We are experiencing a national energy crisis that originated out of the Obama and Biden regimes’ war on coal. That crisis has been exacerbated by Biden’s Green New Scam. President Donald Trump took two important steps last week toward fixing both problems.
Before Barack Obama became president, coal provided about 52 percent of U.S. electricity generation. He nevertheless campaigned on a promise to make coal too expensive to burn. Once elected, Obama launched multiple efforts to make good on his campaign promise.
One effort was through Congress, which attempted to make coal too expensive to burn through a cap-and-trade system. The idea was for the government to give utilities emissions credits that they could buy and sell as needed to meet government-established emissions limits. Derided as “cap-and-tax,” the effort failed even though Democrats controlled Congress.
Obama’s other efforts included federal regulations to make coal burning far more expensive and impractical. There were Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules to make coal mining more expensive and Department of Interior rules to make coal mining physically impossible.
But the most effective regulations were two anti-coal rules from the Obama. The most crippling of these was the Mercury Air Toxics Standard (MATS) rule issued in 2012. Rather than install expensive equipment to scrub mercury from emissions, utilities opted to replace coal plants with natural gas plants that emitted no mercury and half the carbon dioxide emissions. The other rule was the infamous 2015 Clean Power Plan (CPP) under which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would crack down specifically on carbon dioxide emissions.
Although the MATS and CPP were eventually dealt with by the Supreme Court in 2015 and 2022, respectively, irreparable damage had already been done. By the end of the Obama administration, about 50 percent of the coal industry had been destroyed. The top companies filed for bankruptcy protection.
Trump was unable to rebuild the coal industry during his first term, and when the Biden administration came to power, it picked up where Obama left off, driving electricity generated by coal to below 20 percent.
But Trump returned with his pro-coal energy agenda. And he’s just in time. The rise of artificial intelligence and its need for electricity guzzling data centers have derailed any further closing of coal plants. Last week, the Department of Energy ordered two Indiana coal plants scheduled to shut down to keep operating. These are the third and fourth plants the Trump administration has prevented from closing.
We are still a long way from getting our much-needed coal industry going again, especially as virtually irreplaceable infrastructure was destroyed during the Obama and Biden regimes, but keeping these coal plants open is a great start.
Trump also dealt what could be a fatal blow to the offshore wind industry this week. He issued stop-work orders on five projects, including the largest U.S. project off the coast of Virginia. He did so on national security grounds – offshore wind sites may interfere with aircraft radar and submarine sonar.
Because Congress only stripped away about half of the $1.2 trillion worth of Green New Scam funding through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump has been acting administratively to terminate the remainder.
Although there will be litigation over the stop-work orders, SCOTUS ruled in 2008 that national security tops environmental concerns. That case involved green groups trying to stop the U.S. Navy from testing sonar on the grounds that it might harm whales.
While these moves do not come close to solving our ongoing national energy crisis, Trump is definitely moving us in the right direction.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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