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President Donald Trump signed four executive orders Tuesday aimed at reviving the nation’s flailing coal power and mining industries. The administration said it's pushing for more coal to power energy-intensive artificial intelligence data centers in the West.
One order, titled “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” requires the Interior secretary to identify coal reserves on national public lands, assess impediments to mining those resources, and propose policies to enable the mining of the coal by either private or public actors. It also designates coal as a “mineral” under a definition created by a previous executive order, which could lead to expedited permitting for coal mines on national public lands.
Coal production on federal lands fell 50 percent from its height in 2008 to 2023, the latest year for which federal data is available. A 2023 study by Energy Innovation found that it costs more to run 99 percent of existing US coal plants than it would to replace them with local wind, solar, and energy storage resources.
Trump admin removes protections for public land in NV and NM
The Trump administration removed protections put in place under the Biden administration for thousands of acres of national public land in Nevada and New Mexico, opening the land to oil and gas drilling, geothermal development, and hard-rock mining. The change was tacked onto an emergency order issued last week to allow logging on more than half of national forests. The affected land includes 310,000 acres in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada and 165,000 acres in the Upper Pecos watershed in New Mexico.
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Donald Trump is hell-bent on dragging the United States back to the 19th century, complete with robber barons, smokestacks, crippling tariffs, and measles. The free market has already made it clear that renewable energy sources are a cheaper and healthier path to meet America’s energy needs.”
