It’s been a wild month for the U.S. coal
industry. When the Paris climate agreement entered into effect on November 5,
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both thought they had signed the death warrant
of the American coal industry. Just over two weeks later, the new
president-elect has promised to undo the Obama era’s “job-killing
restrictions on the production of American energy.” All of a sudden,
coal has gone from black sheep to DC darling.
Had Clinton won the White House, the Paris
deal would have given her and her environmentalist backers the cover they
needed to put every coal worker in the country
out of business. The agreement seeks
to limit global rise in temperatures below 3.6° Fahrenheit and promote the
deployment of renewable energies. Obama, who had the whole agreement drafted in
a way that would let him do a runaround
on Congress, naturally hailed it as a “historic
day” in the fight against global warming in which he himself was the
main hero.
The Paris deal played well for the Left's
environmental agenda, but it was catastrophic for U.S. fossil fuel industries.
Coal in particular got walloped: between Obama's policies and the specter of a
global regime that would force both the U.S. and other countries to abandon
coal power, American plants and mines have closing at an unprecedented rate,
with thousands of workers losing their jobs and entire communities decimated.
Some of the nation's largest coal producers have recently filed
for bankruptcy, with Peabody Energy, the world's largest
coal company, as well as Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources among the
recent casualties. The Peabody closure alone could put 5,000
employees out of work.
True, some of the damage done to the coal
industry has been a result of the rise of shale gas, but much of it comes down
to burdensome regulations Obama and his EPA saddled on the coal industry. In
2015, the Obama administration stopped
giving leases for new coal mines on public lands, which is the source
for around 40 percent of coal in the U.S. National Economic Research Associates
found the EPA's most recent mercury admission
standards, which went into effect in 2015, will cost the economy $25.6
billion per year. Things were bound to get worse
under the Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon dioxide emissions
from power plants and specifically
targets coal.
The consequences of these policies have
been disastrous for coal country. In all, 31,000
workers in the sector have been made “redundant” since 2009.
Employment in U.S. coal industry is now at its lowest levels since the 1980s,
and in the last six years, over 230
U.S. coal-fired plants have closed or will close soon. Almost five
percent of American coal capacity was shuttered just last year, with states
like Ohio, Georgia, and Kentucky hit especially hard. Of course, it isn’t just
coal workers and communities that have been hit. Declining production caused
electricity prices
to rise, and coal industry stocks
dropped over $30 billion in value since 2009.
After eight years of slow, excruciating
decline, coal country had its revenge on the Democrats by helping take the
White House away from them and giving it back to the one candidate that spoke
to their pain. Unsurprisingly, the Left has responded by declaring Trump’s
election a disaster
for climate change, but even they should be able to find cause for
optimism: after all, president-elect Trump’s transition message made it clear
that it was clean coal he’d be bringing back.
In reality, new technologies mean coal
power can be made
cleaner than ever. By the EPA’s own measure, emissions of carbon
dioxide and other pollutants released by coal plants have fallen by more
than half over the last 40 years. There have been tremendous
breakthroughs in clean coal technology, which uses carbon capture and storage
(CCS) to remove the vast majority of carbon dioxide from coal power emissions.
If this technology were given a genuine chance rather than being written off as
a myth, clean energy might not have to mean an economic death sentence for tens
of thousands of hardworking Americans. Under President Trump, clean coal looks
like it will have its chance.
In this, as in many other things, we are
already lagging behind. There are already
successful CCS plants
in operation overseas: a coal plant in Chennai, India, for example,
has adopted what its creators described
as a revolutionary new technique that can make clean coal commercially
viable for the first time. Using a new solvent that reduces the cost of carbon
capture by up to two thirds, the plant captures around 97 percent of carbon
emissions at a cost of just $30 per ton of carbon -- cheaper than most
renewables. Further adding to the benefits of the process, the carbon is made
into soda ash and used to make everything from glass to detergents. The plant
in India is not the only successful clean coal project: the W.A. Parish plant
in Texas is set become the largest
clean coal plant in the world this year. With Trump in office, more
are bound to come.
While many environmentalists will swear up
and down that coal has no place in their energy plans, clean coal will wind up
playing a vital role in curbing emissions and ultimately do
more to curb greenhouse gas emissions than renewable energy sources.
Choosing to eschew CCS in reaching global emissions targets could more
than double their cost, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. Worse, it would rob the U.S., with enough coal to power the
nation for an estimated 500
years, of an invaluable source of energy security. Those fretting over
Trump’s energy policy should take heart: saving the planet and saving American
workers doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
