooner Donald Trump realizes that, the better
A train hauls coal mined from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. President Trump’s lifting of a federal coal leasing moratorium issued last year by Barack Obama will allow new leasing of federal coal to resume. Photograph: Mead Gruver/AP
In the wake of President Trump’s latest executive orders to undo Obama’s efforts on climate and energy, it has become clear that climate science denial isn’t the only blind spot of this administration. It also suffers from what Australian commentator Waleed Aly calls “commercial denialism” – an attempt to fulfill the campaign promise to protect the dying coal industry all while ignoring the market forces that are leading to its demise.
You know something is wrong when Robert Murray, a coal industry giant and CEO of Murray Energy, tells President Trump to rein in the rhetoric about bringing coal jobs back. Trump is ignoring the reality that the world is moving beyond coal, just as we moved past horses and buggies, landline telephones and cigarettes. The transition is not complete yet, but coal jobs are not coming back substantially. It is time that we move on. We should plan for that.
If we don’t plan for change, the people who suffer the most will be Trump’s base.
Ask yourself these questions: do you really think Appalachia will be a widely expanded coal mining region by 2020 or will it be further diminished? Will Wyoming have employed thousands or tens of thousands more coal miners due to the bump given by the Donald?
The fact is renewable electricity is remaking our energy market because it’s getting cheaper than fossil fuels. Our most valuable companies from Apple to Google, even Budweiser, understand the hefty cost of fossil fuels to the environment and their future bottom lines and have set goals to use only renewable energy one day.
We are already on our way to build a smarter, digital grid to deliver low-carbon electricity more efficiently and reliably. For example, we can build networks of batteries in California to regulate supply and demand in our grid at a cost comparable to a gas peaker power plant that serves the same purpose – and we can build the battery project more quickly.
Simply put: there are twice as many jobs in solar alone than there are coal miners in the US. Even though solar power is small source of electricity now, it’s growing fast while coal is declining.
But Trump is ignoring this, based on irrational reasons, even though incorporating these realities into policy could potentially serve his base. As one example, while coal jobs in Ohio fell overall last year, jobs in solar in the Cleveland area doubled, according to Midwest Energy News. Around 250 coal plants in the US have retired or announced closure plans since 2010 to protect communities from pollution and to save money.
But facts are not Trump’s strong suit. He’s pursuing a culture war by declaring an end to a “war on coal” even if it doesn’t do anything for his constituents like those in Ohio. Sadly for the president, his executive orders won’t work. More coal power plants will be shut down by market forces by 2025 than by the Clean Power Plan, which he sought to destroy with the executive order that will eliminate regulations limiting emissions from existing power plants.
Fighting against this reality, and falsely giving hopes to coal miners, is cruel. There are lots of jobs in energy, but most of these will come from wind, solar, energy storage and other new and smart approaches to building a low-carbon energy industry. They won’t come from coal.
This is not to say the executive order is without its impact. The environmental policy rollbacks are serious and signal the exact opposite of what a sensible political leader should do – as articulated by everyone from President Xi and Chancellor Merkel to the governors of America’s powerhouse states, New York and California, who have all encouraged Trump to stay the course on climate commitments made by the US and to promote the clean energy transition.
Legal challenges to Trump’s environmental policy are coming, and they will delay the attempt to dismantle public health protections. Meanwhile, market forces will continue to dismember the coal industry. Come November 2018 there may be a few more coal jobs. But come 2020, the price of solar and wind power will be significantly lower than it is now – it is already lower than the cost of building new coal, nuclear and natural gas power plants in some parts of the country. That’s why solar had its biggest year ever, with 14 GW installed in the US and 75 GW globally.
The only way to maintain the pretense that coal can come back will be to further subsidize it – that will require the Grand Old Party to abandon the free market-based principles it claims to embrace. Meanwhile, those cities and states that are supporting their entrepreneurs in developing 100% clean energy economies with policies that support more renewables and energy storage will be more prosperous and create more jobs than those that don’t. Shine on!
----------------------------------------------------------
Since you’re here …
… we’ve got a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever, but far fewer are paying for it. Advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.
If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much more secure.
|
