The good, the bad and the ugly in Trump’s coal plans

While wealthy Western countries have been weaning themselves off coal for the last two decades, Donald Trump is now trying to take the US in the opposite direction.

The president is issuing further orders to start digging and burning more of what he calls “beautiful, clean coal”.

“All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened, if they’re modern enough, (or) they’ll be ripped down and brand new ones will be built,” he said on Tuesday.

The good

Why? The “good” thing about coal is that it is reliable and abundant.

In some places it’s cheap, and it still provides just over a third of global electricity.

The US has masses of it. Supporters say its existing coal plants only provide power to the grid about 40% of the time, which could easily be boosted by slashing regulation – something which he has already started.

Read more: The major coal producer that wants to leave it in the ground

The bad

But coal is a disaster for the climate – releasing more planet-heating carbon dioxide than oil and gas, and plenty of sooty air pollution.

Hence it’s been in decline in richer, Western countries (including the US) since around 2008 – helped by plummeting costs of clean power.

But fast forward around three years, and the world’s appetite for electricity has become bigger than expected.

In the US, electricity demand, after plateauing for years, is now rising at speed.

It has been driven not just by energy-hungry AI data centres, which tend to grab the headlines, but things like cloud computing, electric vehicles and a revitalised industrial sector.

Like the UK, the US wants to lure AI companies to build there to bolster economic growth, and to compete with China.

Mr Trump sees coal as a cheap way to power all these things. It’s a case of “if China can have it, why can’t we?” – or at least that’s what he says on social media.

China has indeed carried on building scores of new coal power plants (though it is also building jaw-dropping amounts of solar and wind power).

But “just because they can have lots of coal and lots of renewables in China, doesn’t mean that you can do the same in the US”, says Dan Quiggin from the thinktank Chatham House.

“Apart from one thing, the Chinese economy is massive and has grown lots over the years and is continuing to grow.”

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The ugly

So here’s the potentially ugly part for Mr Trump: the orders might have little impact.

Gas, wind and solar in the US are largely cheaper than coal power, and are more attractive investments.

“From an economic standpoint, an investment standpoint, coal is orders of magnitude away from alternative energy sources” like wind, solar, storage and gas, said Sam Berman, from energy consultancy Wood MacKenzie in Boston.

“Executive orders may create a little bit of buzz in the near term. But you need long certainty for these types of investments and shifts, and it’s not likely that we’ll get there from an executive order.”

Mr Trump has tried to revive the industry before, during his last presidential term. No new major coal plants have been built in the US since then – the economics just don’t stack up, says Mr Berman, and that’s still the case.

The ugly part for the climate is it seems some existing coal plants will have their lifespans extended, which means more dirty air just as the clock runs down to reach climate targets.

But it all looks like more of a prolonging than a comeback for coal.

As ever with Mr Trump, the future is highly unpredictable. But like other energy announcements, the latest should be taken with a pinch of salt.