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Nearly four years after President Trump promised to “put our miners back to work,” the decline of American coal has only accelerated—despite the administration's attempts to stop it. Documents obtained by the New York Times show how the administration attempted but failed to stop the closure of the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, offering $1 billion worth of help by agreeing to an industry plan to relax air-quality requirements.
Historian Peter Shulman, the author of Coal and Empire, told the Times that “Trump’s pledges to coal miners were rhetorical appeals to hard-working, blue-collar Americans like when Nixon put on a hard hat after a meeting with labor union leaders back in 1970. But there was no policy Trump could have implemented that would have changed this situation with coal.”
EPA OKs new attack on tribal sovereignty
The Environmental Protection Administration handed oversight of environmental regulations on tribal lands to the state of Oklahoma this month, following a Supreme Court ruling that found much of eastern Oklahoma was tribal land. Immediately after that ruling, Oklahoma requested the authority using a provision of a 2005 transportation bill that gave the state the power to oversee environmental issues in Indian country.
Cherokee National Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. told The Hill that the move is both an attack on tribal sovereignty and creates the potential for the state to allow polluting projects on tribal land over objections from tribal nations.
The EPA's decision “ignores the longstanding relationships between state agencies and the Cherokee Nation,” Hoskin Jr. said. “All Oklahomans benefit when the Tribes and state work together in the spirit of mutual respect and this knee-jerk reaction to curtail tribal jurisdiction is not productive.”
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We were lied to. Every time we turned around they kept telling us coal miners they would save our jobs. That is what we heard from Trump. But the mines keep closing.”
