The Trump administration’s latest plan to prop up coal

ONCE upon a time, back when America was great, coal was king. Then came Barack Obama. He laid the once-mighty industry low with onerous regulation, especially the hated Clean Power Plan (CPP). On August 21st President Donald Trump, before an appreciative crowd in Charleston, West Virginia, personally slew the offending policy.

So the legend goes. In fact the CPP, a sweeping regulation issued by the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has been bogged down in legal challenges and is yet to come into force. The woes of coal are due less to government interference in markets than the markets themselves. Natural gas is a cheaper and cleaner fuel, made abundant by fracking. Renewables, such as wind and solar energy, are now economically viable alternatives. Mining itself has become more automated. Today’s miners are three times as productive as miners were in 1980, so fewer are needed.

All the same, the Trump administration is committed to undoing the CPP—which sought to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants by 32% from their levels in 2005 by 2030—before it comes into effect. Its new proposal, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, is much less ambitious because it would let states decide their emissions-reductions targets (including having none at all). Its name is Orwellian. The EPA’s own analysis shows that retail electricity prices would be reduced by a mere 0.1%-0.2% by 2035—but that use of coal, a pollution-belching fuel, would shoot up by as much as 9.5%.

The costs, in terms of increased emissions, would be significant. Compared with 2005, America was emitting 14% less carbon by the end of 2016, thanks in part to its move away from coal. That will continue. But whereas the CPP would have reduced emissions by a further 19% by 2030, ACE achieves only a drop of 0.7-1.5%. Coal-fired power plants also produce a cloud of noxious gases. The CPP was expected to cut sulphur-dioxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions by more than 20%; the new plan will reduce them by only 1-2%. The EPA estimates the plan could cause 1,400 additional premature deaths per year by 2030.

“It’s revealing if you don’t think about this as a climate policy, but as a coal-subsidisation policy,” says Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Harvard Environment and Energy Law Programme and an architect of the CPP. A leaked set of White House talking-points given to The Economist confirms this. Climate change and global warming go unmentioned. “A diverse, reliable energy portfolio is essential to the president’s goal of energy dominance,” the document reads. “Energy dominance is good for America and good for the world.”

The new proposal is no great surprise. The administration has tried its utmost to relax regulations for extractive industries. It has delayed rules limiting discharges of heavy metals, like lead, mercury and arsenic, from power plants. The EPA has also loosened rules on the storage of coal ash, a by-product of mining which can leach toxic metals into streams. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, has proposed out-and-out subsidisation of the coal industry; an independent regulatory commission rejected that idea. Two important officials driving environmental policy have close links to the coal industry.

The Republican Party’s concern for left-behind coal miners (and coal-mine operators) can give a false impression of the industry’s importance, however. Just 53,000 Americans work in coalmining, according to the latest calculations from the Bureau of Labour Statistics—roughly 0.03% of the labour force. The outsize importance of coalminers in the American imagination has much to do with nostalgia. Republican calls for a resurgence in such tough-guy jobs play well with a white working-class base, even if they are impossible to deliver.

Tailoring climate-change policy to individual states also makes little sense. Republican-led places like Wyoming, Texas and Oklahoma, where much of the energy boom is concentrated, are unlikely to restrain carbon pollution. This counteracts whatever sensible policies would emerge in Democratic states, and makes climate change—which requires concerted global action—much harder to mitigate. “The whole purpose of the Clean Air Act is to establish a federal policy so that there isn’t a race to the bottom,” says Ann Weeks, legal director of the Clean Air Task Force, an advocacy group.

Finalising regulation takes time. Like the CPP, the Trump administration’s proposal will probably face lengthy lawsuits. Its cost-benefit analysis is particularly ripe for challenge. The proposed rule is unlikely to go into effect within two years. This means that Mr Trump would have to win re-election for his environmental agenda to be seen through. A greener president would probably seesaw back towards the CPP. But as Democrats and Republicans spend years shadow-boxing over the future of energy policy, climate change will continue unchecked.