President Donald Trump’s move to rejuvenate the embattled coal industry and preserve coal-fired power plants is earning high praise from Republican lawmakers.
Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming cheered the president’s executive order to end former President Joe Biden’s moratorium on federal coal leasing and eliminate permitting barriers to starting new coal projects on federal lands, during a Tuesday interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Trump administration is seeking to boost the coal industry in part to help meet the energy needs of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, which Lummis called “welcome news” for her home state of Wyoming.
“Now people are finally realizing … if we’re going to compete with China on artificial intelligence, if we’re going to have enough energy for cloud computing, we absolutely have to have all sources of energy,” Lummis told the DCNF. “We should be looking at how to have the cleanest air we can with the sources of energy we have in abundance, and coal is one of those.”
“When you look at how we can more cleanly produce coal these days, coupled with the President’s green light through his executive orders, I think we are going to see a much greater commitment to coal,” Lummis added. “The president is going to get our country back on track.”
Lummis echoed Trump’s statement in his executive order that coal power will be essential to meet the rising electricity demand due in part to power-hungry AI data processing centers and domestic manufacturing. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright previously told the DCNF that preventing the retirement of coal-fired power plants will be a part of the solution to addressing the United States’ power demand needs.
“Now the big businesses understands the connection between having artificial intelligence dominance by the United States and keeping us extremely competitive in that space and being able to produce adequate energy to fuel AI … they’re going to be more willing to reconsider fossil fuel energy as part of the mix, rather than relying on unreliable sources of energy, like wind and solar,” Lummis told the DCNF. “Wind and solar can be part of the equation for AI dominance, but it can’t do it all.”
Lummis torched the Biden’s attempts to phase out coal production, including the administration’s eleventh-hour move to end federal coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, which spans parts of Wyoming and accounts for nearly half of all U.S. coal production.
“The Biden administration ignored the needs of the country by putting a moratorium on coal leasing,” Lummis told the DCNF. “It was short sighted and nonsensical for the Biden administration to be pushing electric vehicles at the same time that they were denying the largest source of energy for electricity, which is thermal coal.”
John Kerry, the former Special Presidential Envoy for Climate under Biden, notably said that the United States would completely phase out the use of coal as an energy source by 2030. The Biden administration issued an array of regulations to constrain the coal industry, including Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules seeking to make it too costly for coal-fired power plants to continue operating.
Lummis said she is looking forward to inviting EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to Wyoming to tour coal-fired power plants in the state. The Trump administration’s EPA is currently working to rewrite the Biden administration’s stringent regulations on fossil fuel-fired power plants, commonly known as the Clean Power Plan 2.0.
“It gets cleaner every single time we build a new coal plant, because the technology gets better,” Lummis said of coal-fired power plants in her home state.
Lummis also told the DCNF that Trump’s efforts to boost coal production, in addition to his administration’s other pro-energy efforts, could address some voters’ concerns that the president is not doing enough to bring down inflation.
“It is going to have an overall dramatic impact on prices for energy, and that means it will also affect prices at the grocery store, because all of those groceries get on those shelves, because energy is used in transporting those groceries,” Lummis said.
Lummis’ fellow Wyoming senator, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, praised Trump’s executive order boosting the coal industry Tuesday morning.
“For years, Democrats held coal captive with reckless regulations. Joe Biden took coal offline,” Barrasso said on the Senate floor. “President Trump is cutting red tape so America can compete again. Coal is making a comeback.”
Lummis was present at the White House ceremony where Trump signed the executive order seeking to revitalize the coal industry. The president, surrounded by coal miners wearing hard hats, praised Lummis for her commitment to coal miners and revitalizing the industry to meet the power needs of AI and data centers.” She believes like I do in these people,” Trump said of Lummis. “She believes in them maybe even more than I do — that’s pretty good — from day one.”
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