President Donald Trump announced this week that rising electricity prices are a national security threat, and his administration is planning to use more than $800 million of government funds to boost the coal industry.
“In terms of power, there’s really nothing like it,” the president said at the White House on Thursday. “There’s no real alternative.”
But why would such a great energy source need government help at all?
The money will subsidize more than a dozen coal plants across the country, which have been struggling due to the high costs of their aging infrastructure. It will also support the opening of new coal-fired plants in Alaska and West Virginia, as well as subsidize coal mining operations. This is an extension of previous executive orders seeking to keep multiple plants operating beyond scheduled retirements.
Trump is making this happen under the auspices of the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law designed to grant the president authority over domestic industries during times of war. Trump further hopes to construct a new terminal on the West Coast to export coal to Asia.
The plan inexplicably includes $350 million that Congress specifically set aside for clean energy technologies under the Biden administration.
Certainly, the market is capable of signaling the need for new energy capacity — and it has done just that in recent years, amid the boom in data centers. Yet despite growing overall demand in recent years, coal power has only waned. In fact, the United States has not opened a large new coal plant since 2013.
Perhaps this is because coal plants are competing with cheaper and more efficient energy sources, including natural gas. Or perhaps it’s because they emit more pollution than other sources, including carbon dioxide, particulate matter and toxic heavy metals such as mercury and lead.
In an era of seemingly endless demand, an all-of-the-above approach to energy makes sense. That requires politicians to simply get out of the way, not to not put their thumb of the scale for their preferred energy sources.
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