President Trump's promise to end the "war on coal" and put miners back to work was a mainstay of his campaign, and his administration has taken decisive steps to overturn Obama-era mining and energy regulations, some at the behest of coal magnate Robert Murray. Trump's assertions that the industry is now starting to make a comeback prompted The Washington Post to take a closer look at whether such claims are true, Nicole Lewis reports. The short answer is: not really. Here's a highlight reel:
On Dec. 5 Trump said “If you look at what’s happened in West Virginia and so many different places, we’re sending clean coal. We’re sending it out to different places — China. A lot of coal ordered in China right now. So a lot of things are changing, and they’re changing very rapidly.” But the Post says that in 2015 and 2016, West Virginia exported virtually no coal to China. Also, "there is no such thing as 'clean coal.' Electricity-generating plants can mitigate some of the effects of burning coal by capturing carbon dioxide and burying it, but that doesn’t make the coal itself cleaner. And more important, the bulk of the exports of coal to China involve metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel, not generate electricity," Lewis reports.
Trump said at a rally in Pensacola Dec. 8 that "We’ve lifted the restrictions on American energy, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean, beautiful coal, of which we have 1,000 years of supply." The Post counters that, though the U.S. has the second-largest recoverable coal reserves in the world, the total amount of coal is hard to measure because it's buried underground. But based on the Energy Information Administration's best estimate, the country's coal reserves will last us a little more than 250 years.
Read the entire piece for the whole list of claims and facts, but the upshot is that the president has exaggerated the facts or taken credit for things outside his control.
On Dec. 5 Trump said “If you look at what’s happened in West Virginia and so many different places, we’re sending clean coal. We’re sending it out to different places — China. A lot of coal ordered in China right now. So a lot of things are changing, and they’re changing very rapidly.” But the Post says that in 2015 and 2016, West Virginia exported virtually no coal to China. Also, "there is no such thing as 'clean coal.' Electricity-generating plants can mitigate some of the effects of burning coal by capturing carbon dioxide and burying it, but that doesn’t make the coal itself cleaner. And more important, the bulk of the exports of coal to China involve metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel, not generate electricity," Lewis reports.
Trump said at a rally in Pensacola Dec. 8 that "We’ve lifted the restrictions on American energy, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean, beautiful coal, of which we have 1,000 years of supply." The Post counters that, though the U.S. has the second-largest recoverable coal reserves in the world, the total amount of coal is hard to measure because it's buried underground. But based on the Energy Information Administration's best estimate, the country's coal reserves will last us a little more than 250 years.
Read the entire piece for the whole list of claims and facts, but the upshot is that the president has exaggerated the facts or taken credit for things outside his control.
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